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Parenting Therapy
Parenting Therapy aims to help parents develop the skills needed to raise resilient kids, who are self-motivated, academically, socially and emotionally skilled, responsible and stable, able and willing to carry their weight and self-manage academically and in other age-appropriate ways, while living into their fullest potential. This requires a parent’s willingness to learn and practice what works to empower kids to be self-motivated to create and live into their own dreams, rather than controlling or micro-managing them.
For children with particularly difficult behavioral challenges, we say “invest now, or pay later.” The longer your child persists in ineffective behaviors (which must be working for him/her or the child wouldn’t continue), the more that child’s neurology is changed to align with that ineffective behaviors, and the harder it is to alter that those behaviors. The younger the child, the more crucial it is to get help now NOW. NOW Now is when you can make a real difference and have the skills needed to help them learn to manage their own challenging behaviors going forward.
Child Therapy is always more effective when parents are skilled. Dropping a child off for one hour a week of therapy is never as effective as having parents who are skilled at empowering a child to manage their own ineffective behaviors throughout the week.
When a parenting therapist collaborates with an effective child therapist the results are substantially greater.
When parents are divorced, having effective parents in both households is often needed for a given child’s particular challenges and wellbeing.
Especially when children are in therapy with a child therapist specializing in divorce, we have worked with many single, divorced parents to increase their skills in ways that transfer to a co-parent’s home, even when that co-parent is unwilling to pursue their own co-parenting and parenting work.
We typically recommend equalizing the parenting-skills playing field for parents, by asking both parents to take 10, online, research-based and trauma-focused parenting classes offered by EchoParenting.org for only $99. They also provide a Certificate of Completion. (Parenting classes are a dime a dozen, and these happen to be of good quality. They discuss, for example, power over vs power with to avoid ongoing power struggles, and help parents consider how they were raised, and the impact of that on their current approach to raising their own children.)
Please also see our Co-parenting Therapy page.
