The Decline of the Face-to-Face Community
In every world culture throughout history, parents turned to wise people in their community for guidance in solving the problems of parenting. Until recently, people could rely on near-by older relatives, as well as familiar teachers, religious leaders, and doctors who knew their family well. Often times, a parent who had successfully raised several children would act as a kind of community grandparent, listening to and guiding parents who were struggling to raise their own children. Anthropologists call these communities “face-to-face” communities. Many parents no longer have the time to develop and maintain strong adult networks of trust and confidence to foster their children and to nurture their own parenting abilities. Families may move frequently, or live in communities where most people work outside the home and attend to their own families. Little time is left for developing a “face-to-face” community with other families, neighbors, or other near-by resources. Without strong community ties and long-term relationships, how do we as parents know who to go to for help and whose advice we can trust?
Rapid social changes have affected families through skyrocketing divorce rates and the fragmentation of the family of origin. Most children will stay with the mother after divorce and thus, according to statistics, the income of the mother and children typically goes down. Single mothers and fathers find themselves working longer hours or more than one job to make ends meet. Without another full-time adult in the house, single parents may also have more work to do at home in order to take care of household and parenting requirements. At times, this increased workload inevitably leads to less involvement with the children and particularly with teenagers. For two-parent families, the outlook is not much better. In our stagnant economy, even two-income families often struggle to make ends meet or find that better jobs require long hours away from home and family. In the absence of more time with parents and other adults, children and teenagers are turning to each other for guidance and are becoming more attached to their peers than to their parents, sometimes with disastrous results. As young people orient towards the immature values of their peers and become more strongly attached to their friends than to their family, children, and especially teens, can become disrespectful and uncooperative with parents and other adults. In this social environment, it is easy to understand why as parents we feel drained and worn-out, even before our kids hit a crisis.
Many parents need help. They need someone to help them right now, someone who is easily accessible, who has experience and knowledge, and to whom they can turn for guidance and support. Parents need someone who can listen and understand; someone who has the intuition and knowledge to guide and steer people through the troubled waters of raising children. Where can parents go to find this help they dearly need?
New Community
Doctors and teachers in larger communities may not know families well enough nor have the time to offer regular personal guidance, especially on an as-needed basis. Psychiatrists and counselors may be too expensive and too specific as they usually address individual issues, rather than addressing families as a whole. In general, local community networks may not provide enough wise support, so parents need to turn to other resources. Parents need a dependable resource; a wise person well experienced in child-rearing issues and problems and one who is readily available.
The normal generation gap that parents have always faced is just not “normal” anymore and the gap is wider than it ever was. Society and technology are changing at a hugely accelerated rate, which affects individuals and families in every aspect of their lives. Technological progress through computers and the internet, as well as electronic games and entertainment opportunities, is exponentially greater than just thirty years ago, when most parents of today’s teenagers were growing up. In addition to the normal growing pains of our children, we now must cope with our children’s problems with the addictive nature of the internet, the proliferation of electronic social networking into the known and unknown, the easy access to unlimited games, movies, YouTube, and inappropriate websites. We worry about internet stalkers on MySpace or FaceBook, or just worry over the amount of time our teenagers spend at the television or computer. Parents of only one generation back could not have imagined these challenges as a regular part of parenting demands.
We have made the shift from a small town extended-family culture of just two to three generations ago to one where nuclear families move around often. Many children move away from their families to attend college or go to work at a fairly early age. Many are launched before they are ready. In addition, partly as a result of the increased knowledge and information that our children have access to, and partly due to changing values in our society, democratization of the family has drastically changed the way we raise our children and the expectations we have for our teenagers. Children have more power and status, and parents are more indulgent than they have ever been before. Little contribution is expected nor received from these children during critical years.
It would be helpful in these confusing times for parents to be able to tap into the knowledge of a peer for guidance and support. Parents also need strong role models themselves, so they in turn can present positive role models for their children. Parents need people whose advice they can believe. Who can parents turn to?
Who Can Parents Turn To? Parent Coaching as the Solution
Parents who need support and trustworthy advice now have a key parental ally. A FamilyIQ Parent Coach is a dependable resource that parents can turn to: a person who is experienced in child-rearing and the associated problems and who is available via the telephone.
A FamilyIQ Parent Coach can give parents immediate guidance, help with goal-setting and offer feedback at the times when it’s needed most. Parent Coaches have a professional knowledge base, along with the appropriate experience, and can fill the support gap by offering an alternative that is effective, accessible, and affordable.
While parents may have lost the strength of a close-knit local community, they have gained access to people nationally and internationally who share their interests and concerns. FamilyIQ, a long-time presence in helping parents strengthen their skills through the use of multi-media material, understands this paradigm, this cultural and community shift. FamilyIQ has now employed an electronic community and network to provide highly experienced and accessible Parent Coaches to serve parents and their families.
