Abstract

Families making international higher education decisions often disagree not about the facts of a course, university or destination but about which priority those facts should serve, and existing research on college choice, parental influence and person-environment fit offers no session-level method for that situation. This conceptual article presents and theorises a five-stage counselling protocol for parent-student mismatch derived from the Security-Status-Freedom framework, which reads family conflict as the interaction of three orientations: security (risk, cost and employability), status (recognition) and freedom (autonomy and ownership). The protocol was developed by conceptual synthesis in two phases: a working sequence that emerged across many years of family counselling practice, and its subsequent formalisation against the framework and against attribution research, self-determination theory and interest-based negotiation, yielding stated discriminant boundaries between the orientations and a proposed mechanism for each stage. The five stages, surfacing the stated conflict, mapping the underlying orientation, validating without surrendering judgement, converting positions into conditions and building an integrated decision, are specified with aims, counsellor actions and mechanisms, and illustrated with composite vignettes. The protocol gives practitioners a structured method for stuck family decisions and yields four testable hypotheses with proposed measures and a feasibility-pilot design; it has not been independently validated, and its developer and illustrator are the same person, so stakeholder co-design, feasibility work and outcome studies are the necessary next steps.

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