Parenting Was Never Supposed to be This Hard! How Parent Coaching can help you build a stronger, more connected family
Let me guess, before you had your kid, you had parenting completely figured out. You had this idealized view of how your kids would behave and what your relationship with them would be like. You imagined how much they would love to travel with you, how joyful your vacations would be, making lifelong memories together. Your kids were going to eat all the healthy food you put in front of them, and they were going to be oh so grateful and sweet for all your efforts and hard work. Your children were going to be so well-behaved because you were going to be CONSISTENT and CLEAR about your expectations. You would never yell, and they would always listen. Your parents and in-laws would support you and your choices as a parent. You and your spouse would never fight and always see eye-to-eye on how to raise kids. Unicorns and roses all around!!
Well, baby arrived, and reality hit: Your perfectly idealized expectations of what your family would be like don’t match up to what it is really like.
Does any of this sound familiar?
You and your spouse see discipline from completely different angles and you are fighting with them as much as your kid.
Your child has received a neurological, medical, or mental health diagnosis that really knocked you off your center.
You gave birth to an extrovert who really NEEDS PEOPLE, and you just want to hide away from everyone or vice versa.
You love your job and feel useful and smart at work, but feel completely disconnected, isolated and alone at home with your kids.
You thought you were going to raise a crunchy, granola family, and your kid only wants to play video games and eat cheese-its, and wants to talk to you nonstop about it. (Oh wait, maybe that’s just me).
If your expectations of parenting don’t match up to reality, you might need help adjusting your intentions. It might be time for Parent Coaching.
Parent Education and Coaching can help you become the parent you wish you were AND the parent your kid needs.
Parenting has changed since you were a kid
We learn much of what we know about parenting from our own parents. For some of us, that is really good news. For others, well, we need to think about doing things differently from what our parents did. And likely, it is a combination of both: There are things we can take from our own childhood and use with our kids, and there are things we need to leave in the past.
I remember my feral childhood, where I left the house in the morning, and didn’t return until the street lights came on. No one worried. It was spacious. I never felt the need or desire to check-in.
Things are vastly different today, and though I would love for my kids to have that kind of space and freedom, it is hard to see it working nowadays. It can be easy to lose our bearing about what is best for our kids and our families given the constraints of culture and the current environment.
Life with kids can be isolating and overwhelming
Life gets hectic and overwhelming and before you know it, you go from snuggling your newborn to rushing from activity to activity, yelling at your kid, eating fast food in the car, all of you exhausted and feeling completely disconnected, angry, and alone. You never intended it to be this way, and honestly, you don’t know how you got here. It is in these times you can realign yourself and come back to your intentions, or begin to formulate new intentions that match your family’s current needs.
Just like your kids are constantly growing and changing, so are you.
We know that growth happens over the entire life span. Who you are now may be quite different from who you were five years ago. And your kids are changing as well. What worked for your family when your children were very young might be vastly different from what works for them now. Perhaps you have a kid who really needs structure and that does not come naturally to you. Or maybe, when the going gets tough, you tend to be more rigid, and your family really needs flexibility to thrive. As we raise our kids, we can have blind spots and places where we feel stuck.
Sometimes the struggle is overwhelming and we can’t see the path to the ease we seek.
A Parent Coach can look in and assist you in seeing the big picture in an unbiased way.
There are so many unrealistic expectations of today’s parents. Parents and kids are busier than ever and being pulled in a million different directions. Connection is deeply important to strong, healthy parent-child relationships, and we know that people are feeling more disconnected than ever. This is concerning, with mental health struggles for all ages groups on the rise.
With Parent Coaching you learn to build stronger relationships within your family - this is your protective super power for you and your kids! You will learn to settle into your own authentic self and to make decisions from a place of inner knowing instead of always feeling like you are grasping in the dark for answers.
Tap into your own wisdom
I believe strongly in each person’s capacity to find their own inner wisdom and truth. Parenting books won’t give you the answers you can only find in your gut. As your Parent Coach, I guide you to connect with your own deep wisdom, your inner knowing about what is right for your child, for your family, and for you. It is all interrelated and connected. Every strong, healthy family is guided by a parent who understands that each person’s needs will rise to the surface to be met at different times. The healthy parent has the agility to quickly change from one person’s needs to another person’s, all without losing herself and her own needs in the process. Not always an easy task, and let’s face it, this is vulnerable and valuable work.
