Parent Coaching and Workshops
Has your child turned into a stranger, an intruder or a rival?
Someone that challenges, argues and criticizes you and your lifestyle, doesn’t want to spend any time with you, prefers confiding in friends or the solitude of their bedroom.
Are you frustrated, feeling rejected and disconnected from their lives or have any positive influence over them?
We are parenting in the most distracted, disconnected, digital time in history, even experts are struggling to get caught up on the impact this digital age is having on the development of our young adults. We have every reason to be alarmed.
Alarm often leads to quick fixes and control based approaches, that not only damage relationships they simple don’t last.
“Parenting is not a job it’s a relationship”
— Gabor Mate
Individual Parent Coaching
All parents have blind spots and all parents struggle at times. It is those who strive to deepen their relationships with their children through having the courage to examine themselves and their parenting approaches who have the most rewarding families and the most successful children.
Merissa offers individualized parenting coaching for parents and caregivers who are struggling with their children. This one on one interaction will focus on giving you immediate skills and strategies to support the challenges that you are having with your child, rooted in the groundbreaking relational-developmental approach of Dr. Gordon Neufeld and Dr Peter Lavine neorscience. The focus is on the principals of how to create healthy relationships so you can have a more positive influence on your children and create a deeper bond with them, and ultimately creating healthy adults that reach their full potential. Merissa will develop an individualized coaching plan in collaboration with you based on the needs of your family. The focus of her coaching work is solution-based, and your willingness and readiness to modify any unhelpful behaviours that you have will be instrumental in teaching your children to do the same.
Parent Workshops
Merissa’s workshops invites parents to dig deeper into their family and to explore the values and beliefs systems that guide you as a parent. You will also explore the ways in which you respond to your child, especially when you are upset? This will help you understand the behaviours that are working well to strengthen the connection you have with your child and family. You will explore parenting styles learned from your family of origin and understand how they are impacting with your relationship with your children today. You will explore your communication style as learned in your family system and how that impacts the relationships in your home. You will explore the intricacies of each child in terms of development, mental health, temperament and cognitive ability and what is needed to support the growth of that specific child.
Making sense of our children from the inside out
Adolescence
Adolescence move between childhood and adulthood, our role is to understand this developmental stage and help our children navigate this alarming stage
Anxiety
Anxiety is part of the human condition, finding the root cause and working with tools to help at the nervous system level offers insights and relief
Discipline
There is a big difference between punishment and discipline. Punishment creates alarm, discipline is attachment safe and developmentally friendly and preserves the adult/child connection.
Emotional Health
The emotional health of a child will impact overall development and maturity. Understanding what is developmentally appropriate vs a child that is struggling is key.
Frustration/Aggression
Regulated nervous systems are able to move in out of activation , Understanding how children process their emotions helps us make sense of their inner world.
Peer Orientation
Children that are peer orientated are diifcult to parent. Taking back the lead is vital to the role as parent
Sensitive Kids
Sensitive kids can be challenging and extremely demanding, they need a new set of tools to parent with.
Introductory 6 week Parenting Workshop
“CROSSING THE BRIDGE”
This foundation workshop starts with self-discovery, with your life as the curriculum.
Self-awareness is the foundation for the relationship skills required to transform your life and your childrens.
This experiential workshop is rooted in the relational-developmental approach of Dr. Gordon Neufeld and the neuroscience of Dr Peter Lavine.
You can not lead a child unless they have given you their heart. ♥️
Taking back the lead creates emotional safety and allows children’s nervous systems to rest helping them feel the more open and less defensive. Children need to rest in our love, not work for it. Emotional safety is the key to effective learning, self regulation, healthy brain development, happiness and ultimately whole hearted healthy adults reaching their full human potential.
Workshop outcomes:
Understand your child’s behaviour and what is driving it. in order to find meaning behind what they are trying to communicate to you.
Understanding the developmental stage of your child in order to make sense of their behaviour.
Become more aware of family beliefs and values: You will increase your understanding about your own family systems and how these values and beliefs influence your parenting approach.
Learn about your emotional response to your child’s behaviour based on your own nervous system responses and how your children co-regulate off your nervous system.
Examine inherited generational stress and how that impacts you and your children.
Leave with new communication skills that help you preserve the relationship with your child.
“Between stimulus and response, there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom”
— VIKTOR E. FRANKL
Benefits from this Workshop
Relationship Strategies
Give you strategies that will support you in creating a calm and healthy environment for you and your children, which will strengthen your relationship with your children.
Maximize Potential
Learn to accommodate your parenting strategies based on the individual needs of the children in order to help them achieve maximum potential and strengthening your relationship with them.
Effective Communication
Give you strategies that will increase effective communication with your children, allowing your knowledge and influence to support them in life and strengthening your relationship with them.
Self-Care Support
We will look at self-care strategies that support you in being more available to parent your children and the demands that come with that, work and life.
“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows not the flower.”
— Alexander Den Heijer
Merissa offers private online sessions and group parenting workshops
Meet Merissa for a complimenary 20 min chat