by Dr. Caron Goode | Apr 17, 2019 | Certified-Family-Coach
How we parents communicate and demonstrate conversations with our children speaks louder than any intention or goal. A family coach or parenting consultant trains parents and family members in communications skills. How are your communications skills?
Not Like This
"Caron, speak up." My father screamed. Other statements he used were....
"Quit mumbling. Stop mumbling. You are driving me nuts."
"STOP the mumbling.
My father was a man with a hearing loss, probably acquired from his stent of service in the second world war. He boasted how he was lucky to be alive despite the shard of metal in his skull. He drank a lot which often resulted in being a happy drunk until he couldn't hear what one of his children said. Then, his short fuse resulted in the not-so-nice screaming bout.
The story of my father demonstrates how truly important it is to establish two-way communication within families. Two-way communication implies two people are speaking, but also listening, as well as respecting opinions and solutions. Two-way communication suggests that listening receives as much respect as speaking.
Communication styles are characterized by the way people want to appear and be heard:
- People want to look (or attempt to appear) a certain way when communicating. For example, it was necessary to my father that he raised his voice and corrected me because he was the "boss."
Unclear, poor communication leaves family members unhappy and lonely. If your communication skills are lacking, then a family member may be miserable and feel alone. The following consultant's tips can help you improve the opportunities for being heard, speaking your truth, and inviting conversations with your children.
Ten Right-Way Communication Skills for the Home
Fostering a more favorable environment in your home includes offering opportunities for discussions and space for disagreements, Try these communication strategies
1. Be open and honest with one another. While being honest, be kind when saying something that may cause a family member any distress. Children are more receptive to calm voices, kind words, and tone of voice, but then, isn't everyone?
2. Have some fun each day. Family fun doesn't have to take up a lot of time. It can be as simple as having ice cream cones or playing with your pets. Simple tasks or rituals make a significant difference in how the communication flows in a home, mainly when people are engaged in functions together.
3. Set priorities for chores that everyone must do. Agree on who does what chores and when they should do them, so everyone participates in age-appropriate tasks. Write them on a chore chart ahead of time to prevent arguments! What worked best for my family was to set aside 30 minutes when all family members cleaned a room, the least of which was owning and removing each one's paraphernalia.
4. Keep privacy boundaries. Adults and kids both need their privacy on a regular basis. Ensure that the kids understand the importance of respecting this priority. A parent consultant can speak with your children and help them define their personal boundaries.
5. Have a family meeting each week to discuss family issues. Find a time in which everyone in the family can attend. Hold the meeting every week, preferably at the same time. In the meeting, let each family member speak their mind, even if it's a complaint. Solve challenges, run ideas by each other, and make plans for the future together.
6. Allow free time. Everyone needs some time to do things on their own or with their friends. Meeting this need will help each family member feel more satisfied, fulfilled, and open to communicating.
7. Spend holidays and special events together as a family. Strengthen your family bond with special occasion family traditions. Let the kids share their ideas about the occasion, too.
8. Establish a weekly family night. Make time just to enjoy being together. Watch movies, play games, or have story time. Encourage laughter and open communication.
9. Learn to negotiate. Learning to compromise and come up with win-win solutions for everyone involved is a priceless skill that will serve your family members well throughout their lives.
10. Say, "I love you." The best consultant I worked with in a school setting always repeated: "Each day, remember to show your spouse and kids how much you love them. Share loving, encouraging words and hugs freely throughout the day - even if it's a hard day, especially if it's a hard day!"
A happy home promotes a supportive place to live, play, and look forward to the future! A comfortable home welcomes your loved ones when they return from work or other outings. They can leave the stresses of the outside world behind as they enter the warm sanctuary of home. Practice these communication strategies to create an inviting environment in your home because you shape the foundation for your child's ability to get along in life.
Fulfill Your Calling and Train as a Family Coach
by Dr. Caron Goode | Oct 20, 2018 | Understanding Your Child
Traditionally, many school-aged children love school and look forward to start of a new school year. But for other children, it’s also a time of great stress. In fact, stress—those overwhelming feelings of doubt about ourselves or our ability to handle things—is as common in children as adults.
