Parent Coaching
Empowering you to become more of the playful, loving, & attuned parent you always imagined you’d be, and to accept the parts that fall short of that vision.
“If only my child had come with an instruction manual!” That’s a thought that most parents have had at some point in their lives.
Nothing really prepares us to become a parent. We go into parenting with some fantasy of the parent we’d like to be, often imagining ourselves without our parents’ shortcomings, and with all the attributes we wished they would possess. Then the realities of parenting settle in, and we fall short of our vision.
This is where PARENT COACHING comes in.
Coaching can help you identify where you might improve in order to come closer to your vision, and it can help you accept some of the inevitable limitations and challenges that parenting presents.
Who is Parenting Coaching For?
I offer parenting coaching to parents of children ages 1-12 who wish to resolve a host of behavioral struggles with their children or just feel better about their parenting choices. (If you are suffering from depression or anxiety or another mental health condition, psychotherapy may be more what you’re looking for. If you are also having parenting challenges, your therapy can include some parenting coaching as well.)
What Will I Get Out of Parent Coaching?
Even though you will come in with a specific problem (bedtime, sleep issues, potty training, picky eating, aggressive behavior, sibling rivalry, homework, or separation anxiety), you will walk out with multiple tools that you can use for a variety of issues. You’ll shift your goal from solving the current problem to deepening the CONNECTION you have with your child, and you’ll feel ready to tackle any future challenges as they come up.
What Kinds of Tools Will I Learn?
- Empathy Training – We will practice how to respond to your child with empathy even when they’re being difficult.
- Playful Listening – You will learn how to defuse difficult moments with humor and play.
- Special Time – You will learn how to leverage the power of focused one-on-one attention to help your child grow their trust in you.
- Listening to Emotions – Emotions can run high for children, and we’re not sure what to do when they’re crying or throwing a tantrum. You will learn what to do and what to say when your child is crying.
- Limit Setting – Learning how to set limits with children without yelling, and identifying when setting limits is actually exactly what your child is asking you to do.
- Self-Care – You will identify areas in which you require more self-care and limits on how much you are giving so that you can show up to parenting with your own cup full rather than showing up depleted. You will learn how to forgive yourself when things don’t go as planned.
- Identifying your own unresolved childhood issues– It is inevitable that as we parent we will face moments in which our own unresolved issues make it harder for us to parent. The best way to learn how to give support is to receive it. This is where a parenting coach steps in to offer you full support for those difficult past moments, so you can experience what it’s like to feel fully listened to, and then you can extend the same to your child. Also, if it suits you, you can learn a new form of peer support, where you join with other parents who sharing listening time in order to feel fully heard, so that they can return to parenting ready to tackle its challenges.
Finally, if you’re child has a specific issue that they are working on in therapy, I will collaborate with their clinician to tailor the coaching experience to your family’s needs.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me to see if you think we will be a good fit for one another.