Parenting Like it Matters

LAUREN BUTLER, founder of Parent Like it Matters, says that if you want to change the future of mental health, you’ve got to start at the very beginning.

“If children are given the ability to work on whatever is affecting their lives at a young age, you create a generation that can effectively handle whatever life may throw at them later on with positive coping skills that come to them naturally due to practice,” Butler says. “With this in mind, current parents and caregivers need to know how to support their children and how to examine their own parenting through the lens of how they were parented. Getting to heal your own inner child through the way you are parenting your own children is an incredible process.”

Butler is a licensed clinical social worker. She founded her private practice in February 2022 and in August of this year opened a group practice. The most common services currently offered by a team of therapists specializing in working with children, parents and families are play therapy sessions, Christian counseling, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) sessions, parenting sessions and family sessions.

Butler, who was born and raised in Wilmington, changed her career path following a significant family experience that gave her insight into the field of social work. She initially studied medicine as an undergraduate at North Carolina State University before switching to a social work degree.

“I realized what an honor it is to be the person who gets to show up for a child and their family in their hardest moments,” she says. Butler spent many summer trips in Guyana and a spring break trip to El Salvador that confirmed that working with children was exactly what she wanted to do. Butler also has a master of social work from the University of New England and has prior experience working at Child Protective Services, a fertility clinic, geriatric and employment social work, and a local community mentor matching program. She also wrote grants before pursuing her clinical license and becoming a therapist in 2018.

Butler recognized that in rapidly growing Wilmington, there were very few local group practices that focused only on children and their families. Additionally, she saw the impact that the pandemic had on children. “The number of children in need of mental health therapy has grown like never before,” Butler says. “Children have spent so much time isolated due to the pandemic, which has unfortunately caused an increase in anxiety and depression and a decrease in social skills and self-esteem for many. Because pandemic-related issues are brand new, support for parents was not fully checking the boxes of what was needed. It was time to do things a little differently by honoring what children had gone through during the pandemic.”

So she created a place where kids could come and feel like themselves. “I’ve worked really hard to create a bright, vibrant and kid-friendly space that kids want to be in,” she says of Parent Like It Matters, where parents and caregivers accompany their children.

“I firmly believe that a parent is the expert of their own family. It is our job to come alongside them in order to help them uncover how to be the best parent for their kids,” she says. “There is an intentional choice being made to parent like it matters, because it really does.”

In the whirlwind of the “should” and “should-nots” of parenting, Butler advises parents to take a deep breath and remind themselves that they are doing the best they can with what they have at the moment. “There is no perfect parent, but with support, a parent can be the best parent possible for their child,” she says.

As a mom herself, Butler likes to remind parents what an honor it is to be the ones to parent their kids and to show up when things are difficult, fun, and everywhere in between. “Getting to sit with our kids through the good and the bad,” Butler says, “so that they know they are not alone, even when we don’t know how to fix it, is something not to be taken for granted.”

To view more of photographer Daria Amato’s work, go to dariaphoto.com

Want more WILMA? Click here to sign up for our WILMA newsletters and announcements.