Faced with a parenting challenge? Might be time to call a family life coach

With every season of parenting comes a struggle—the struggle to get the kids to bed on time or to keep behavior in check or to connect with a teen. And the pandemic has only underscored those conflicts as we're all stuck together with few places to go.

As a family life coach, Kim Allen, co-founder of the Family Life Coaching Association, has coached families through these struggles and others, so parents and kids can move forward with healthy habits and relationships. As parents look to a new year with new plans to yell less at their kids or get more sleep or simply have a better connection with them, a family coach can provide some answers and support.

"We help families identify what their goals are and we help them to reach their goals," said Allen, a local mom who also is a professor at NC State.

Family coaching is a relatively new field. And, in a lot of ways, it's similar to executive coaching or life coaching where people gain skills to move them forward in their careers, relationships or day-to-day lives. Family coaches typically have a background in family science and coaching psychology, Allen said. And they are trained to tackle family life issues that aren't caused by a clinical mental health issue. In those cases, they'll connect a family with a mental health professional for more support.

'Behavior as a communication'

Some family coaches focus on helping divorcing families. Others work primarily with families with younger kids or older ones. Most, however, can help families across a spectrum of ages and issues. Common struggles often pop up during transitions, Allen said, including the move from diapers to potty training or the start of preschool. Relationship issues can cause other problems to arise when kids have a hard time fitting in with friends or are dealing with anger or behavioral issues.

Often Allen said her work is focused on helping parents better understand why their child is acting in a certain way and help them see "behavior as a communication."

"When a child is acting out, they aren't trying to act out, they are communicating there is an unmet need," Allen said. "Coaches help think about a situation in a new way and introduce some evidence-based practices that are specific to the behavior they are seeing."

Most families find ways to address whatever the issue is after four to six sessions with a coach. "It's very seldom a super long thing," Allen said. And often, families will return to a coach over the years as other conflicts come up.

No stigma

In her years working with families, Allen, who now mostly focuses her work on training other family coaches to work with families, issues that come up are less about the parent-child relationship and more about the parent-parent relationship. In one case, she said, a mom was struggling because the kids just would not go to sleep at night.

"As we teased it all out, it really wasn't a matter of a consistent bedtime," Allen said. "Mom and Dad were on very different pages about what bedtime should look like. ... Mom and Dad had some conversations and got on the same page together. Then the kids went to sleep. Our kids pick up on what happens in the couple relationship if the parents are a couple and even more so if the parents are not a couple. That can really make a big difference for how the kids are behaving and what they're doing."

One benefit of family coaching is that it doesn't come with the stigma of parent education classes, which often are mandated by a court, or therapy, which might signal a deeper problem. And Allen adds that she wishes there was no stigma attached to either.

But there usually isn't a stigma attached to coaching, she said. Kids have a coach to help them get better at a sport. Parents have an executive coach to help them get a promotion at work. Similarly, family coaching can help families find the tools they need to get out of a rut or break a bad habit.

"The reason we need to promote coaching is because of the lack of stigma that we tend to have in psychology and education," she said.

In fact, a 2018 article in Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry by experts at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Arizona State University identified family coaching as a "nonstigmatizing, goal-focused intervention strategy" for families and recommended that family coaching become a way to "prevent minor challenges from becoming major problems" for a variety of issues.

Building happier families

Family coaching, in particular, can head off the kinds of interactions between kids and parents that can lead to unhappy kids, agitated parents and, in some cases, even neglect or abuse.

"The more we can do to help reduce the stress in the lives of families, regardless of what that family looks like, that's a potential benefit for all members," Allen said.

The association that Allen co-founded is working to launch research-based and globally recognized credentials for family coaches, which she hopes to secure this year. The credential will make it more likely for insurance companies to cover the cost of a family coach as a preventative service. Family coaches charge, on average, about $75 and $100 an hour, and that's make them too expensive for many families who could benefit from them.

Currently, the association offers training for family coaches and serves as a clearinghouse for families who are looking to hire one. Because of her work and others, Allen said North Carolina and the Triangle, in particular, is a "hotbed" for family coaches.

"Almost always the stress that's coming in the family is a result of some sort of imbalance of the quality of the relationship," Allen said. "Family coaches can really hone in and help the client understand what's going on and look for options to repair some of what's damaged. Once those things start to get repaired, the behavior changes."

For more information and to find a family coach near you, check the Family Life Coaching Association's website.

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