Parenting support
One of the great benefits of parenthood is the personal growth that comes with it. While there are many life lessons to be learned through the process of raising kids, counselling assists with the education necessary to refine parenting skills. Counselling can help where a particular child pushes your buttons so you can avoid meltdowns yourself and model appropriate behaviour.
Counselling can help you think creatively to replace a battle of wills with a child, with a win-win situation. For example, when you return from work, finding ways to share stress relieving (de-briefing) activities with a child rather than demand they be quiet or quit pestering you, so you can relax.
Counselling helps by reminding parents that teaching children positive thinking patterns can set them up for a happier life. Optimists experience better health, increased longevity, more success in life, and less stress, among other benefits. Counselling helps establish positive parenting attitudes and thereby role modelling positive attitudes.
A person’s temperament, their inborn personality traits affect how they respond to their environment and so affects their behaviour from infancy on. Counselling assists parents to effectively deal with a children with different personality traits.
Whilst there are more- and less-effective strategies for disciplining a child, counselling assists parents to problem-solve particular difficulties with particular children in specific situations.
I see most parents and teachers as both heroes and vulnerable members of our community. They are ushering in the new generation and earning a living at the same time. Showing up responsibly and consistently on a daily basis for others over years can take it’s toll on a person. Counselling can help restore the balance in a person that has been other-directed rather than self-directed over many years ‘on the job’. This re-balancing often occurs naturally at the time children achieve relative independence or leave home. However it is often helpful to get skilled assistance at this transition to explore new personal directions, life priorities and meaningful challenges beyond the parent-carer role/identity.
