Parent Coaching and Developmental Guidance

The goal of Parent Coaching and Developmental Guidance is to support secure attachment between parent and child. Coaching refers to the role of active suggestion about parenting activity based on the temperaments of parent and child.

Developmental Guidance

• The goal of Developmental Guidance is to enhance empathy, communication, and self-esteem in parents and children.
• Individual sessions with parents and children focus on understanding normal behavior and how behavior is affected by personality, temperament, stress, and family circumstances.
• We help parents understand how these stages affect their child's behavior and how to intervene when children's fearful, aggressive, or unreasonable behavior may be normal but not acceptable.
• Decision-making, understanding age-appropriate behavior: developing reasonable expectations, and helping children to respond.

Parent and child often attend sessions together. The clinician offers emotional support for the parental role and teaches parents and children to express and process negative emotions. The parents are helped to identify the child’s emotional needs and to respect the motivation and meaning of their child’s behavior.

Parents learn to recognize and compare their own expectations with the actual abilities and temperament of their child. The emphasis is on identifying and exploring parents’ issues so that they understand the connection between their own upbringing and their subsequent parenting style.

Elaine Frank, MSW * Denise Rowe, BA

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