PARENTING WITH IMPACT PODCAST
Parent Coaching and Support: What Parents Need Most (podcast#268)
Feeling isolated or overwhelmed? Unsure why some parenting support spaces help, while others leave you feeling even more stuck? In this episode, Elaine Taylor-Klaus and Diane Dempster break down the differences between support groups, coaching groups, learning communities, and live Q&A spaces, and why the right kind of support can completely change your experience as the parent of a complex kid. They explore how feeling truly understood and supported can reduce isolation, why coaching creates deeper change than information alone, and how shared experiences help parents move from overwhelm into action. Discover how choosing the right kind of support can help you feel less alone, make real progress, and create the kind of change your family has been needing. Download a free tipsheet, "10 Tips for Calm & Confident Parenting." Use the coach-approach to change the tone in your home or classroom -- starting now! Parent Coaching and Support: What Parents Need Most Amazon Music | iHeart | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | TuneIn | Youtube Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Elaine Taylor-Klaus Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster But understanding what the majority of the call is, what’s the format? And to me, Elaine, the other part of it is, and we can talk about this after the break, how do I know which one I need? Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus So while, on the one hand, there’s this learning in the Q&A and the conversation with whoever the expert is, whether it’s us or somebody else, on the other hand, people are finding their connection. There are other people who see them and get them, and they’re feeling seen even without that direct conversation. Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus In the group, the way we do it, now I know that other coaches do it differently, the way we do group coaching is we have each member of the group take AIM on their particular issue so that everybody’s getting coaching on their individual situation in the group setting. Some coaches will have a group issue and everybody’s working on the same thing. We don’t happen to do it that way because we wanna personalize it to each individual. But both really work quite well. Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Elaine Taylor-Klaus Elaine Taylor-Klaus Diane Dempster Download a free tipsheet, "10 Tips for Calm & Confident Parenting." Use the coach-approach to change the tone in your home or classroom -- starting now!
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Our Discussion
I’m thinking about part of what inspired this was that amazing episode that you did with those, I think it was all moms, that were in our group coaching program. That was just a couple episodes ago. We were talking about kind of the changes that they’ve seen and what it’s like to be working in a group. So I think it’s helpful for us to kind of go back and say, “Well, what really is group coaching, and what would it be like, and what’s the difference?” and that sort of thing.
Well, and it’s not just group coaching, right? I think what inspired me in thinking about this initially was I was involved with some organization that does support groups, and we got into this conversation I did with a colleague about what’s the difference between a support group and a learning group and a learning community and a coaching group, right? Because they’re very different.
Well, and I have to tell you, I talk to parents all the time who are looking for help, and the minute I say something about group, all of a sudden… and many of you know that I come from a 12-step background… the first thing that comes up is, “Oh, it’s that group with that person who talks for an hour…”
And nobody’s managing it.
Nobody’s paying attention and nobody’s managing them, and there’s all this, you know, no crosstalk, yes crosstalk. There are all these kinds of rules of how to work together in a group. So I think it’s really helpful to talk about what the differences are because there is an important role for a support group, don’t get me wrong. Because I think that even in those rooms, it’s helpful to hear other people share their story, and it would be great if somebody would facilitate and make sure they didn’t spend the whole hour talking about their story. I think we need more as humans than just having witness because having a witness is important.
It is. It’s hugely important, fundamentally important, that a lot of parents in our world feel like they’re all alone and that what’s happening to them is only happening to them. They don’t realize that there are thousands and millions of other parents going through similar circumstances. So just being seen, being recognized, being acknowledged is a fundamental step in helping parents learn to navigate this world that we’re in, right?
And add to that, not just being seen, but getting it. I think one of the things that I’m very proud of with our team is that we’re all parents of complex kids, and we get it in a way that a lot of really well-meaning professionals don’t.
Oh, because we’ve lived it and breathed it every single day, right?
So let’s go back for a second, if we can. I think the parameter I put out there is there’s support groups, there’s kind of learning-community groups, learning together in a community, and there’s coaching groups.
Is there anything else? Did I miss anything? How would you describe office hours? That’s a little… our office hours are kind of this hybrid of learning community and coaching group, I guess.
Yeah. Well, I think it’s the learning community. So let’s just talk logistically about what our office hours are. Office hours are one of the things that’s included in most of our programs.
Most all, yeah.
And what we do is twice a month we get on, and there’s usually 20 to 50 parents on the call. Typically, we ask them to raise their hand to ask questions or to get some coaching. We usually get to about 7 to 10 parents every week, and everybody else is really happy to listen to everybody else get coached. I mean, that’s really it. They’re not there to get coached. They’re there to hear other people—
Listen…
Get coached and to listen and hear other people’s questions answered. Part of that is, “I want to feel like I’m not alone. I want to feel like there are other people who have problems similar to mine.”
