Parenting Support
These are common challenges experienced by most parents.
In addition to normal growth, change, and development, the demands of everyday life (work, relationships, multiple caregivers), may make it challenging to focus on improving your relationship with your child. As you experience difficult events in your life or if your child is struggling in theirs, it may be more difficult to communicate effectively or to tolerate the inevitable distress that is a necessary part of parenting a child. Young children are especially vulnerable to challenges in the parenting relationship and their behaviors are heavily influenced by those of the people around them. It is important to receive support and to utilize effective parenting strategies to help your child learn to be as effective as possible during these formative years.
Luckily, if you find yourself feeling stressed or burnt out in your relationship with your child, it is possible to learn new skills and techniques to manage and change their behavior and to improve the relationship. There are many useful tools available that you can learn and practice within the supportive environment of parent counseling therapy.
Parent counseling allows you to learn strategies that you can use to address your child’s unique challenges and still maintain a positive relationship with them.
Questions parents of older children ask:
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 deal with being a big sister or brother?
How do I explain world events? How do I calm my child’s fears?
My child is very different from me. What does that mean?
My spouse thinks I’m spoiling our child. I think my spouse is too strict. What do we do?
Our child spends most of the time shut away in his or her room. What can we do?
Our child’s grades are dropping. How can we help?
How do we help our child cope with the pressures of standardized tests and the high school admissions process?
How do we manage our expectations and help our child focus and not freak out during the college admissions process?
How do we deal with our child’s alcohol and/or drug use?
What about sex?
You want your child to have the best possible experience growing up to set the stage for a successful life going forward. But how do you measure success? Is it by the number of sports trophies, academic awards, student body leadership positions; or is it by being more popular than you were growing up; or is it by getting into an Ivy League school? Is it about community service? Is it by being well-rounded? Thin enough? Beautiful or handsome? Funny?
How do you get through the “wars” of adolescence? When do you step back? What does attachment parenting look like in middle school, high school, college?
Therapy can be incredibly helpful in dealing with all these questions and more. It can help you chart a course through unfamiliar territory, figure out how to manage your anxiety, anger, or hurt feelings and help your adolescent child through his or her hormonally-fueled anxiety, anger, and hurt feelings. The “hormonal stew” can be challenging and coming out on the other side can be a time of closeness and enjoyment of each other that is rewarding and wonderful. We’ll help you navigate through the challenges so you can launch a young adult who has good self-esteem, a solid work ethic, an appreciation of connection, a warm disposition toward life and other people, has a good sense of humor, has reasonable respect for reasonable authority, and is a responsible and engaged world citizen. These attributes happen through you working on yourself to model and instill these qualities in your child