The Role of a Parenting Coach in Managing Child Behavior Issues

Using a parent coach to manage child behaviors makes more sense than you might think.

First, parenting is a skill; it is not innate.

Many parents hesitate to get help because they feel that a good parent should just know instinctively how to help and guide their child.

These parents do not realize that historically parenting knowledge has been handed down from generation to generation by the wise counsel of the village—by parents, grandparents, religious leaders in the olden days and more recently by teachers, coaches and even librarians.

Parenting, Parenting Coaching, Parenting styles, TantrumsElisabeth StittOctober 7, 2024behavior

Parenting Coaching for New Parents: Navigating the Early Years

Discover how parenting coaching can help new parents navigate the critical early years. Learn strategies for effective communication, creating a family vision, handling conflict, and understanding key developmental stages. Set your family up for success with expert guidance and practical tools from a seasoned parenting coach.

Parenting, Parenting Coaching, TantrumsElisabeth StittOctober 3, 2024early childhood education

How Parenting Coaching Supports Single Parents

Parenting, Single ParentingElisabeth StittAugust 28, 2024Single Parenting, Parenting Support

Creating Your Best Summer Ever

Do you have a love-hate relationship with summer when it comes to your kids? Especially your teens?

If you answered yes, you are not alone! I get this a lot from the parents I work with.

Summer used to be the ice cream truck, spending hours in the pool, and riding our bikes around the neighborhood.

Now it’s feeling torn between work and being there for our kids, logistical nightmares of getting kids to a different camp every week and spending the whole summer feeling guilty that our kids are spending too much time on their screens.

4 Steps to Engage Your Kids as Critical Thinkers

One of the negative effects of all this technology at our fingertips is that we are not asking our kids to really think things through or be critical thinkers. Our kids today are used to getting instant gratification by the ease of finding information online --that use of tech together with our tendency to helicopter parent and plan everything out for our kids--we are essentially imposing our executive functioning instead which doesn't allow them to use their own executive functioning. We as parents may be taking over too much which doesn’t allow our kids to learn how to be critical thinkers.

Critical thinking is the logical planning, evaluating, looking back, and looking forward in the process of making a decision. Parents are automatically doing this instead of letting their kids learn it naturally.

This can end up being a real problem for our kids!

Engaging our kids as critical thinkers is going to help kids across multiple measures. It's going to give them a sense of efficacy, a sense of autonomy, and of self-confidence because they are thinking things through and figuring things out on their own.

Independence, Parent as teacher, ParentingElisabeth StittApril 25, 2022critical thinking, training

Clarity Through Self-Awareness

When we are clear about who we are—and really own it with confidence--we are better able to separate ourselves from our kids and let them be who they are (and who they are becoming).

What Parents Can Learn from Classroom Teachers

A home is not the same as a classroom full of twenty to thirty kids.

But there are some things that parents can learn from the way good teachers do things.

When teachers are evaluated for effectiveness, the measure used is Time on Task. That means how many minutes of the day are students actually learning or practicing content. Any minutes spent doing organizational tasks—taking attendance, collecting lunch money, turning in homework—do not count towards a teacher’s effectiveness.

At home with families, there are necessarily a lot of things that just need to get done—laundry, food prep, clean up, kids getting dressed/undressed, bathed, etc.—but the truly meaningful time is the time spent bonding together, connecting and having fun. In families, that is the Time on Task.

Confidence, Parenting, Parenting stylesElisabeth StittMarch 2, 2022organization, home organization, fun, routines

Positive Discipline With Tweens and Early Adolescents

I was first exposed to Positive Discipline as a classroom teacher, and I was very glad to have it in my toolbelt when I became a parent. Positive Discipline supports Authoritative Parenting—represented by the balance of high warmth with our kids and high expectations for our kids. It has long been known to be the most effective parenting style for raising kids who thrive.

Read to find out more and to hear, specifically, what Positive Discipline Looks like with Tweens and Early Adolescents go

Savoring the Silver Linings of Covid

A lot of people—parents, kids and teens—are anxious about returning to “normal” whatever that is going to look like post-covid. It is my sincere hope that families work to incorporate the silver linings of #parentinginplace into the new school year. That might include family dinners, kids doing chores, family meetings or even new hobbies that keep us grounded and relaxed.

