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What is a parenting coach? A parenting coach is an objective person who can give you parenting skills and help you find positive parenting solutions to the challenges your family is facing. Our parenting coach, Siope Kinikini, will guide and encourage you. He will point out what you are doing well and ways you can harness your strengths. He is not there to shame you or make you feel bad. Our end goal with an ADHD Parenting Coaching session is to help heal and elevate your family using the elements of the Teaching-Family Model.
All parents could use a parenting coach as raising kids, whether they have ADHD or not, is tough. We believe in the power of a parenting coaching session and offer free 15-minute mini-sessions to help you see how much an ADHD Parenting Coach can help. Sign-up today and let our master teacher help your family.
For a free 15-minute mini-session: https://www.smarterparenting.com/coaching
Episode Transcript
This is episode 40. Let’s get started.
Smarter Parenting welcomes you to our podcast series, the Parenting Coach for ADHD. Here to heal an elevate lives is your Parenting Coach, Siope Kinikini.
Hello, my friends. How is everyone? I hope everybody’s doing well. I am doing fantastic. Everything is going well. And today what I wanted to cover is a question that I get all the time from different people who are often in trouble and they’ve waited too long, and the question is, “When do I seek out a coach? When do I seek out a coach?” What I’m talking about specifically is when do I seek out a coach to help me with the behaviors my child is experiencing?
So what I want to do in addressing that is actually answer the question upfront because I don’t want anyone to wonder where I stand on this question. The answer is as early as possible and as frequently as possible. That may sound surprising to some, like do you need a coach for everything? But let’s step back and let’s take a look at what coaching actually provides. What it is. And the difference that it is between just seeking advice from somebody else that you care about or that you love.
So, often, coaching is a way to help people realize goals and what they hope to accomplish when they’re working with their child. A good coach will always establish goals and goals that can be measured over a very specific time. So think of a physical fitness coach, for example. A physical fitness coach, if you hire somebody for your physical fitness, will have a regiment that you follow and they will be following up with you to be sure that you do it, right? Coaches for sports, for example, are the same way. They have a very specific goal, during the season, we want to accomplish this, and so as a team, we’re going to work towards this and we’re going to win these many football games. Our goal is to win an award at the end of it.
I mean, coaches themselves innately have some very unique and distinctive features. They have very specific approaches to how they’re going to accomplish a goal. They have a goal. They have a timeframe within where they work and they expect to reach the goal. And they are also in some ways connected but also disconnected enough that they can hold you responsible, right? Coaches will hold you responsible for the decisions that you are making and they want to actually get the very best out of you.
Coaching for parenting a lot of times gets a bad rap. I mean, they’re like, “Oh, do you really need help for coaching?” Of course, you need help for coaching. Of course, you need help for helping raise an individual, a child to become a responsible adult. Of course, you need help doing that.
Now, a lot of us depend on friends and family that we turn to for advice, and that’s fantastic. The problem though that I see and the difference between them and a coach, a parenting coach, is that when you’re asking family members or friends, there’s always a bias and an emotional connection to the situation. Sometimes they’re unable to remove themselves far enough to call things as they are, black and white. Now, that can be a good thing and that could be a bad thing; a good thing in that they’re meshed and they’re going to be there for the long haul and for the long term, bad in the way that sometimes they will overlook things that need to be addressed because they’re too involved, right?
So I’m not saying don’t ask for advice from family members or from friends. I think that that actually has its place and I think it can be super helpful. However, if you want to up your game, if you want to reach your potential, your maximum potential as a parent and help your child grow up in an environment of happiness and safety and actually build that relationship and you need help, then getting a coach, a Parenting Coach to help you along that journey will be your best option. It absolutely will be your very best option.
So coaching, in and of itself, regardless of how you feel about it, is super helpful. I do want to relate just how helpful coaching for me has been, and then really how it’s been helpful in helping other people as I worked in that field for a long time. This goes actually before my child was born. Before our child was born we were new parents. I was in school, we were living in Hawaii at the time, and this new thing that was happening in our family was so exciting, and yet, we were completely unprepared for what was going to happen. I had read books, and of course, I came from my own family and we had our own ways of doing things, my wife came from her family, they had ways of doing their things and they didn’t always match. So I was trying to learn as much as I possibly could and we actually signed up for our own coaching in how to work through things.