Yes. And part of what we do at Impact is teach coaching skills to parents and professionals, right? Part of the way coaching is taught is by modeling coaching and having other people watch people getting coached. So we’re teaching coaching on some level, and we’re giving people that sense of connection and, “I’m not alone.” People are applying it because when you see someone else getting coached, you kind of coach yourself. People are applying it to themselves. And we digress a little bit. So there’s support groups, there’s learning in a community together, taking a class together, taking a webinar, workshop, or master class together, right? We have this hybrid office-hours thing, which is a combination of several approaches. Then there’s a coaching group like what you were talking about the other day in the success story episode, which is actually a structured time where the group is being coached by a professional coach, right?
Well, and I think that none of these are good or bad. I think that—
Oh yeah, they’re great.
Ours are great. So the thing to pay attention to is what exactly is it? You know, when somebody says the word group, it’s like, what is it? What’s the format? What are the kinds of people? Who’s leading it? Is somebody leading it? All of these things. But it’s this sort of starting with not just assuming that if it’s called a group that you know what it is. Because I think even listening to you talk about it, you gave an example of a learning group. Well, there are lots of people who do what they call support groups where they have guest speakers who come in every time they meet, and so they’re learning together, right?
Right. Well, I think it was helpful for me. I hope this was helpful for those of you listening, and it was helpful for me to kind of identify what the groups are. Because I remember when I first started, now we’re going back a couple decades, but when I first started doing this work, I remember going to a support group and I left in tears.
Mm-hmm.
And I left in tears because I felt like, “Well, these aren’t my peers. They don’t really understand what I’m going through, and if this is all that’s available for me for support, I’m in a lot of trouble.” And I remember leaving literally in tears and going home to my husband saying, “Now I’m even more lost than I was before.” And that’s not because it was a bad thing. I think support groups, as you say, are really great. I think part of it was that it wasn’t being well facilitated. It was a professional, but it wasn’t somebody who was making me feel like things weren’t broken. It was just kind of what you described earlier. There was a lot of complaining and a lot of people who were very upset, but not a lot of resources to help them navigate their upset. That was just my one experience, you know, decades ago.
Well, and I think the other piece of it is, and we talk about this all the time, every flavor of kid is different. It’s a sort of, the core of this is kids with executive function challenges. But whether your kid has ADHD or autism and ADHD or anxiety or anxiety and ADHD or whatever the flavor is, trying to find somebody with exactly the same problems as you is gonna be hard. But if you look for the commonality, you’re gonna experience it very differently, I think.
Yeah.
And that’s part of what I think we do because we’re talking about the common themes that are coming up. It helps people go, “Oh yeah, me too. Oh, I can see myself in that other person’s experience.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a support group is really designed to give you a place to, to what you’re saying, where you don’t feel alone, where you feel like, ideally, they’re offering resources of some variety or helping you find resources, even if it’s references from other people in the group, right? It’s not gonna teach a modality per se. A typical support group isn’t designed to… Well, let me think about that. In a 12-step program, I guess it kind of does teach a modality, doesn’t it?
Yeah. Again, there’s not one flavor of this.
Right.
What you’re looking for and what’s out there. Is it, am I looking for information? Am I looking for—
Right.
Being seen and feeling like other people get me? Am I feeling like I want more personalized support to actually take action? Which is what a big part of group coaching is. Not only am I feeling seen, not only am I around other people who get it, not only am I gathering information, but I’m also getting assistance to take what I’m learning and say, “How am I applying this?”
And so before we go to that, because what I hear you saying with a support group is that a support group could mean a lot of things. So you really wanna get clear before you go into a support group: What am I looking for? How do I want it to support me? What do I wanna leave with? Yeah. Right?
Well, and I think that’s the bottom line for any of these. So maybe we don’t try to explain all of them because there are so—
You wanna explain some of them—
Different flavors of—
But I want—
Of them, right?
OK.
Support groups, we said learning community groups, office hours groups, which might be more like a live Q&A sort of environment, and then coaching groups are the four buckets. And for me, there’s gonna be nuance between them, and it’s hard to know, but one thing might be dominant in each of them.
Yeah. So I think we’ve kind of covered support groups pretty well, right? Um, and a lot of, like, ADDA is an organization, CHADD is an organization in the ADHD space, both of which offer free support groups or membership-based support groups, so not completely free. And I think NAMI has support groups. A lot of organizations out there offer support groups. One of the things to look at is who’s running the support groups. Is it being run by a peer leader? Is it being run by a coach in a coaching space or a licensed clinician? Who’s leading the group will help determine a little bit about what’s happening in that group. So that’s something—
And what’s the structure in the group as well.