Parenting Coach Exposed as Fraud

Theory is one thing. Putting your best parenting practices into play in the heat of the moment is quite another story! Come read my true confessions of feeling I too often failed my visiting niece and nephews this past week. Boy, are my skills rusty! And, wow, was I reminded how much of parenting is the mental game!

Consistency, ParentingElisabeth StittJune 27, 2021Joyful Parenting Coachingparenting is a skill, patienceComment

How Do You Talk to Your Kids About Porn?

The idea of talking to your kids about porn may make you want to hide your head, but who better than you to do it? Recently I had the pleasure of hearing sex educator Amy Lang give a webinar on how to talk to your boys about porn. I felt like what she has to say is so critically important that I wanted to pass on to you the key ideas I got from her talk. (And while it was directed towards parents of boys, everything Amy said sounded like I could have easily used it with my daughter, too.)

What do you wish your parents had talked to you about?

I hear from a lot of people, “My parents never talked to me about that.” The “that” could be sex, sexuality, rape, relationships, a family history of mental illness, divorce, money, suicide, smoking, drugs, alcohol or addiction, dating history, you name it.

Many adults report wishing their parents had been willing to talk to them about difficult subjects and reflect that maybe if their parents had talked about these issues, life for them might have been easier.

Wondering How do I talk to my kids about sex? About drugs? etc. Here are some general guidelines to consider.

Your Parenting Questions Answered

As a parenting coach I love giving talks around the San Francisco/Bay Area. And now that we are all sheltering in place, I have been doing coaching online by giving webinars. Every once in a while, I leave 10 minutes for Q + A at the end of a talk and I realize upon reflection that I should have talked for 10 minutes and left 50 minutes for Q + A. Since a lot of the questions that come up have similar themes and might be showing up in your house, I thought you might like to read some of those questions and answers.

Your Child Has Been Diagnosed with ADHD. Now What?

The fact that your child has been diagnosed with ADHD may bring up a lot of emotions—fear, sadness, guilt, anger, confusion. But to my mind the diagnosis is good. Let me tell you why. You have been living with a child with ADHD for quite some time now. Whether or not you knew it, you knew your child is different. To my mind, having a diagnosis is a good thing: It means you can get the professional help your child might really need. In the meanwhile, all the parenting techniques that support harmony and cooperation in any household are even more important with your kids with an ADHD diagnosis.

3 Keys to a Harmonious Home

The tagline to my business Joyful Parenting Coaching is Be the Architect of Your Family. With that, I really mean to parent deliberately. Here are three reasons I see structure as supporting a happy, harmonious family life: It makes kids feel secure; it gives opportunities for independence; and it can improve connection among family members.

Parenting and Finding Work/Life Balance During COVID-19

Have you been looking for a break all summer but still haven’t gotten any vacation? Do you resent your kids lying around all day? Here are some reminders how both working parents and stay-at-home parents need to reinforce their work life balance routines.

Gather Round the Table

Three months into COVID-19, we are more antsy and our nerves are more frayed. It is no surprise that our kids’ behavior might be amping up. You should expect to see more moodiness and more negative interactions as they lose the structure remote learning (such as it was) provided. The best way to counteract that is CONNECTION. In a world that is feeling slightly crazy, it is even more important that kids feel anchored to the family. The forced physical proximity of being home together helps, but kids too often withdraw into their rooms and onto their screens. Get them off their phones and to the table for family dinner!

Are You Your Kid’s Cruise Director?

Now that we are parenting 24/7, it can feel like we are responsible for engaging our kids 24/7.

What if we didn’t? What if we left children to their own devices so they could discover learning on their own? What if by doing so, we were actually helping our kids develop some important independence and autonomy?

The Power of Dreaming

It is important to be present, to appreciate the moment as we are #parentinginplace with our families. At the same time, dreaming is a powerful way to shift our reality, to inspire us and to reassure us, that we will not always be sheltering in place. Children of all ages from preschoolers to teens will benefit from some active, no-holds-barred dreaming.

My Child Wants More Independence Than I am Comfortable Giving

How do you decide what is an appropriate level of freedom and independence for your child? How do you find the balance between keeping him safe and learning things on his own? We can’t teach our kids to make good judgements about decisions if we never give them the space to make decisions independently. On the other hand, it is your job to provide limits that will keep your kids from going too far off course.

Parenting, Setting limits, TrustElisabeth StittApril 9, 2020independence, communication, responsibilityComment

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