Parenting Support
Growth, change and the demands of everyday life — work, relationships, multiple caregivers — can make it hard to focus on your relationship with your child. When you or your child are struggling, communicating well and tolerating the inevitable distress of parenting gets harder still. You do not have to do it alone.
Questions parents bring to us
- How do we manage screen time and other technology?
- How involved should we be in our child’s schoolwork?
- We have a new baby on the way. How do we help our older child adjust?
- How do I explain world events and calm my child’s fears?
- My child is very different from me. What does that mean?
- One of us thinks we’re spoiling our child; the other thinks we’re too strict. What do we do?
- Our child spends most of the time shut away in their room. What can we do?
- Our child’s grades are dropping. How can we help?
- How do we help our child cope with standardized tests and admissions pressure?
- How do we deal with our teen’s alcohol or drug use — and the conversation about sex?
What parent counseling offers
If you feel stressed or burnt out in your relationship with your child, it is possible to learn new skills to manage and change behavior and to improve the relationship. Parent counseling gives you a supportive place to learn and practice them.
- Strategies tailored to your child’s unique challenges
- Ways to stay connected while holding firm, consistent limits
- Help managing your own anxiety, anger or hurt feelings
- Support through the “hormonal stew” of adolescence
- A plan for when to step in and when to step back
- Tools to work together more consistently as caregivers
Young children are especially sensitive to the parenting relationship, and their behavior is heavily influenced by the adults around them. Effective, supported parenting during these formative years helps your child become as capable as possible.
How do you measure success?
You want your child to have the best possible experience growing up to set the stage for a successful life. But how do you measure success? By trophies, awards and leadership positions? By popularity, or by getting into a highly selective school? By community service, by being well-rounded, by appearance, by being funny?
How do you get through the “wars” of adolescence? When do you step back? What does attached, connected parenting look like in middle school, high school and college?
Therapy can be incredibly helpful with all of these questions and more. It can help you chart a course through unfamiliar territory, figure out how to manage your own anxiety, anger or hurt feelings, and help your adolescent through theirs. Coming out the other side can be a time of closeness and enjoyment of each other that is rewarding and wonderful.
We will help you navigate the challenges so you can launch a young adult with good self-esteem, a solid work ethic, an appreciation of connection, a warm disposition toward life and other people, a good sense of humor, reasonable respect for reasonable authority, and a sense of responsibility as an engaged citizen. These attributes grow through you working on yourself to model and instill them in your child.
Common questions
Is parenting support the same as family therapy?
Does my child need to attend?
You do not have to figure this out alone
Whether you know exactly what your child needs or simply sense that something has changed, we can help you decide on the next step. Call, or request a consultation and we will reach out.