Building your Parent Toolkit is a collaborative process at the heart of Holistic Parent Coaching. You’ll select strategies and exercises for your Toolkit to address a challenging child behavior. Items in your Toolkit are grounded in the work of experts such as psychologist Martin Seligman’s concept of Well-being in which positive emotions, interest, and purpose develop. These elements contribute to your own and your child’s ability to flourish, which can be visible as resilience, optimism, self-esteem, self-determination, and relationship. Your Toolkit will contain items from additional experts in fields such as neuroscience, education, psychology, health, arts, and athletics.

To build your Parent Toolkit, you’ll select strategies and exercises to practice in coaching sessions before using them at home. Coaching sessions are responsive to your distinctive situation and typically include the following.

• You’ll list your values, beliefs, traditions, and aspirations for your child, you, and your family. This list will guide your decision-making during coaching sessions and at home. We’ll celebrate your parenting successes and you’ll identify a challenging child behavior you want to change.

• In following sessions, we’ll focus on the time, place, and sequence when a particular child behavior tends to occur. You’ll describe and reflect on your child’s behavior and your parenting responses, identifying ones that you feel are less effective, such as impatience, irritation, frustration, or anger. You’ll also identify responses that you feel are more effective, such as patience, acceptance, calm, and humor.

• You’ll select strategies, and exercises to practice in coaching and feedback sessions before you apply them at home. Examples of strategies and exercises might include certain games, songs, role plays, mindfulness activities, drawings, outdoor activities, or calming exercises. These and others can often be done in the course of daily home routines.

• After you use strategies and exercises at home, we’ll discuss what you observe about your child’s and your own responses in the context of family life. We’ll focus on what worked, what needs fine tuning, or what other strategies and exercises you want to try.

• Ongoing reviews of your home experiences and observations during coaching and feedback sessions will solidify new behaviors and indicate any adaptations to consider. If needed, you’ll identify other challenging child behaviors to address in next sessions.

• We’ll collaborate to create your long-term plan that replaces less-than-effective behaviors with effective ones. We’ll celebrate positive interactions between you and your child within the family context.

Your Parent Toolkit provides an individualized pathway to well-being and flourishing. As you and your child develop resilience, optimism, self-esteem, self-determination, and relationship, family harmony can emerge.