The greatest challenge to parents today is teaching children to manage stress effectively. Children may react to excess stress with behavior that seems immature, inappropriate, or even disturbing. One child exhibits anxiety and tears the night before going back to school. Another child speaks of new teacher and asks her parents questions while trying to imagine the teacher's personality. Another child enjoys shopping for school clothes and looks forward to seeing new friends.
Stress can be terrifying to children who lack the emotional maturity or experience to understand and deal with it. The challenge for parents, teachers, and other caretakers include how to recognize signs of stress in children of different ages, how to know when stress threatens to overwhelm a child, and what to do about it.
In Nurture Your Child’s Gift, I offer excellent suggestions to help parents cope with their children’s stress. A stressed-out condition can result from a specific cause or from life in general. Here are some examples:
- At 17, Jen was a high school senior expecting to graduate with honors in the Spring. Just before Christmas, however, Jen’s father lost his job and the family had to move into the basement of a cousin’s house. Jen soon developed a severe allergy, then asthma. The illness cost her so much time from school that she required home-schooling to make up the difference.
- Mark was only two when his parents divorced. Confused, Mark wandered the house, calling plaintively for his father, but weekends with Dad made him cry. Most weekends, Mark developed upset stomachs that were so bad he’d miss preschool on Mondays.
Age-Related Stressors
Toddlers need to feel safe and comfortable. Stress for preschool children can arise from a new face at home or at day care, the disappearance of a familiar face, visiting lots of new places at once, or abrupt changes in the family’s structure, relationships or daily routine.
During the grade-school years, children become concerned with pleasing people like teachers, parents, guardians and coaches. School life—even a change in assigned seating or having to take a test—brings higher levels of stress every year. And when it comes to peers, even the threat of diminished acceptance is terrifying. Sleep-overs, birthday parties, sporting events and music competitions can trigger stressful reactions.
Through middle school and beyond, the pressures kids feel from parents, teachers, peers, society at large, and from within increases. Children have to learn adapt to these pressures. Because they have grown in their intelligence, curiosity and knowledge of community, demands for their attention, time, energy and effort can often feel like a tug of war. As in the cases of Mark and Jen, it is not unusual for life-altering events to express themselves in illness. At the University of Missouri, for instance, researcher Mark Flinn found that a child’s risk of upper-respiratory infection increases by 200 percent for the seven days following a high-stress event. And parents like Miranda’s might confuse what they believe are normal behavior with an expression of anxiety. Children often display their tensions in small acts that have aggressive undertones.
How You Can Help
- There are many ways parents can help their children deal with stress and stressful situations.
- Don’t try to fix everything for the child, and avoid offering advice. Sometimes just listening so that your child feels truly heard may be enough to relieve the stress.
- As you listen, ask questions that encourage your child to think a situation through. “What’s the next step?” or “How would you handle that?” are good questions. Ask a lot of “what-if” questions, too.
- Help children listen to themselves. Nurture Your Child’s Gift suggests quiet-time techniques for children to listen to nature sounds like rain or waves upon the beach, to their own heartbeat, or to recordings of whales, dolphins or birds.
- Encourage children to spend time listening to their thoughts. When they feel free to speak their own thoughts aloud about a situation, things suddenly become clear.
- Nurture Your Child’s Gift details a diaphragmatic breathing exercise for kids and parents. Shallow breathing is associated with the production of cortisol, the stress hormone. Deeper, effective breathing produces feelings of relaxation and calm.
- Use soothing and rhythmic music, even simple drumming, to help your child relieve muscle tension. It works!
- Don’t overlook exercise for releasing stress and tension. It works for your child just as it does for you. Have children walk the dog, get on the treadmill or stretch through easy yoga movements for children. Any movement they enjoy will help ease stress away.
