The greatest problem for our children and young people today is alienation. That's the belief of Andrew Duggan, an influential British child and family therapist whose ideas are spreading across Europe. Duggan works with the most socially "deprived" children and parents in Britain and his success stories are legion.

"Children feel that they don't fit in, that they are not valued or listened to. At the same time, their parents have high expectations of them, with an emphasis on academic achievement rather than skills and qualities. Parents are picking goals for their children which may not be their children's choices," he says.

He was speaking to me after addressing a conference attended by 500 therapists at the European Brief Therapy Association annual conference at Trinity College Dublin.

"Parents have a decreasing ability to talk to and listen to their children," Duggan says.

"They're not taking a helicopter view of their child's world." The biggest difficulty for children, especially those perceived to have problems, is that they are like square pegs being pushed into round holes, he says. "We are trying to fit children into an existing educational system, yet some children don't fit into those systems. They are being taught in ways that they cannot learn. So more and more, children are being isolated, they are failing school and then being referred to psychologists and social services. Teenagers who feel they are not valued then turn to drink, drugs and violence."

Parents, meanwhile, feel lost and are worried they don't know how to parent anymore. "We are constantly being told that parenting is in crisis," says Duggan. The British response has been to consider mandating parenting courses for parents of children at risk. But this attitude makes it look as though parents don't have the capacity to parent, whereas they actually have the skills but have been disempowered.

There is no such thing as a problem parent, Duggan believes. "If you come to us as a parent, we don't talk about why you failed, we talk about how you managed to get your children to go to school and to prevent them being taken into care. We tell parents, 'you must have been doing something right'."

Duggan's revolutionary work with parents - similar "brief therapy" work is also taking place here with the Brief Therapy Group in Dublin - involves empowering parents to do what they do best. In as little as one or two sessions , weeks - even months - apart, he has encouraged parents to parent positively, resulting in dramatic improvements in children's behaviour. It's cost-effective and convenient for parents too busy and stressed to attend 12 weekly sessions.

Duggan's work with parents, which I witnessed on video at the conference, is extraordinary. What he basically does is to guide parents away from seeing their children's behaviour negatively. Parents are encouraged to see the good things only. They are asked to keep "sparkling moments" books, so that each time the child does something right, the event is recorded. This has the effect of encouraging the child to do more and more "good" things, until the "bad" behaviour recedes. All children want to please their parents and flourish when critical voices are replaced with praise. Parents themselves have incredible resource, no matter how deprived they are, and it blossoms when they are praised by the therapist.

"You have to create some change for change to occur. It doesn't matter what the change is - it just has to be change. Resistance in a child is a function of the relationship, rather than a personality trait of the parents. All parents want to change for the better," says Duggan.

The first step for parents is to stop imposing their values on their children. For example, if a 14-year-old has been smoking cannabis, parents will rightly be worried. But the solution is not to ban cannabis smoking.

Parents need to ask how the cannabis smoking is affecting the child. If he is doing well in school, if he is healthy, if he is socially well adjusted, is smoking cannabis really a problem? "Parents might need to reframe their attitude. Because if they ban cannabis, the child will just smoke it more and it exacerbates a difficult situation," Duggan advises.

As a therapist, Duggan never tells people what to do: "My goal is to work with children, parents and teachers and ask them, how can I be helpful to them?" For example, say a group of 13-year-olds is found having sex together on school grounds, as has happened. The first question for teachers has to be: "what is it about this that causes you anxiety?" Your values have no place in how you deal with the children. The real question has to be: are the children upset? If not, will you traumatise them more by turning the incident into a crisis and shaming them? A better response would be to quietly remove any opportunity for the children to be alone together.

There are obvious child-protection issues. Have the children been exposed to pornography? Have the children been sexually abused by adults?

Outside the child-protection issue, adults need to work with what the child thinks the problem is, if any, not what the adults see as the problem.

Transforming children's behaviour into crises, based on adult anxieties and expectations, will only create further problems, Duggan advises.

Excluding children from school is the worst thing you can do. In Britain now, unlike the Republic, children cannot be expelled - which is why innovative approaches like Duggan's are now being considered. When pushed to the wall, British schools are being forced to help, rather than merely discipline. We should do the same here.

For further information contact Brief Therapy Group, 1 Chelmsford Road, Ranelagh,

Dublin 6 (tel: (01) 491 3033; e-mail info@brieftherapy.ie; www.brieftherapy.ie).