And what’s the structure. Right. Great. So is it a free-for-all? Is it an open mic? How is it operating? So where are we on time? Because I haven’t been watching it. Do you know? We are having a conversation about finding your village and figuring out what support you need. I think that’s what this is beginning to come around to. We’ve talked a fair amount about support groups and all the different varieties of how that shows up, and making sure that whatever support you’re going into, you’re really asking yourself, “What am I looking for? Do I want information? Do I want guidance? Do I want connection and acknowledgment and somebody to see me?” Because that’s gonna determine what kind of resource you might need. You look like you wanna say something.
No. So the next two that I wanna kind of focus in on are kind of interplaying together, which would be a learning community and then more of what we call office hours or a live Q&A. So that’s maybe often a larger group setting where your goal is either we’re all learning something together—
Well, I guess the point I’m trying to make is that a learning community group, like a workshop or a webinar or a master class, right? Even some communities have groups that are ongoing learning communities. Like every month we have a new workshop or master class, right? It’s what’s happening in that moment that is information while a community is in the same space kind of supporting each other and sharing and acknowledging the information, right? What were you gonna say? Where were you going with it?
I was gonna talk then about live learning versus maybe office hours or something like that, where people might be learning somewhere else and then they’re coming together to reflect—
Yeah.
Talk about what they’re learning. So the goals of the groups may be the same, which is we’re learning and we’re asking questions. But again, there are so many different flavors of this that we can’t really paint a picture and say, “This is exactly what it is,” right?
Yeah. And in the learning community, I think what I’ve seen over the years of doing this, what I love about them is somebody comes to one of our workshops or master classes, and then what’s happening in the chat is validating and acknowledging and encouraging and supporting. People are liking each other’s comments and guiding each other, encouraging each other, buoying each other, right?
Well, and I just wanna jump in because I realized I was distracted because I thought you said booing them in the chat, and I was like, “No, you’re saying buoying.”
Buoying. Yeah. It’s a hard word to say. I should use another word. Um, lifting them up.
Lifting them up.
Right. But there’s this sense, we hear this all the time, where sometimes we’ll do webinars and we’ll do Q&A at the end, and then we’ll still be there 30, 45 minutes, an hour later, and we’re like, “Why are you here?” Right? And people’s answer is usually, “Because I just don’t wanna miss anything. Because I just feel supported here. I don’t feel alone here.” So there is this way, I think, in which people go to workshops and webinars. Some of it is for the content, but some of it is just to be with other parents or other people like them who get it, right?
Yeah.
And that’s powerful.
Well, and then the counter to that is more of an office hours Q&A.
Yeah.
Where instead of it being about learning and then answering questions, it’s about answering questions and just sort of open mic, “I don’t know, ask me anything” kinds of things. Like when people do those sorts of, “I’m gonna do an Ask Me Anything night on Instagram,” or whatever, right?
But you just said something a minute ago, which I hadn’t really thought about, which is our model. Our model is that we do this asynchronous learning and coaching piece, right? So people learn the information in one place. For us, it’s typically Sanity School. Maybe it’s a master class or a workshop, which is double-clicking on something from Sanity School. But it’s learning the content, and then we go to office hours to begin to integrate the content, right? So they learn a little bit, and then they come to office hours. Maybe they’ve taken the class, and maybe they haven’t, but that’s the place where they can get their questions answered, or they can hear other people beginning to learn to use the tools, right?
Well, if we talk about information, which is, like, I’m receiving it, I’m hearing it. Integration, which is I’m figuring out how I’m applying this to me.
Yep.
Implementation, which is I’m taking the information and actually putting it into practice. And then transformation, which is what we all really want, which is the outcome of making real change, right? Again, it’s a sort of, I don’t wanna get too locked into the different types of groups being a certain way. But know that there are lots of different kinds of groups, and part of this is just figuring out what you need and what can best support you.
Yeah. And for some people, it’s not a group. But in the podcast episode with the group the other week, one of the people who was there, we were talking about how she said she’s just not a joiner. She’s not a group person at all, right? And she did not believe that coming into this group of strangers was really gonna make a difference, but she just didn’t know what else to do, so she started. And she’s been there for a long time now and loves it and is an active participant because it’s deep, right? It’s not surface stuff. It’s a real conversation with people who are going through similar experiences. So it created a sense of safety really quickly so that she all of a sudden became a group person because it was the group that could really meet her and support her.