- Parents can do much to alleviate stress in their children’s lives. Effectively dealing with your own stress is the first step. Showing your kids how to release their stress comes next.
Copyright © Caron B. Goode.
by Dr. Caron Goode | Oct 20, 2018 | Certified-Parent-Coach
Early Behavioral Theories
By Deborah Beasley
The groundwork that laid the early theories for our current understanding of treating, and parenting children with emotional, psychological, and developmental disorders is about 60 years old. [ctt template="5" link="9SWqh" via="yes" ]In the last thirty years, research in the areas of trauma, stress, PTSD, and the child’s developing brain has intensified through the dedication of the superstars of the world of trauma, children, and affect-regulation @parent_coach[/ctt]
Noteworthy names include:
• John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, for their work in early parent child attachment. (Download John-Bowlby link for PDF.)
• Allen Shore for his extensive contemporary work in affect-regulation
• Peter Levine, Bruce Perry, and Bessel van der Kolk for their unstoppable research and discovery in the effects of trauma on the neurobiological and social-emotional development of children.
Their collective, groundbreaking, work is the sound philosophy of this training, backed by the science of neurobiology and neuropsychology.
[ctt template="5" link="RK_37" via="yes" ]We now know that the healing path for children and families with emotional and behavioral difficulties rests on the firm foundation of these principles: @parent_coach[/ctt]
1. Healthy relationship and attachment between the parent and child as its pivotal point.
2. Understanding affect-regulation and brain development as the fulcrum of healing in the family.
Our relationship-focused model combines the best strategies and methods of all other approaches. The results we seek in this coaching/parenting model are
• To support and maintain a healthy relationship between the parent and child and unity in the family.
• To respect the unique cultural differences in family composition, and
• To identify and build upon the individual strengths and qualities of parent and child.
This model uses the best practices of current behavioral, cognitive, sensorimotor and interpersonal approaches, as well as traditional wisdom and related modern science, to create a path to healing which best fits the circumstances and behavioral needs of individual families. We use what is usable within the context of a healing relationship and discard the rest.
Are you a kind of person who wants to help families with special needs by becoming a parent coach but you don’t know how to become a parent coach?
Register for our coaching families with special needs course and become a certified parent coach.
coaching families with special needs course
by Dr. Caron Goode | Oct 19, 2018 | Business Training & Marketing Courses
Are you struggling with a decision to become a parent coach? Do you wonder how to succeed with business training?
Entrepreneurship calls to the restless souls who want to serve as financially successful parent coaches. Like you might have questions, I questioned my own decision to start the Academy for Coaching Parents International.
I thoroughly grasp the hesitance in starting a new business and committing to its success--your success. However, one fact will always be sincere....
...In economic tough times, entrepreneurs flourish. Focusing that same worry about time and energy on developing a new service or filling a need in a community is worth your time and effort. You can become a financially successful entrepreneur in a relevant coaching business.
A recent news article stated that in times of economic downturn, the time and energy any person spent looking for another job can be exhausting. And not finding one can cause a sense of hopelessness. I get that too, as I applied for 300 different counseling jobs at the time I received my doctorate. The timing was honestly the worst as government funding had been cut to all major institutions for higher education.
That made sense to me. I understood hopelessness. Major surgery in 2000 left me feeling like attempting anything more than getting well was overwhelming. Then, after the events of 9/11, my seminar business ground to a halt quickly. I refused to give up finding a passion that could also make me financially successful. I had to keep asking myself, "What's Next?" every time I wanted to quit.
What Next to Be Financially Successful?
If people could not come to us, we would go to the people, and the Academy for Coaching Parents International forged ahead to offer other entrepreneurs and nurturers the chance to work at home and be available to their children. Many have become financially successful entrepreneurs.
I had cultivated optimism well, and I would need it.
In January of 2013, all of the fifteen websites associated with my books, coach training and wellness crashed when the hosting server ignored my pleas to examine my site. I asked myself a hundred times if throwing in the towel was the right move.
