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Parent Coaching

Parent Coaching

  • Are you worried about your child’s behaviour, well-being or learning?

  • Do you feel overwhelmed by the challenges you are having to face as a parent, or uncertain how to best support your child?

  • Do you find yourself doing or saying things as a parent, you always said you wouldn’t, or wish you didn’t? 

 

This is totally normal, but can also be incredibly painful and difficult.  Our children can trigger emotions, memories, thoughts and behaviours in us that we never anticipated.  We can end up feeling totally alone with the challenges – making them seem all the bigger.

What is Parent Coaching?

Parent coaching provides a safe space for you to discuss your family’s unique situation and concerns. It helps you explore what you want for your family and, how you want to get there.  As a parent coach and educational psychologist, I bring specialist training in child development, learning and behaviour, with additional expertise in neurodiversity and trauma to support the process.  Within coaching sessions, we work together using your knowledge of your family to create ways forward that are tailored to you, your children and your circumstances and therefore tend to be workable, sustainable and effective.  But it’s not just about strategies.  Your personal journey as a parent is heard, accepted and supported within a non-judgemental collaborative partnership.  Parent coaching supports an even deeper understanding of your children, their needs and your relationship with them.  This enables you to have greater clarity and confidence in your parenting and feel prepared for any future challenges. 

Why Engage A Parent Coach

Parent coaching enables parents to identify their own key concerns and areas they wish to work on.  Coaching sessions then focus in on these areas that are most important to the parents and their family, thereby supporting engagement and motivation.  Coaching follows the client’s lead and asks permission to offer suggestions or delve deeper. It is an empowering process and works well for families who are perhaps nervous about engaging with professionals and/or who have a history of trauma themselves. 

Parent coaching supports parents to explore new interpretations of their child’s behaviours.  Through this key information can be shared about child development, age appropriate expectations, attachment theory, trauma responses, neurodiversity and models of parenting etc, in a way that is real and applicable to the family in the here and now. This means the learning tends to stick and also generalise. Parent coaching, whilst not therapy, can also involve some deeper emotional work with parents and enable emotions around their situation and parenting journey to be processed, creating a more emotionally neutral space from which new approaches can be tried.

Working collaboratively with the family to consider new approaches and how to try them out in a way that fits with the time, energy and resources they have available to them – making changes realistic and achievable. Supporting parents to understand the evidence and research, and then scaffold them in developing their own way forward based on this new understanding, alongside their knowledge of their own family and child(ren). In this way, strategies are designed by the parents themselves, meaning they are more tailored to the specific circumstances, interests, personalities and needs of the family, making them more effective and sustainable.

What Happens In A Couching Session

Each one-hour coaching session happens over Zoom, meaning you can do it from any space which is private enough for you to talk openly – many people do sessions from their car.

The session begins with you explaining a key problem that you would like to focus on.  This might be something that has just cropped up, or something that has been happening for a while, sometimes even years.

Together we explore what is going on: what might be adding to the problem, things that help/don’t help, things that get in the way of change, things you have already tried and what happened, things that you want to try but haven’t felt able to yet etc.

We then think about your different options and explore which feels most right to you, and how to put those things into place.  You decide what to take away and try over the week/fortnight until we meet again.

Parent coaching usually lasts between 6-12 sessions depending on the issues you are facing.

What Is Included

  • Reading of background paperwork/reports where applicable

  • 6-12 one-hour Zoom coaching sessions

  • Weekly or fortnightly sessions

  • Email support in-between sessions

Professional Assurances

  • BSC in Psychology

  • Doctorate in Educational, Child & Adolescent Psychology

  • Certificate in Coaching from the Centre for Coaching, London

  • Training with the Jai Institute for Parent Coaching

  • Registered with New Zealand Psychologists Board

A bit about Dr Veronica Roberts

Dr Veronica Roberts worked as an educational, child and adolescent psychologist for over a decade.  In the UK this included specialist roles in a Tier 2 Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service, and supporting schools and resource bases specialising in working with neurodiverse students and/or those with and social, emotional and behavioural needs. 

 

Her most recent role was within New Zealand’s Te Kahu Tōī: Intensive Wraparound Service where she further developed her understanding of trauma and its interaction with neurodiversity needs.  She used parent coaching with many of the families she supported in this service and noticed its effectiveness in building a deeper understanding of a child’s needs.  From this place, parents naturally started to approach things differently and small changes led to bigger ones over time, even in situations that were incredibly challenging.

Veronica is from the UK but moved out to New Zealand in July 2021 and lives with husband and 8-year-old son. Thanks to her son she knows way more than I ever thought she would (or should?!) about Minecraft, Rubik’s cubes and Dungeons and Dragons!

 

She has worked with children, young people and families since she was 17 in a variety of roles including: working in nurseries, as a nanny, a teacher aide in both mainstream and specialist schools for children with neurodiversity and complex needs, working as an ASD Outreach Support Worker for teenagers with autism who were struggling in mainstream schools, and then working as an Educational Psychologist including supporting mainstream schools with specialist resource bases for children with emotional, behavioural and social difficulties and/or neurodiversity, and specialist schools for children with additional needs.

When she became a parent, she found it incredibly challenging, even when she had all this extra training on how kids develop and how to support them. It really knocked her confidence and made her double-guess herself every day. As a result, she became determined to support other parents, so they did not have to feel alone with the challenges, and she did further training in coaching, and parent coaching specifically. 

Veronica Roberts.jpg

Testimonials

“We expected a few pointers on the way we handled certain situations and some basic skills in supporting each other's methods.  What we ended up with was so much more than we ever imagined. At times it was challenging but the levels of understanding we reached, both individually and as a couple were astounding and unexpected…We still have our little bumps along the way, but we can now draw on the knowledge and skills we learnt in our sessions. I would highly recommend Veronica and her work. She is professional, inciteful, and enjoyable to work with and especially supportive through the more challenging conversations.”

Becky and Phil, parents of 3 children

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