Transgender adolescents and emerging adults often rely on family support to access, navigate, and sustain gender-affirming healthcare. Yet, families and providers must do so within fragmented healthcare systems and shifting sociopolitical conditions. We conducted a scoping review of peer-reviewed articles published between January 1, 2010, and February 19, 2026, to examine integrated, affirming care models involving transgender adolescents or emerging adults, and their families. Searches were conducted in PubMed, PsycINFO, and PsycARTICLES, and 44 articles met the inclusion criteria. Three themes emerged from the review: family involvement as a cornerstone of affirmative care, variation in integrated care implementation, and systemic and sociopolitical barriers to access. The findings suggest that family involvement can strengthen care engagement, improve communication, and support transgender youth and emerging adult mental health, while fragmented systems often place additional emotional and logistical burdens on families. Clinical implications suggest that providers should prioritize coordinated, interdisciplinary, and family-inclusive models of care that address medical, mental health, relational, and systemic needs while supporting transgender adolescents, emerging adults, and caregivers across affirming healthcare settings.
Parental narcissistic traits and parental differential treatment (PDT) are each associated with adverse family and psychosocial outcomes, yet the empirical overlap between these literatures remains limited. This critical integrative review maps direct and adjacent evidence concerning parental narcissistic traits, favoritism, disfavoritism, scapegoating, and sibling relationships, and evaluates whether unequal sibling positioning is a plausible family process linking parental narcissistic traits with offspring outcomes. Structured searches of Scopus, PubMed, and EBSCOhost resources were supplemented by Google Scholar and citation searching. Evidence was organized by level of inference rather than treated as a single homogeneous literature. Direct studies support scapegoating as one relational pathway and identify psychological control, conditional regard, and attributional processes as plausible mechanisms. The broader PDT literature consistently links relative disfavoritism and larger treatment differences with poorer adjustment and sibling relationship quality, while also demonstrating important child, family, cultural, and reporter effects. The complete causal chain remains untested. For marriage and family counselors, the evidence supports behaviorally specific assessment of sibling comparison, selective blame, conditional approval, coalitions, and perceived fairness while avoiding unsupported diagnostic labeling of parents.
Parents who have learned sound techniques still encounter problems that technique alone does not resolve. This article develops Adaptive Parenting, a theory-building application of Heifetz's Adaptive Leadership framework to parenting and parent education, drawn from clinical work in Hong Kong. Technical problems yield to existing knowledge and skill, whereas adaptive challenges require those involved to change priorities, beliefs, habits, or loyalties. Seven Adaptive Leadership concepts are translated into family terms, noting where the organizational analogy breaks down. The model asks three questions: What kind of challenge is this? Whose work is it? Which zone is that person in right now? The central hypothesis is that technical responses to adaptive challenges may produce short-term compliance followed by recurrence and escalation. The main interlocutors are family stress theory, coercion theory and the Palo Alto tradition, and reflective functioning. Explicit safeguards bound the concept of “raising heat.” For marriage and family counselors, it offers a way to decide, before intervening, whose work a problem is and how much pressure that person can bear. The article offers testable propositions, not a validated intervention or assessment tool.
Through a replication study of Gushue et al. and a fictional case example exploring pornography use, implicit bias against male sexual minority clients was explored among counselors-in-training. Participants ( n = 65) were recruited from master's-level counselor training programs to explore the differences in case conceptualization of a male client of different sexual orientations and expressions (straight, gay, bisexual, kink) seeking counseling at his partner's request following pornography use. Results indicated that participants rated “straight” Jaime as significantly more impaired and attributed his concerns more strongly to internal factors compared to the sexual minority conditions. The largest difference occurred between “straight Jaime “and “kink Jaime,” despite both being identified as heterosexual men. Additionally, participant age and the sexual orientation of the fictional client were also significantly associated with participants’ perceptions of the case. Implications for couples and family counselors are provided.
Over the past two decades, intensive parenting practices have gained attention in parenting research. The current study examined the associations between maternal and paternal helicopter parenting (HP) and adolescents’ psychological well-being and academic engagement, with a focus on the mediating role of emotion dysregulation. A cross-sectional correlational design was employed, with data collected from a sample of 281 adolescents ( M age = 15.62; Male = 86; Female = 195) in Kerala, India. Results showed that both maternal and paternal HP were positively correlated with academic engagement. However, no significant correlation was found between HP and adolescent psychological well-being. The mediation analysis shows an indirect effect of maternal HP on psychological well-being, thus confirming the importance of emotion regulation in parent–child relationships. However, the mediating effects of emotion dysregulation in the association between paternal HP and adolescent psychological well-being and academic engagement were not significant. The findings highlight the differences in the effects of maternal and paternal HP. The study also emphasizes disentangling specific HP behaviors and emotion dysregulation as a mechanism of risk, providing useful clinical implications for improving adolescents’ well-being.
