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Go Parents Go!
Supportive Coaching for
Successful Parenting By Kelly Burgess
Successful Parenting
Parent coaches generally provide that support via telephone, offering one-on-one counseling sessions with varying price levels. With parent coaching, only the parent interacts with the coach; there is no family overview except that offered by the parent. This is not family counseling.
"Parents tend to step back a little from parenting when their children enter middle school, and the middle school culture encourages that,"Wolf says. "But when problems arise or the children start moving in a direction their parents don't like, they sometimes have trouble taking that parenting role back. As a coach, I help parents find a place where they can parent from their intuition."
Terri Douglas of Walled Lake, Mich., turned to parent coaching when her preteen son became very difficult to deal with. What the coach did was not try to change her son's behavior, but to change the reactions of Douglas and her husband. "The big benefit we got from coaching is that my husband and I became a better team," Douglas says. "We began to communicate better and realized that our parenting had to be more consistent across the board. At the time, all these techniques seemed ridiculously lame, but they worked! Our situation has definitely improved over several weeks."