Where parenting support starts with you — Sydney and online

When something happens with your child — even something small — your reaction can sometimes feel like it belongs to a different moment entirely. More intense than the situation warrants, or strangely familiar, like you’ve felt this before. That’s because you have.

The patterns we carry into parenting don’t arrive with our children. They were already there, formed long before, in the family we grew up in and the experiences that shaped us. What gets handed down across generations isn’t just eye colour and temperament. It’s ways of responding to big feelings, to conflict, to need. A family’s deep commitment to community. The instinct to show up for others. The value placed on belonging somewhere, to something, to each other. These are inheritances too — and they matter.

Some of what we carry is a gift. Some of it deserves a closer look. This work is about knowing the difference.

How I work

Most parenting support focuses on your child’s behaviour. This focuses on yours — not to blame you for it, but because that’s actually where change becomes possible.

We begin by mapping your story. Using a genogram — a visual map of your family across generations — we trace the patterns, relationships, and experiences that have shaped how you parent today. What was modelled for you around big feelings, conflict, repair, and love. What was missing. What you carry without perhaps realising it, and what has quietly been a source of strength.

From there the work turns inward. Using Internal Family Systems we get curious about what gets activated in you when you parent — the reactions that feel disproportionate, the moments you respond in ways that surprise you, the feelings your child’s distress stirs that seem to belong somewhere further back. We look at the meaning you make of your child’s behaviour, because that meaning is almost always a doorway into your own history.

This matters more than most parenting content acknowledges: children are extraordinarily attuned to the emotional world of their parents. They feel when something is activated in you, even when nothing is said. And because children are skilled intuiters but poor interpreters, they will often draw conclusions about themselves from what they sense — conclusions that can quietly shape how they see themselves and the world. Your inner work is never separate from their experience of you.

This isn’t about blame — yours or your parents’. You are raising children in a genuinely complex world, and every pattern you carry made sense in the context it developed. The work is about understanding those patterns clearly enough that you have a real choice about what to do with them.

We also build practical skills for the moments of activation — real tools for when you feel hijacked, overwhelmed, or further from yourself than you’d like to be. And we work with repair: because rupture in any relationship is inevitable, and the capacity to return — to acknowledge, to apologise, to reconnect — is one of the most powerful things a parent can model. It is never too late to repair. And it is always worth it.

Woven through all of this is attention to your own sustenance as a parent. Not as an indulgence, but as something structural. You cannot offer your child what you yourself are running on empty of. Finding what replenishes you — and giving yourself genuine permission to pursue it — is part of the work too.

This approach draws on the IN-Sight Parenting work of Leslie Petruk, IFS Lead Trainer, whose framework brings the Internal Family Systems model directly into the experience of being a parent. It is also deeply informed by Dan Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology, Stuart Shanker’s Self-Reg framework, and Ross Greene’s Collaborative and Proactive Solutions — each of which shares a fundamental conviction: that understanding what is happening beneath behaviour, in both parent and child, is where lasting change begins.

Ways to work together

Individual therapy — One-to-one sessions exploring your parenting patterns, what activates you, and how to parent from your most grounded self. Available in person in Sydney and via telehealth.

Online workshop — A structured introduction to Self-led parenting for those who want to understand this framework before committing to individual work, or alongside it.

About Dr Lucinda McFadden

I am a doctoral-qualified social worker, researcher, and IFS-informed therapist based in Sydney. My background spans anxiety, adolescent mental health, and family systems, and my research has consistently pointed to the same thing: the relational environment around a child matters enormously. Which means the work with parents is never peripheral — it’s central.

I work with parents only. Not because children don’t matter, but because you are the environment your child grows up in. Supporting you is how I support them.

Next step?

I offer a free 20-minute introductory call. A chance to talk through what is happening and see whether this feels like the right fit, get in touch.