Support for Parents

Being a parent can be difficult, demanding and taxing on emotional wellbeing. We often find ourselves experiencing distress in our role as parents. I feel privileged to be able to work alongside parents to help them honour and meet their needs, whilst maintaining positive relationships with their children. We often feel parenting is a project we have to succeed in but, in my experience, parenting is rather a work in progress, and a process, that, like any other relationship, needs genuine empathy and compassionately-set boundaries to thrive.

 

 

 

 

 

Parents instinctively seek connection with their children. I am a firm believer that every parent longs for a positive and healthy relationship with their child. However, we face various barriers in our journey to parenthood that hinder connection and block an empathic engagement with our children.

High emotional states, such as anxiety, stress, depression, anger, can cloud our ability to understand the child's needs. Most importantly, when we are used to neglect our own needs, we may find it difficult to see the child's needs or set boundaries. Our own experiences as children significantly affect the way we parent and, more often than not, unprocessed feelings from the parent's childhood will come into play and interfere in the child-parent dynamic.

My aim is to support parents to make sense of the young brain, using reflective parenting and attachment-focused approaches. I support parents to identify why certain situations or children's behaviours are particularly triggering and distressing. Exploring the parent's state of mind, we aim to process distress, so the parent can empathise with the child's state of mind and developmental needs, and relate in a respectful way. I believe that it is impossible to always get it right, and there is not such a thing as a “perfect parent”. All we can do, is try to empathise, act with compassion to self and our children, reflect, and repair.

 

 

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