The Parent Hope Project is a social enterprise founded by Dr Jenny Brown. It is dedicated to supporting parents in rediscovering confidence and fostering children’s wellbeing.
Dr Jenny Brown has worked in child, couple, and family health since the 1980s, focusing on child and adolescent mental health and the crucial role of parental involvement in treatment. Throughout her career, Jenny has observed and researched how easily parents can lose confidence in their strengths and wisdom, often stepping aside to let experts address concerns about their children. Her extensive clinical and research work based on Bowen family systems led to a profound realisation: children do best when their parents and carers have self-awareness and clarity in their roles rather than just trying to fix their child.
Driven by this insight, Jenny developed the Parent Hope Project. The project reflects her commitment to empowering parents, enabling them to effectively nurture their children’s mental health. This approach is grounded in her depth of understanding of family therapy, particularly Dr Murray Bowen’s family systems theory.
The Parent Hope Project offers a unique approach called differentiation-based parenting.
This innovative approach assists parents in adjusting themselves to reduce relationship reactivity and gain a balance in their thinking and feelings, as well as their connection and separateness.
Jenny’s dedication to this field is encapsulated in her recent book, “Facilitating Parents’ Agency in Child and Adolescent Mental Health: Helplessness to Hope,” and her best-selling book “Growing Yourself Up.” As the founder and Director Emeritus of the Family Systems Institute in Sydney, Jenny has made significant contributions to family therapy, earning recognition and awards for her work in Australia and the USA.
Our Vision
Our mission is to support parents in regaining their confidence, enabling them to enhance the family environment’s positive effect on children’s resilience and coping capacities. We aim to equip parents with ways to promote their children’s responsible independence and stable parent-child connection.
While supporting parents is our number one goal, we aim to do this mainly by training and equipping professionals to use our family systems approach.
The Parent Hope Project offers training and resources
For organisations that are concerned about the impact of stressed and overwhelmed parents and are committed to improving children’s wellbeing. They want to offer effective, sustainable support for parents and children. We provide unique family systems programs that assist parents in discovering what they can adjust to help children flourish.
We bring our Differentiation-based parenting approach to life for clinicians, educators, family support workers and, most importantly, parents and carers. This is a much-needed fresh direction in the children’s wellbeing field.
If you’re going to assist your child to grow their resilience, the first step will be to increase your own resilience in tolerating your child’s upset without feeling compelled to rush in and smooth over everything for them. The grown-up parent, who really wants to be a loving resource to their child, is prepared to work on themselves.
Dr Jenny Brown
Grown Up Parenting
Ch 8 in Growing Yourself Up, p 108