Black – coaching parents

Parents play such an important role in children’s development and, you know, we’re often not really prepared for parenting, none of us. Our models are how we were parented, for better or worse, so what are strategies that we can help parents be better parents. 

Often the strategy that we have learned works best is having parents model, so model being parents, so that if we’re trying to help parents we coach them a bit. Giving parents handouts, showing parents videos and worst of all telling parents what to do, “This is what you need to do, this is what you need to do”, those are not very effective strategies. 

Those are the strategies that many of us who are in the health care field might do.  That – and what we’ve learned is that that’s really not very effective. That parents learn best when they have the opportunity to practice and the instructor can provide some coaching. We use videos a lot. So the videos that we use is we video families together, we video them having a meal. And then we use the video, we show the video to the parent and at that point the parent is often very able to see what has gone well and what hasn’t. And you can always find something that goes well. 

The most positive thing that we can say to a parent is, “Look at her look at you, she is not letting you out of her sight.” So what that telegraphs to a parent is how important they are to a child. On the video if you see the child imitate the parent, which you often do then that’s a time for a coach to say, “She is doing just what you’re doing”, again, “Look how important you are, you know she learns from you”. 

But, so having a parent see it and then practice it is a very strong way for a parent to adopt the behaviour, much better than the pamphlet or the telling.