Helping parents take a coaching approach to support their children
Helping children with autonomy, independence and wellbeing
Parenting of children whilst they are of school age has many wonderful opportunities, and many challenges. As parents, we want the best for our children. Sometimes they take our advice and guidance. And often, they don’t!
Parents can learn applied coaching approaches to common issues, and can then use them to support their children with their learning.
Our approach
We have a range of bite-sized programmes to offer to parents to support their children.
The overall aim is to provide parents with some key coaching skills to use. And then to provide guidance on areas of importance to our children (and to us parents). These areas include:
- Approach to learning
- Homework and self study
- Self perception and beliefs
- Independence, autonomy and motivation
What is a coaching approach to parenting?
As a starting point, it is recognising the moments when our children “need” our guidance and advice, and being comfortable giving it. And then, it is recognising the moments when our children need to hear their own voices, come to their own conclusions, and not be restricted by us telling them what to do.
This is obviously a challenging area, and every child and every parent will be different. However, we see that parents who are able to hold back from advice and hold the listening space for their children, are likely to help them thrive.
A coaching approach to parenting has, amongst other things, these elements:
- Making time to listen, with full attention and focus
- Being able to ask strong, supportive questions that aren’t leading
- Handling our children’s strong emotions, which may include criticism of us and others (yikes!)
- Showing that we believe in our children’s capacity to solve many of their challenges
- Being able to do all this in both pre-planned and spontaneous conversations
Many parents already have many of these skills, that they have learnt as parents, and in other relationships. Our coach training for parents helps them to identify and hone these skills.
What does coach training for parents look like?
As we are aware that parents are often busy people, and schools have limited time to run long courses, we have developed bite sized training for parents to take on coaching skills.
Our programme is:
- 3 x 90 minute sessions, either face to face or online
- Further resources provided for home study, including case studies and videos
We run these programmes within schools, for groups of parents who are interested in developing these skills.
An overview of the content includes:
- Coaching definitions, and definitions of a coaching style of parent
- When to advise and when to hold back
- Holding back from judgement or evaluation
- Core coaching skills of listening, questioning, pausing
- How to structure a coaching session with your child, that is appropriate to their age
These skills will stand you in strong stead to deal with many of the conversations that you will be having with your children over the years.
And what about the skills based workshops?
In addition to the coaching skills for parents, we also run workshops on the themes that seem to be the most important for school age children and their parents. These themes are:
- Approach to learning – how to help children have a focussed and positive approach
- Homework and self study – how to both talk with your children, and support them with homework
- Self perception and beliefs – helping them explore their feelings about themselves, especially their beliefs about their intelligence and their learning skills
- Independence and autonomy – helping our children take the appropriate steps towards becoming self motivated
Practicalities for this work
We run all of these programmes in partnership with schools. Schools who engage us to deliver this work for their parents will book us, promote the sessions amongst parents and sponsor the activities.
The programmes are delivered by one of the team, who either is a specialist in how children learn, a specialist in approaches to parenting, or both. It doesn’t mean that we are either perfect parents, or flawless in how we work with our children. We do not provide lectures or “must do” activities. We take a coaching approach to this training, and respect the autonomy of parents to take away from our courses the things that work for them, and leave the things that don’t.
Download our coaching approach to parenting flyer and contact us to discuss it further
