Family counseling like relationship counseling offers strategies for living together. Competition, cooperation, and compromise become even more complex as children have different skills and needs as they develop. Besides the differences between parents and children there are new cultural expectations. When I was ten, it was natural to have a paper route and deliver 120 papers door to door daily. Today it is not even legal. Knowing what cultural changes are appropriate can be a challenge.
Skills learned in family counseling include establishing appropriate boundaries between parents and children and between siblings, disagreeing without being mean, establishing common goals amidst differences. Family counseling tasks include understanding how childhood families influence current behaviors, replacing animosities with understanding and caring, creating a balance among rights, responsibilities, and privileges.
Other important tasks that may be relevant include understanding the stages of development that children follow, learning the difference between discipline as a teaching skill and discipline used to overpower children, how understanding and loving children can make child rearing easier and eliminate the need for violence (how to be strong without being mean.)