“Technology should improve your life, not become your life!”
Harvey B. Mackay
The aim of today’s article is to explore the application of Single-Session Therapy in the context of parenting support, focusing on one of the most current and complex challenges contemporary parents face on a daily basis: managing technology and its impact on family life.
We spoke with Dr. Rosita Del Medico, a psychologist and psychotherapist specializing in Brief Systemic-Strategic Therapy. She provides psychological services both in private practice and in collaboration with various organizations. She is also involved in training and personal development, delivering career-orientation courses for those pursuing a career in psychology.
Being a parent in the digital age means facing situations for which there are often no established educational models. Smartphones, social media, video games, chats, and digital platforms have changed the ways in which children and adolescents communicate, but they have also transformed how families define boundaries, rules, autonomy, and control.
For many parents, this change can be a source of uncertainty and confusion.
“How much should I monitor?” “When should I intervene?” “What rules should I set?” “Should I check my child’s phone?” “How can I distinguish normal behavior from a potential warning sign?”
These are questions that may also arise in the therapist’s office and, in some cases, may be the primary reason for seeking help.
When digital technology changes family boundaries
The widespread use of digital technologies has made the distinction between what belongs to the family space and what happens outside it less clear-cut.
Children’s relationships continue even after they return home. School experiences may continue through group chats. Conflicts with peers may become immediately visible to parents or completely escape their observation. Even concepts traditionally central to family life, such as closeness, distance, privacy, and sharing, are taking on new forms.
Parents may therefore find themselves facing a paradox: they are closer to their child’s life while simultaneously feeling more excluded from it. Having access to an enormous amount of information does not necessarily mean being able to truly understand what their child is experiencing. It is within this space of uncertainty that an increasing need for control may develop.
What is the therapist’s role in this situation?
In these circumstances, the goal of therapy is to help parents understand how they are currently dealing with the problem and what effects their attempted solutions are producing.
A first step may be to distinguish between control and guidance. Rules and supervision may be necessary and, in some situations, parental-control tools may also be appropriate. However, the therapeutic question concerns how these tools are used within the relationship.
The same rule may foster a child’s sense of responsibility or, alternatively, become the starting point for an escalating conflict.
It therefore becomes important to shift the focus from simply managing smartphone use to the relational dynamics that develop around it. The therapist can explore how rules are established, how the child responds, how the parent reacts, and which attempts have already been made, examining the effects they have produced.
Information and communication: the therapist’s role
In this work, information and communication represent two important resources.
Parents do not need to be familiar with every platform their child uses. What matters is that they can approach their child’s digital world with sufficient familiarity while keeping a space for open dialogue.
The therapist’s role is therefore not simply to help parents decide what should be prohibited or allowed, but to understand how the ways in which rules are established and transgressions are addressed contribute to maintaining or changing the situation.
From this perspective, managing the digital world becomes the context in which a relational difficulty manifests itself, rather than the problem to be solved in isolation.
Intervening in a single session: from behavior management to changing the relationship
Single-Session Therapy can be particularly appropriate when a parent brings a concrete and circumscribed difficulty for which a direction for change can be identified.
The therapist does not necessarily need to reconstruct the entire history of the family. Instead, the goal can be to help the parent focus on what is happening, what has already been tried, and which element can be changed.
Exploring attempted solutions makes it possible to understand the logic maintaining the problem and identify a change that can be practically tested.
From this perspective, the intervention can help parents move away from searching for increasingly effective ways to control their child’s behavior and towards the possibility of changing the way they engage in the relationship.
The question can therefore become:
“What can I do differently in my relationship with my child, even if I cannot completely control what they do online?”
The direction of the intervention will depend on the specific configuration of the problem and on the attempted solutions that are maintaining it.
One session to get the system moving again
The therapist’s challenge is therefore to shift the focus from managing behavior to changing the relationship.
Single-Session Therapy can provide a space in which parents can reinterpret the situation from a different perspective, identifying where the system has become stuck and what kind of change might help set it in motion again.
Behind requests that apparently focus on technology, such as “I no longer know how to manage my child,” “Every time we talk about the phone, we end up arguing,” or “I don’t know whether I should monitor them or give them more freedom,” a broader difficulty in regulating the relationship may emerge.
It is precisely from this specific configuration, and from the resources already present within the system, that the therapeutic work can take shape even when it is contained within a single session.
Rosita Del Medico
Psychologist, Specialized in
Brief Systemic-Strategic Therapies
at the ICNOS Institute