Parent Coaching
Helping overwhelmed parents feel calm and confident so they can enjoy parenting
Does this sound like you?
You’re worried that you’re not doing the “right things” for your kids
You’ve read books, followed IG accounts, and even joined courses and memberships, but are still looking for “the answer” to parenting challenges
You’re frustrated because the advice you get from other parents doesn’t “fit” you, your kids, or your family
You resent that you don’t have more energy to put into yourself
You notice that you are not as happy in parenting as you expected to be
These are all very common, but that doesn’t mean that you are destined to live this way!
Unfortunately, most of the advice out there doesn’t take into account the uniqueness of your family members’ nervous systems and how they need to be supported. That’s why that is the main focus of my approach, not the specific parenting styles I’ve trained in. (Although I do think they’re the best ones for raising kids who thrive!)
What others are saying about working with me…
Here’s What You Can Expect
First, a crash course in neuroscience and polyvagal theory so that you can be the responsive parent your child needs.
Usually the client does most of the talking in coaching, which helps them get in touch with their intuition and inner knowing. But for most of us, there’s a lot of conditioning standing in the way of our intuition. So, the first coaching session usually involves a lot of me talking and giving you the information you need to chip away at that conditioning. Some of the things we’ll dive into are:
What the phrase “Kids do well when they can” means—and how it applies to parents
What regulation actually is and how it works (and what our colloquial use of the term “dysregulated” misses)
The difference between objective safety and felt safety and what it means for regulation
Neuroception and the parent-child nervous-system feedback loop
Second, we’ll tackle how to support yourself and your child during their distress.
During each session after that first one, we’ll go deep into an actual example from your life of your biggest parenting challenges. In other words, we’ll break away from the generalities of “this always happens” and look at what specifically happened (with BOTH you and your child) the last time “this” happened, so that we can uncover what you might want to do differently next time. Through this process, you’ll learn the skills you need to:
Feel grounded and present no matter how much chaos is flying around you
Soothe the challenging feelings that arise in you and make you feel the need to take immediate (but not necessarily effective) action
Increase your child’s felt sense of safety
Empathize in a way that your child can really feel your love and concern (hint: it doesn’t involve a lot of words)
Third, we’ll look at how to support yourself and your child outside-the-moment so everybody grows their capacity (a/k/a “window of tolerance”) and distress becomes less frequent.
Of course, if all we ever do is address the problem at hand, things will never actually get better. Perhaps the first problem will be resolved, but a new one will inevitably crop up. Or the same problem will occur over and over again. This is why long-term change depends on widening the window of tolerance in both us and our children. We will do this through:
Bringing more joy into your life
Parts work, memory theory, and understanding both why “knowing better doesn’t mean you’ll do better” and what to do instead of collecting knowledge to create genuine change
Getting to know the emotions that are most difficult for you and welcoming them into your life
Strengthening the parent-child connection
“Active parenting” skills such as Special Time, roughhousing, repair, win/win problemsolving, and emotion coaching
The Initial Investment
Parenting Deep Dive
This package includes 9 sessions (9.5 hours) of parent coaching over a four-month period. During that time, you also will have asynchronous (text and/or email) access to me for additional support.
This amount of time will give you the framework that I use for analyzing and addressing parenting challenges, guided practice applying that framework to your biggest parenting challenge, and time to start integrating what you learn.
Prior to our first session, you will complete a written intake form that will both help me tailor my support to you and get you thinking more creatively about your current situation.
After each session, I will send you an email that summarizes the session, including key takeaways and homework assignments.
Cost:
$1500*
Parenting Intensive
This package includes 3 sessions (5.5 hours) of parent coaching over a one-month (five-week) period. The first session is 90 minutes long and includes nervous system education in addition to us getting to know one another better. The second session is 3 hours and includes all four lenses I use for evaluating and addressing challenges (in-the-moment support for the child, in-the-moment support for the parent, outside-the-moment support for the child, and outside-the-moment support for the parent). The final session is 60 minutes and is used for review and troubleshooting.
The package also includes asynchronous support during the duration of the Intensive, a written intake, and a personalized “treatment plan” and recommendations following the second session.
The material covered in the Intensive is similar to that covered in the Deep Dive, but the Intensive is less in depth.
Cost:
$900*
*Sliding Scale pricing and payments plans available. Click here for details.Next Steps
After completing the Parenting Deep Dive or Parenting Intensive, additional sessions can be purchased either individually (1 or 2 hour) or in packages of 5 one-hour sessions to be used within a 6 month period. Details and recommendations provided at the end of the initial package.
A bit about me
Hi! I’m Heidi.
I’m on a mission to help smart, thoughtful, and committed parents like you reduce the overwhelm, feel more confident, and raise kids who thrive.
Most of the parents I work with already practice Peaceful Parenting but something isn’t quite working. Maybe the suggestions that they are getting don’t quite seem to “fit” their family. Or maybe the suggestions do—but it feels like way too much work for the parent to keep up. In both cases, my approach combines peaceful parenting with neuroscience and mindful parenting so that parenting feels both more effective and more easeful.
Your Questions, Answered
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Although I am influenced by many other fields, my approach to parent coaching is based in Peaceful Parenting. This is an authoritative (high expectations, high support) style of parenting that nurtures the relationship between parent and child. My style is also heavily influenced by Mindful Parenting and nervous system understanding and support.
