What is Parent Coaching?
Parent coaching is an empowering service that creates a non-clinical relationship between a coach and a child's parents. Through this empowering relationship, parents can gain skills, confidence, developmentally-sound wisdom, motivation, encouragement, and guidance in their parenting approach with their children.
How does it work?
Your parenting coach gains a deep understanding of your needs as a parent especially in response to your child's needs. Your coach transfers skills, education, and advice to address those needs and to build upon strengths you and your child already have. Your coach also provides a supportive, non-judgmental space for you to talk out your parenting fears and insecurities.
What are common coaching goals?
Some examples of needs we've helped parents with include (but are not limited to): general support; navigating post-placement contact between families/parents; strengthening parent-child/sibling/family relationships; helping children cope; disclosing difficult information to children; understanding a child's needs through trauma/adoption/child development lenses; managing challenging child behavior; supporting children through grief/loss/transition; advocating and communicating with a child's helpers (e.g. teachers, doctor); issues of race in interracial families; and helping children develop healthy adoptive identity.
What makes coaching different from therapy?
Therapists and parenting coaches may sometimes work on similar needs and problems; however, their approaches are different.
A parenting therapist establishes a therapeutic relationship with a parent and provides ongoing treatment for mental health or emotional concerns. A parenting coach establishes a non-therapeutic relationship with a parent and provides ongoing support through case analysis, advice, education, encouragement, and skill transfer (e.g., self-advocacy skills, parenting skills, relationship skills, etc.).
Can I attend therapy and coaching at the same time?
Yes! Parenting coaching can complement other services you may receive from other professionals.
Please note, our therapists and our coaches ethically cannot hold “dual roles.” This means that your coach cannot also serve as your therapist or the therapist to any member of your family (nor vice versa). This is with the exception of our tween/teen therapy program where a child's therapist may offer coaching sessions to the parents that are related to enhancing the child's therapeutic progress outside of sessions.
What do you Specialize in?
Our parenting coaches work with parents who are raising or supporting children whose needs fall within our areas of specialty overall.
Our main specialties include: adoption-competent practice, post-adoption support, foster care, donor-conception, non-traditional families, co-dependency and healing from relationship harm/abuse (particularly narcissistic abuse), trauma and post-traumatic growth, grief and loss, teens, parent-child relationships, and identity and oppression (special focus on issues of race and LGBTQIA+ issues).
How do we Connect?
Parent Coaching sessions are available nationwide through our secure virtual video portal. You will receive an account and log-in for this portal to make it easy to meet with your coach anywhere. Sessions are also available in-person to those who would like to meet at our location in Parkesburg, PA. For the texting add-on, clients can use their regular texting service - or - download our secure texting app for additional privacy and security. The portal and the app have no additional/hidden service or download fees.
How do I pay for sessions?
All sessions with a parenting coach are billed per session (55 minutes) at the time of each session. We accept debit and credit cards. The fee is $175 per session.
Please note that insurance does not cover coaching services.
How often do we meet?
Coaching typically takes place on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Forming a solid relationship and understanding of how to help is key to success. Because of this, we start out working with coaching clients on a weekly basis for at least the first 2-3 consecutive sessions before revisiting the session frequency.