One of my mentors for the Academy whose book I was ghostwriting was a self-made multimillionaire. When I asked how he went from being a physical education teacher to a millionaire, he encouraged me to focus one hour a day on the marketing of the Academy for Coaching Parents. He explained that focused attention on an object has an exponential effect - in short, what you focus on manifests. That was his secret and soon became mine also. Focusing on the act of creating something new provides a different perspective from those around you.
Focus on the formation of a financially successful business like the Academy brought out strengths that were waiting to be used again. Resilience surfaced and opened the door to passion, which fueled more focus. That kind of discussion moves helplessness out of the way, making room for hope, creativity, and of course, more focus, and eventually financially success in the role!
By now if you have decided to become a financially successful parent coach, but you want to explore the possibilities, we might have something for you.
Explore the coach training programs and decide for yourself, the best training course which aligns with your passion.
by Dr. Caron Goode | Oct 17, 2018 | Learn about Coaching
What if your calling to support parents and children were your career? The value ACPI provides extends far beyond the monetary aspects of the parent coaching skills training and the profession. Being a parent coach is exciting and inspiring, but how exactly does it add value to you, the coach?
Being a Parenting Coach is one path to freedom of time and better-earning power if you are committed to success as a helping professional. This option strengthens your character and fulfills your motivation and moral and social values. Learning coaching skills and ethics offers rewarding experiences. Or, learning consultant planning sharpens your mind and lights the fire of curiosity again.
As Richard Branson states, you just have to say yes to a novel opportunity.
“If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later!”
― Richard Branson
Learning parent coaching skills can be life-changing, and not just for the families with whom you interact, but also for yourself. You might feel that parent coaching is your calling, so you help others in your parenting and friendship circles. When your satisfaction grows, the calling pulls you even further into the possibility of working at home for yourself. Think of the possibilities!
[tweetshareinline tweet="The wonder of being pulled toward your journey is unparalleled. The idea of coaching stays in your mind and you mull it over." username="parent_coach"]
Learning Enhances Earning Power
A good teacher or mentor is a life-long learner. Learning adds value to
- How you feel emotionally
- What you do
- How you respond to others
- IHow you increase your confidence and personal esteem
Your temperament and values motivate you to seek opportunities to use your natural skills like listening. You are a helper like a coach, a counselor, a teacher, a nurturer. You look for new challenges like coaching that broaden your knowledge and expand your skill set. By temperament, you are often called to teach, share, support, negotiate, and help.
Bringing your natural temperament traits into a profession like coaching engages your heart, which any job must do. If your heart is not engaged, you lose interest. If you are not seeing progress and achievements in your sphere of life, then consider parent coaching.
The Sense of Giving Back
The most satisfying act for a nurturer is knowing you have contributed to society in an effective way. Even better is knowing that the changes you have made have a long-term effect. By helping families and parents to strengthen their bonds, you offer them better connection and communication skills which can become their best habits.
You are assisting parents in raising their children as emotionally healthy individuals with ethical and moral values. There can’t be anything more satisfying and rewarding than knowing you help influence three generations of parents and children. However, the coaching skills are very different from giving advice.
The Client-Coach Relationship
- As a mentor and coach, you know your clients on a personal, intimate level. They will share their emotional struggles and problems with you.
- You are wired to be an empathetic listener who can understand and feel what the client is experiencing.
- This requires developing a strong emotional bond with the customers.
- You learn to build a relationship to help your clients heal, grow, and refine their focus and actions. This is missing in self-help parenting books and resources. That is what gives coaches an edge.
Taking Multiple Roles as a Consultant, Coach, or Mentor
As a parent coach, you are not just a counselor; you are a mentor who listens, teaches, educates, supports and transforms. Parent coaching skills can be defined as a set of excellent listening, coaching, and counseling skills. It is a universal skill set that will help you throughout your professional and personal endeavors in every walk of life.
However, you need to acquire the skills set required to become a good parent coach and reap the real value of being a mentor. You can start now by enrolling in Academy for Coaching Parents.
Be a Certified Coach