Other parenting styles that are similar to Peaceful Parenting include gentle parenting, respectful parenting, responsive parenting, and conscious parenting. And if we deepen our understanding of both expectations and boundaries, we find that there is a lot of similarities between Peaceful Parenting and low-demand parenting as well.
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When I was a young parent first starting down this Peaceful Parenting path, I found it incredibly hard. The “tips and tricks” that both coaches and other parents suggested rarely worked and they often made me feel a lot worse about myself as a parent. I could see that they just “didn’t get me,” but I didn’t understand why until I started learning about neurodivergence and the autonomic nervous system. It took that plus the meditation practice and embrace of “good enough parenting” that I got from Mindful Parenting to really transform my parenting so that it was both more effective AND more easeful.
As a coach, this experience has deeply contributed to my compassion for my clients as well as my commitment to and creativity in helping them discover unique ways to individualize the most important lessons of Peaceful Parenting so that they can apply them to their unique families. We do this primarily through an understanding of the autonomic nervous system (both parent’s and child’s) and a four-part approach to addressing challenges that looks at: (1) what the parent needs in the moment; (2) what the child needs in the moment; (3) what the parent needs outside the moment; and (4) what the child needs outside the moment.
Another thing (though it relates to the autonomic nervous system) that is pretty different about my approach is that my focus is on helping you do LESS, not MORE by shifting your focus from doing all of the things to doing what matters most. As part of this, I usually recommend that clients reduce their consumption of parenting content as much as possible (at least temporarily) so as to lessen the feeling that they “should” be doing more (or different) things and soothe the nervous system.
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As the neurospicy and highly sensitive parent of two kids, at least one of whom is neurodivergent, I firmly believe that the answer is YES. But getting the right information and support is important and many parent coaches aren’t equipped to provide it (and may inadvertently cause harm) because they lack necessary knowledge and experience related to neurodivergence.
My education and experience has demonstrated the importance of really focusing on the Three Big Ideas of Peaceful Parenting (even if you don’t do all the other parts of it), abandoning the “tips and tricks” approach to parenting, and understanding how to “read” the autonomic nervous system so you can tailor your parenting to what is actually happening with yourself and your child in any given moment.
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This is such a big question. I consider myself trauma-informed and cognizant of the risk of retraumatization, and somatic practices do make a somewhat regular appearance in my coaching sessions, but I am not a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and I do not do trauma resolution with my clients. If that is something that interests you or that I think you would benefit from after our initial sessions, I can make a referral.
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We can absolutely work together. The majority of my clients are mothers who work with me independently, without their partner. (About 25% of the families I work with do 1:2 sessions with me and both main caregivers and/or both parents receive individual coaching.) Although Peaceful Parenting is most effective when both parents do it, it’s important for the “more interested” parent to remember three things:
Your relationship with your child is unique to the two of you and does not depend on your parenting partner.
You and your parenting partner probably have more in common than you think when it comes to your parenting hopes and goals—even if your current ways of getting there are very different.
Our partners—much like our children—learn through modeling. So watching you parent your child in this manner will impact the way they parent your children as well.
So don’t try to convince your partner. Though if they are curious, they can join you for one or more of your sessions. Or you can do what one of my clients did for her on-board-but-not-getting-coaching husband and buy them some sessions.
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Generally speaking (and this is a generalization), therapy is backward-looking and coaching is forward-looking. Of course, effectively moving forward often requires addressing the past, so the past will come up (in some cases frequently) in parent coaching. This includes your childhood and earlier experiences, as well as those of your child(ren). But we focus on the future and what you can start doing differently now to change what isn’t working for you and your child.
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After a lot of thought and reflection on my own experience as a coaching client, I decided that I primarily would work with families long-term instead of as a “one-off.” Coaching is fundamentally different than therapy in that people rarely go to therapists for a single session. Yet it is very common to do so with parent coaches. The problems is that this keeps us in “doing mode” and looking for the answer outside ourselves, when what we really need is to focus more on the “being mode” and strengthening our connection to our intuition so that we don’t stay dependent on parent coaches and other outside experts.
Longer term engagements—at least in the beginning—give parents the opportunity to really relax into the supportive, coregulatory, coaching relationship so that they can better support their children. Then, after the initial 2-3 month engagement, individual sessions become more useful.
Of course, I recognize that signing up for a longer engagement can feel scary. That’s why I offer free discovery calls to potential clients. In these 30-minute calls we get to know each other a little better so that we know whether we are right for each and whether I am likely to be able to help you.
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I’m a huge proponent of therapy (including for children) but the reality is that most kids spend 20+ times as much time with their parents each week as they do with a therapist. This means that therapy is supplemental to parenting and not a replacement for it.
(Also, does your child need to be fixed? Or do they need more support? Or perhaps you need more support so that it doesn’t feel like they need to change in order for you to thrive.)
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I don’t know. Some would say there isn’t and I will occasionally refer to myself as a parenting coach. But primarily, I call myself a parent coach because my focus isn't just on your parenting; it's also on you (a person who just happens to be a parent) and how I can support you to show up the way that you want—a change that will radiate out to other areas of your life.
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I’ve done my best to foresee your questions, but I am sure I missed something. So if you have anything else you’d like to know, you can send me a message or book a call to see what I say.
Take the first step to move from “doing” to “being” with my
free Embody Peace workbook.
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