We all know parenting is an incredible journey, filled with joy, laughter, and, let's be honest, a lot of challenges when your child turns into a teenager. Sometimes, even the most dedicated parents may find themselves at a crossroads, wondering if there's a secret manual to decipher their teenage children's behaviour.
When your teenage children are unwell, I trust your 1st protocol would be having them seen by a doctor, and if their illness persists without improvement for a substantial period, you would then consider asking the doctor to refer them to a specialist for a comprehensive investigation so that their illness can be treated and their full health restored.
What about the challenges in your family, such as relationships, communication, parenting difficulties, co-parenting problems, sibling fights, conflicts and so on. If you look at your "Family" as a physical body, then having fights about how to co-parent, relationship breakdown, parenting challenges can be seen as an ailment to your family body. If they persist, it is clear that it will eventually be detrimental for you and your family.
So now you may ask why parents don't reach out for help. That's because there is not enough encouragement around you to encourage you to access help. Everyone expects you, society expects you and YOU expect you to just KNOW how to parent your teenage children.
It's very sad because every parent needs help. It takes a village to raise a child and a parenting specialist is part of the village.
We are talking about raising a human here, building a family and your family legacy here. Why wouldn't you seek help when there's a challenge?
Now, I would like to encourage you to try to have a closer look at your family. Are there any areas you are struggling with?
🏡 Relationships at home
🏡 Communication
🏡 Co-parenting
🏡 Your teenage children's behaviour
🏡 Boundaries
🏡 emotional involvement with each other
🏡 affection
🏡 parenting skills and knowledge to parent your teenage children
🏡 couple relationship
and so on...
If you notice there's a struggle in any area, then this is WHEN having a parenting specialist to help you and your family would be really beneficial.
Now, let's look at the three most important components you need to look out for when wanting to work with a parenting specialist to help your family.
The first component is the professionals
A skilled and experienced professional who has the qualification to back up their claims. Being a parent of teenage children is not enough. Without the doubt, they will have lots of wonderful experiences to share, but you also need them to have professional knowledge and skills to back the experience up.
Binge on their free resources to find out if you are aligned with what they are teaching you. If they have no free resources for you to access, I would stay clear.
It's a no-no if the coach is giving you parenting strategies/advice without 1st trying to know more about what your unique family blueprint and circumstances are. It would be like a doctor prescribing you medication without knowing anything.
The second component - YOU as a parent. You need to be in place where you are ready to do the work and be open-minded about trying new strategies (for me anyways), you also need to be ready to reflect and look into your way of parenting so that you understand what you are bringing to the table, both your strengths and areas for change.
Third component is of course the PARENTING STRATEGIES - in order to make parenting strategies work for your family, you need to 1) have a parenting specialist/coach who is skilled to help you identify what the difficult behaviour is, 2) identifying what the contributing drivers to the behaviour 3) prioritising the most impactful driver/s to work on first 4) develop tailored made parenting strategies that meet your your unique family blueprint and circumstances 5) to show you how to implement 6) to support you evaluate what works and what doesn't. This is the comprehensive model I use to help my parent clients address the difficult behaviour at home with success every single time.
Make sure to consider the 3 components before working with a parenting specialist. It's your family we are talking about here, and this can not be taken lightly. If any one of the components of missing, you may need to consider if this is the right time for you to work with a parenting coach/specialist.
With that said, if you are struggling to help your teenagers who are struggling, you can find out more about how i can help your family here
Pei-I
Parenting and Teen Challenging Behaviour Specialist
🌈 There's always hope, endless hope.
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