In parent coaching work, you will learn skills as a parent to support your loved one in terms of the challenges they are facing.
We offer parent coaching for families with children of all ages – elementary school aged-children, adolescents, and young adults.
The types of issues we offer parent coaching for are:
When our loved ones are experiencing mental health issues, we might often accommodate (i.e., support) those issues out of love and concern. However, the result is that we unfortunately maintain our loved one’s mental health issues and perpetuate their ongoing struggles. Family accommodation can arise in many ways. When a loved one has OCD, a family member might participate in a loved one’s rituals, support their avoidant behaviours or make significant changes in family routines.
Parent Coaching work can help decrease the amount of family accommodation that understandably occurs when a family member is experiencing difficult mental health issues. Strategies to decrease these behaviours benefit both the parents and the individual experiencing mental health issues. Family accommodation work is often highly beneficial for families in which a loved one is experiencing OCD. We often start with providing education on OCD to family members. Then we work towards decreasing accommodation and learning ways to address the OCD behaviours. We work with families whether or not their loved ones are also seeking help with us.
Parent coaching can also be beneficial when parents want to coach Exposure and Response Prevention work that an individual is engaging in. By understanding the tasks that an individual is working on, parents can help support that individual and further their success and recovery.
Parenting strategies can also be developed that can be of benefit to each unique family situation. Enhanced communication is another skill set that can also be developed within the context of parent coaching. In addition, power struggles and challenging parenting dynamics that have developed are also addressed.
Finally, parent coaching can also happen within the context of general family education and ensuring that everyone is using similar language to address challenges that individuals are working on. This can help a loved one feel very supported as they do the hard work of therapy on a daily basis.