Who are FamilyIQ Parent Coaches?
The FamilyIQ Coaches are experienced teachers and facilitators with specialization areas that run the gamut in child rearing and relationship issues. They are trained and experienced in, among other things, family life and relationships, divorce, juvenile delinquency, blended families, AD(H)D and other disorders, adoption, substance abuse, child abuse, children’s mental health, general mental health, domestic conflict, conflict resolution, life coaching, and special education. Click here for brief biographies and resumes of the FamilyIQ Parent Coaches.
What Do FamilyIQ Parent Coaches Do?
The diverse and experienced FamilyIQ Parent Coaches provide coaching over the phone to parents everywhere from every background. The coaching style is based on reflective listening, collaborative brainstorming, feedback, and planning for positive parenting practices. Issues covered include setting limits, teaching responsibility, family government, and self-esteem. Coaches provide encouragement and support to parents and then parents can provide encouragement and support to their children as they grow emotionally, physically, and intellectually. Parent Coaches can help parents anticipate crises and develop plans to respond to crises if they do occur. Parents can also call on their Coach at crucial times for support for themselves. As the parents and their Coach set up a plan for changing particular behavior patterns or improving family cohesiveness, for instance, the Parent Coach will help to keep the family on track, monitoring progress and offering encouragement in those times when parents may encounter setbacks.
Why Else Would a Parent Need a Parent Coach?
Parents need allies, and that is exactly who the Parent Coach is: someone to talk to, to bounce ideas and thoughts off of (no matter how trivial they might sometimes seem,) who can be called on as a back-up and who has the wisdom to impart guidance. But most importantly, the Parent Coach can listen and help parents to find their strengths, set goals, and build a plan to achieve those goals. Parent Coaches focus on actions; practicing parenting skills and formulating action plans to achieve the goals of the parent. Parent Coaches are not therapists interested in long talks about the past. Instead, they focus on the strengths of each individual parent and form an alliance with the parent so that they can face the current challenges together, resulting in more purposeful parenting*.
How Does Parent Coaching Work?
The Parent Coaching process is simple. First, read the Coach profiles, determine which Coach best suits your situation and then choose the number of consultations you feel will best fulfill the need you have for support (you can always add more at any time). You then indicate several preferred scheduling dates and times and provide electronic payment for the services. The coach you have selected will be notified of your decision and will contact you to begin the coaching process. After the initial consultation, follow-up phone conversations with your Coach will be scheduled to monitor the progress being made and to address any new concerns. The Coach may send email messages to offer encouragement and to help keep the parenting plan on track. The parent is able to determine the number of telephone calls and email contacts that are most helpful for support. The parent also submits a Profile Form to the Coach to help both parent and Coach determine what strategies work best for each parent for their coaching. The lifeline of support and encouragement that the Coaches provide is expressly geared toward each parent’s individual needs. One FamilyIQ Coach, in speaking of parents he has coached has said, “The Coach is their person,” yet truly, in the end, Parent Coaching benefits the whole family.
In Conclusion
The environment in which parents now find themselves working to raise happy, well adjusted children has changed dramatically over the years. Both parents are usually out in the work force leaving little time and energy for dealing with the enormous pressures of school, peers and social demands placed on their children. Parent Coaching has the ability to help individual parents move towards creating what authors Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate call “a village of attachment for our children,” a place where children can move from peer orientation towards parent orientation. In this place children can find, in the words of poet Robert Bly (quoted in Neufeld and Mate, 2006), “stability, presence, attention, advice, good psychic food, unpolluted stories.”
These qualities are all the things that they are not finding in the peer-attached, media-dominated, consumer society and culture that exists now. Parents need to help children find a middle ground, one that allows them independence, yet encourages them to maintain long-term support networks of friends and extended family. Parents need to freely be able to trust in, believe, and feel confident about the council they choose for reassurance, advice, encouragement and guidance. Face-to-face counseling is expensive, requires appointments during the day, and usually focuses on just the individual and not on the family dynamic from where the problem may have arisen. A FamilyIQ Parent Coach can and will provide this service, via telephone and at times convenient to the parent. The Parent coaching process is strongly supportive of parents and families while providing wise counsel and allowing parents to rediscover and repair their own networks. With a Parent Coach to assist in the parenting process, families can receive the guidance and support needed to get back on track and experience the joy of being together.
Click Here for the FamilyIQ Parent Coaching FAQ.
*Please note: Parent Coaching is not offered as psychological counseling and is not a substitute for it. If anyone in the family exhibits behaviors that indicate the need for medical intervention, psychological or otherwise, the Parent Coach cannot offer this type of help and the family is advised to seek medical intervention.