What I found through that whole exercise is that it was very, very helpful because it was removed enough that it allowed us to explore some territories where we could formulate how we were going to approach things and how we were going to do things. Being able to do that before our child was born actually established a pretty firm foundation for me and my wife in the way that we were going to approach things, right? And the coaching thing helped us realize our own biases and our own weaknesses so we could focus on that, work on those and improve them.
So that actually has been, for me, a personal experience where coaching has been super, super helpful. We did role-playing where communication could break down and how we could overcome those issues, how we could deal with frustrations that we were feeling and super helpful things that over time we’ve continually used these skills, we have continually used.
Now, later on in my life, I became involved in treatment and being a home-based worker. Now, a home-based worker may be confusing to some, but just let me explain what I did. My job actually was to go into the homes of families where children were possibly going to be removed from their parents by the court system for misbehavior or for other issues that were happening in the home. So my job was to go into the home, assess what was happening, teach some very specific skills and to coach these families along the way to keep them together and to help them along. I had worked with families for over a decade actually. I’d worked with families in this type of environment from the super modest to the extremely wealthy, from culturally different backgrounds. I mean, there have been various groups of people that I worked with in order to keep them together and help them learn the skills that they needed to be successful as a family.
What I found in the coaching process is that everybody does come with their own biases and their own proclivities in the ways that they’re going to address raising a child. Being a coach in guiding them through that, we can explore and find a new way of doing things using skills that were founded in evidence-based treatment. So the Teaching-Family Model, which we use in Smarter Parenting and also for the coaching that we provide here at Smarter Parenting for parents, I use that with all the families and it was universally helpful and successful in establishing some very profound groundwork for families to build upon.
So coaching, being able to coach families and having a very set system in order to help different families, was very rewarding for me as a worker. I remember working with families and being able to see the transition and the changes happening over time. My time working with them was roughly between eight to 10 weeks of intensive working with them, spending roughly around eight to 10 hours with them a week. So, yeah, it was pretty intensive, but the coaching was super helpful for them because it helped them see things that they didn’t already see and also taught them new things and new ways of doing things that they had never considered before.
And so when somebody comes and asks me, “Coaching. When’s the best time for coaching?” I would say, “Get coaching. Get coaching as soon as possible. The earlier, the better.” Early intervention is always best in getting the coaching that you may possibly need for your child in preparation for things that may come up, and then continually adjust and change. Now, do I now have a coach? No, I don’t have a coach right now, my daughter is 16 years old, but I like to be fine-tuned every once in a while, and it’s nice to have another person there to help me walk through the process, and evaluate, and then discuss and work through. So here at Smarter Parenting, we offer coaching as well and we offer a free first 15-minute mini-session where we can discuss and work out. And if you need more than that, then we can do a more longterm coaching session after that and continue from there, but you’ll find that information on the Smarter Parenting website.
So I just want to be very, very clear. When do you need to seek for parenting coaching? I think you can get it anytime. I think the earlier the better. I think it’s always a good idea to get additional information and actually information from a person who can be a little removed, but also be able to see things and can teach you some new ways of intervening with your child, specifically if they can set some goals that are defined within a specified time limit that you’re working towards. Those things would be super, super helpful, right? And that actually is what we would do during our mini session. 15-minute mini session and as well as in our coaching sessions, just define some outcomes that we want to reach and work towards those goals.
So get a coach. Get a coach. A coach will help you. A coach will absolutely help you, and it would be beneficial to everybody. I think everybody needs a coach every once in a while to kind of guide them along and do check-ins every once in a while.
All right, that’s it from me, and I will talk to you again next week. See you later. Bye.
Resources mentioned in this episode
Episode #19 Power of a Parenting Coaching session
Episode #23 Mastering ADHD behavior skills
Episode #26 Confidence to follow through
Episode #29 Traits of successful parents
Episode #36 Relationships–the why of the Teaching-Family Model