Right. Well, so let’s talk about coaching groups because, at least in our model, that really is a different kind of animal.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what happens in our coaching group? First of all, coaching groups are more structured, right? There is an activity to do here. It’s called coaching. So it’s not just coming in and talking about whatever is coming up, but coaching is about tackling, taking AIM, what we call taking AIM, on a situation, an issue that you wanna see changed, and then moving yourself toward understanding it better so that you’re able to make some change regarding it, right?
Coaching at its basis, the way I describe it, is it’s digging deep and moving forward. Digging deep and moving forward. So in a coaching group, I have an idea of the thing that I wanna work on, I’m gonna get really clear about it, and then I’m gonna figure out how to take action.
And along the way to get to the action, I’m gonna understand it better. I’m gonna understand what’s really going on so that I can figure out how to problem-solve around it. So coaching is a method of change that’s inherently collaborative because the coach is supposed to partner with their client. It’s not hierarchical, it’s collaborative. We stand side by side to tackle the problem together. And so with a group, we stand side by group, I guess, to tackle each individual’s situation.
Right. What else about coaching?
No, I think that the phrase “meeting you where you are” is an important piece of this, right? It’s this sort of, it’s not, “Here’s the thing you need to know,” versus, “OK, let’s get clear on where you are and where you wanna go, and how do we help get you there?” Which is, like you said, top-down versus bottom-up. I don’t know which way it is.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. It’s a different way in.
Yeah. And for us, we do that with a very clear structure. So there’s an hour. You start off taking AIM. Well, actually, we start off with celebrations because, you know, it’s coaching. We always wanna start with what’s working. We do some celebrations, and then we take AIM, and then there’s a topic each week. We have dozens and dozens and dozens of topics that we teach in Sanity School. We’ve pulled the top 26 that we go through in our coaching groups. So each week there’s a different topic. The coach will talk about and teach on that topic for a few minutes, and then the group moves into discussion and problem-solving with each other or based on where they’ve taken AIM. So everybody’s kind of working on their own issues, but doing it in this collaborative, interactive way with a coach. And then before we leave, everybody captures what their takeaways are, what they’ve learned, or what their commitments are to action. So it’s a tight hour, but it’s really designed to give people a place to practice the tools that we teach. And I like to say it’s a place to be in conversation with yourself, where somebody else is guiding you to be in conversation with yourself. That’s how I like to look at it.
Well, and the cool thing is that investing in coaching is a stretch for many people, and what I love about group coaching is it’s one of the most affordable ways of getting really personalized support that’s effective. So I just wanna highlight that because it is—
Yeah, it democratizes coaching—
Yeah, in a lot of ways.
So we’ve talked about support groups, coaching groups, learning community groups, and then office hours groups.
Right. And we know that everybody’s flavors are gonna be a little bit different, and part of this is about thinking about, what do I need? Do I need to feel heard? Do I need help to integrate? Do I need to see someone else practice the tools? What is it that I’m needing? And whether you consider our coaching groups or whether you’re looking for other people’s resources, we hope that this conversation has helped you figure out, “How do I choose?”
What do you need?
How do I choose, right?
Yeah. What do you need? And if you need help thinking it through, then we do offer Sanity Sessions so you can come talk to us. If you’re trying to figure out if one of our programs is the right fit for you, let us know, and we’re happy to talk to you about that. And at the end of the day, much like when we tell parents to go talk to providers about medication for kids, we always say, “Let’s get clear on what the change is that you want. What are you trying to achieve with the medication?” When you’re looking for support, I think it’s the same thing. What are you trying to achieve? Is it information? Is it integration? Is it implementation? Is it transformation? Those different pieces will happen in different ways depending on the support you choose. So take a minute listening. It’s been clearly kind of an interactive back-and-forth conversation on this. You’ve got two different coaches, really seasoned coaches, with different views on some of this.
What are you taking away from this episode? What’s the insight you’re taking from the conversation Diane and I just had? Maybe it’s about what you’ve already been doing for support. Maybe it’s about looking for a different kind of support. What are you taking away that you wanna bring forward with you into your life in the coming weeks and months? Next up on the podcast, we’re gonna be talking with Rabbi Shoshana Friedman from the PDA Safe Circle. Other than that, folks, if you like what you’re hearing on this episode, please take a minute to like, follow, or subscribe wherever you’re listening. Even better, leave us a review. We’d really appreciate the support. And as always, thanks for what you’re doing for yourself and for your kids. It makes an extraordinary difference. Take care.
Thanks, everybody.Want to Go from Chaos to Calm?
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