Services for Parents
Transforming your parenting... transforming your life
Why Work with a Parent Consultant
Parenting can be immensely rewarding, but it also comes with a host of challenges. As children develop, they communicate their needs, express their desires and frustrations, and convey their own emotions. Many times, they communicate by crying, shouting, talking back, hitting, temper tantrums, or other behaviours that cause you huge amounts of stress, which affects you, your child, and your family. Often, traditional discipline does not seem to work and parents feel frustrated and confused. This can result in more yelling, conflict, guilt and resentment, leading to the deterioration of the family life, with little success or change in your home.
As a parent consultant, my goal is to work with you to identify these challenging areas, create a workable plan to address them, provide continuous support and training to ensure you get closer to your goals. You will experience measurable and clear improvement in your family life.
How Parent Support Helps You
All of my programmes include a strong parent training component. The Parent Training and Support modules help parents and family members maintain and promote the child’s gains using the most effective interventions to increase skills and find a replacement for challenging behaviour. Moreover, I understand the families’ own difficulties in relation to the child’s needs (e.g., isolation, guilt, depression, anxiety, anger, etc.). Therefore, the Parent Training and Support include modules that will help the families acquire the tools to effectively deal with their own difficulties that often get in the way for a consistent, effective and empathetic intervention. This is based on Acceptance and Commitment Training, which has shown to be effective in helping not only parents of children with autism, but also in alleviating human suffering by promoting general psychological well-being.
What is Parent Consultation?
All parent consultation services begin with an assessment that include family interviews and observation and evaluation of any challenging behaviours and the context in which they occur. During this process, we will work together to identify key areas to address, while carefully considering your family’s strengths and motivations. Each consultation plan is unique, as no two families have identical goals and preferences! I will work with you to create a plan that best suits your family using evidence-based strategies to ensure rapid and lasting changes for you and your children.
The goal of consultation is to use positive behaviour strategies to simultaneously address your goals while quickly reducing stress for everyone in the family and helping to foster a better relationship between the parents and the children.
What Should I Expect?
Consultation sessions are hands on! Research shows that the best way to learn new skills and create change is to a) practice and b) practice in real-life situations and environments. Sessions can take place at the home, creating opportunities for the parent to teach skills to the child; or anywhere parenting challenges arise (in the shop, car, etc.). These can be conducted in person or through webcam/ Facetime / Zoom / etc. Depending on your intervention plan, I will have sessions only with the parent, and sometimes I will provide hands on training or coaching to the parent during interactions or teaching sessions with their child. During the sessions, we will work around psychological flexibility and what matters the most to you.
I will provide written instructions for any techniques used in sessions, guide you to measure ongoing changes to ensure progress, and I will remain a constant source of support throughout the process.