Adolescents in serious emotional difficulty are often unwilling to accept help from formal and statutory services. However, they remain a great worry to their parents, families and society as a whole. In this paper, I present the development of a model where the parents of adolescents are seen without the adolescent being referred. The adolescents themselves are occasionally present to help in the thinking about what they need from their parents and what they find unhelpful. They are not there to be engaged in therapy. Parents are encouraged to restore their authority and develop their role as parents appropriate to the new demands and needs of adolescents, who are held in mind by the therapist and are engaged indirectly through the work with their parents.