What is Successful Parents?

Successful Parents works with parents who want the essential information and skills to give their children the best possible preparation for adult success. First Teachers Parenting Seminars, and Parent Coaching Sessions, not only teach about child development and parenting skills, but also empower parents to become confident and creative.

• Knowledge

  Parents are the first (and most important) teachers their children have . They teach the lessons for crucial for all further success in the world (to trust, to manage emotions, care for ourselves and others with mutual respect, observe, think and solve problems, to handle frustration and failure, to maintain a positive idea of ourselves and of the world).
  

  Parents need to know the whole arc of a child's development, 0-21 years old, to know how to adjust their parenting as the child changes.
  

  Parents need to understand that "one size fits all" parenting advice can backfire, because children come with widely varying built in "character traits". By understanding their child's combination of traits parenting strategies can be successfully matched to them.
  

  Skills
  

  • Parents' greatest tool is a strong relationship with their child. Effective communications skills are necessary to build both loving bonds and ensure parental authority.
    
    
  • Discipline can either positively build moral character, or can negatively undermine it. Parents need to know what methods are positive, and which are not.
    
    
  • Today's parents must have the management skills that allow them to balance the demands of raising children, work and taking care of themselves in order to build a strong and enjoyable family life.
    
    
  • Parents need to have the communication and general agreement to avoid working at cross purposes to each other. If they have effective "team building" skills they can make sure that they can support each other, creating an effective parenting "team" who enjoys working together raising children.
    
    
  • Parenting is just too stressful and complicated to be handled in isolation. Learning how to work in cooperative support systems expands the resources and energy that parents bring to the job.
    
    
  • Parents who work with me feel more effective and less stressed and report enjoying their children and family life more. They are able to gain real progress in areas where they felt stuck and confused, leading to a sense of greater clarity and confidence in their parenting. They feel that they have new ways to really understand their children's needs, their own needs, and how to effectively meet them both. And most importantly these tool help them feel that they are more in line with their own most deeply felt knowledge and beliefs about parenting. As on parent put it, " I feel like I am learning to really appreciate and understand things that on a deep intuitive level, I already knew, but wasn't always following."