This all is a big ask. I know. I am a single mom to four amazing kids. When my kids were young, I was completely overwhelmed by the demands of parenting and a floundering marriage. I felt like I was constantly giving from an empty container, and there just wasn’t enough of me to go around. It was a slow and winding path to building the strong practices that helped me connect deeply to my own inner knowing and to my kids to become the parent I always wanted to be.
We can’t be in healthy, intimate relationships with others without
first experiencing that within ourselves.
The practices of mindfulness, embodiment, and self-compassion can help develop a sense of being grounded in a clear understanding of your beliefs and your intentions for your kids. There is a thread that I can follow from the humble beginnings of my meditation and yoga practices to my relationships with my kids, each one deeply informing the other. I could not be in a healthy place with my children had it not been for my practices because these practices create the container for a healthy relationship with ourselves, and that is what forges strong bonds with others. This is why Integrity Parent Coaching draws together the three points of connected parenting.
The Three Points of Loving, Connected Presence: Mindfulness, Self-Compassion, Embodiment
Through your work with me, you will explore parenting through these three lenses. Why?
• Mindfulness
Allows us to be aware of our internal experiences as well as those of our children.
• Self-Compassion
Helps us to be kind to ourselves when things don’t go right. Only when we learn self-kindness can we effectively extend that kindness out to our children, both in what they learn from watching us succeed and fail well, and from how we talk to and treat them.
• Embodiment
Helps us tune into our inner knowing, to be guided by our intuition, to feel into our own sense knowing of what our family needs.
Together, these skills help us open up to intimacy and connection, increasing our ability to co- and self-regulate. They become your miraculous way into deep and lasting connection with your kids, and that protects both you and them! These are wisdom practices, helping us to both root and grow.
What you can expect if you work with me
Coaching can help you make clear-minded decisions about how you want to show up for your kids. Who do you want to be for them? How do you want to guide them as they grow and learn and develop? What relationship do you want to develop with them? With yourself?
I think of Parent Coaching as a lantern along your path:
The path has always been there, but the light cast from the lantern shows the way by revealing obstacles and potential traps, and provides you with a sure-footed orientation.
Working with me will give you practical, actionable strategies for dealing with your most pressing parenting needs, including:
Setting goals that are appropriate for you and your family
Learning how to tap into your inner wisdom to be the best parent possible
Learning to bring connection and joy back to parenting
Developing strategies to incorporate self-care into each day because you can’t expect to build connection with your kid if you don’t first connect with yourself!
Working together would NOT be a good fit for you if:
You expect me to tell you what rules are best for your kids
You want someone to give you an easy-peasy framework to implement (pro-tip: it doesn’t exist!!)
You want me to tell you the same thing I told your neighbor, as if your lives are the same
You think you can push your way through the struggles and simply DO MORE to make things better
You think you can bypass or ignore what is happening in your family that is creating struggles
You believe that caring for yourself can be put on the back burner
Every family will do things differently in response to the unique needs of its members, each person contributing to and benefiting from the system as a whole. And let’s be honest: This IS the hardest job there is.
As a parent coach, I know that self-care is more important than ever. It helps to ground you and connect you to yourself and you cannot connect to your kid until you have a strong connection to yourself. The work we do together will incorporate skills in regulating your own nervous system so that you can lovingly connect to your child, via their nervous system.
I bring together my background in social work and years of experience working with children and families, and combine it with my training in mindfulness, self-compassion, and embodiment. I draw on training in and deep understanding of Polyvagal Theory and the importance of self- and co-regulation in the context of family relationships. As a social worker, I understand how larger systems interact with family systems and how to tease out what we have control over versus what we don’t.
Parent coaching and education can help put you back on the path to being the parent you alway wanted to be or the parent you have discovered you wish you were. Book a free discovery call with me today to see if working together is the right fit for you!