Once a parent, always a parent: the position of parent includes taking on various identities, and these identities undergo transitions. If you view yourself as a human, you must challenge your goals. Your needs are put on the back burner, and your duties change. A parent coach seeks to help parents give their families a good life by embracing family goals and building families to help them realize those goals.
Parent coaching is a short-term intervention for foster, adoptive, and kinship parents and other caregivers that provides them with hands-on, here-and-now resources for encouraging foster, adoptive, and familial children and children in their care to rapidly and significantly change their actions.
Each family receives a personalized plan to assist in caring for their child, particularly while he or she is away from home. Coaches then work with caregivers, to whom the child is otherwise inaccessible, to help them learn techniques and resources that encourage bonding and self-esteem while also encouraging even more positive behaviors.
Elaborative Role of A Parent Coach
Parent Coaching takes the parent to a new role when their child encounters problems with a challenging or traumatic situation. This position is very different from all the others we’ve spoken of thus far. It makes an attempt to look at what’s going on at the moment, like how to prevent an emotional episode from happening or helping a child to complete their homework, but it doesn’t stop there.
It is also important to remember that using the current situation as a view-port into the child’s emotional and social ability inventory is also emphasized. Many coaches use a similar approach: One keeps an eye on all the players’ results in order to draw attention to the need for practice drills, and the Parent Coach does the same. When looking at this from this new viewpoint, the child’s attempts to cope with ordinary and predictable demands of life suggest the environment where “coaching” is needed.
Involving parents in the Parent Coach position stresses the importance of being respectful and compassionate in order to promote an open and truthful dialogue between parent and child. It is important for a child to feel welcomed and understood, not reprimanded and lectured, before coaching can continue. Resisting putting on the parent cop’s shoes necessitates that parents, instead, stay out of their children’s shoes. In other words, holding the “parent cop” at bay is important for helping children voice their views, but it also raises the risk of protecting children from difficulties.
Children today in our modern society are most open to advice, but will oppose it if they believe it is forced upon them by using bullying techniques. When issues are addressed, the Parent Coach makes sure to affirm to the parent and child that they’re both in favor of discovering the causes for the issue in order to reassure the parents that they’re both on the same page. When you say, “I’m going to teach my child a lesson,” you are thinking, “The old standard was ‘I’m going to teach my child a lesson.'” So the new standard is: “What is the lesson that both of us should learn?”
The aim of “parent coaching” is to help parents learn about specific relationships between unwanted actions and intense, incredible feelings that they might not be aware of. If parents can identify and understand their own intimate relationships with their children, they may be able to handle their children in a way that is healing and does not re-traumatize them. It is amazing how easy it is to re-traumatize a child who has suffered physical or sexual abuse, neglect, and/or abandonment. The more parents recognize that traditional parenting strategies tend to kindle feelings of unexpressed grief and anger, the more they will be able to bring out the very best in their children.
What to expect from Parent Coaching?
In short the benefits of parent coaching are-
- Re-establishing healthy relationships between families
- Increasing the flow of communication
- Increasing confidence and self-efficacy to perform well between parents and children
- Understanding the problem-solving process and improving metacognitive abilities
Like every other coaching profile, parent coaching is also not a form of therapy. Parent coaches will offer access to the services and supports parents may need, including assistance with psychotherapy and learning stress management strategies. Meanwhile, coaches stand with parents in assisting the parents in having daily face-to-face talks with their children, which is where healing takes place. This two-pronged strategy of parents getting the help they need for their previous challenges and being compassionate when doing so is an immensely effective mix. The two processes will take place at the same time.
The children who have been traumatized aren’t going to have months to wait for their parents to recover from their childhoods. That’s why there are parent coaches who can be contacted by phone, email, and Skype today. These coaches also have in-between-appointment time-outs, where parents are allowed to call their coaches in the middle of their appointments for on-the-spot support.
Instead of losing their patience with their children, parents can take advantage of calling a phone-a-friend, who can calm them down and help them hold their temper. This is extensive support to promote both good behavior and strong family relationships, with the long-term goal of making it a lifetime commitment for the children.
