Parent Counselling & Support

Parenting can be the best job in the world. Parenting can be the hardest job in the world. And as parents, we can be so hard on ourselves because we want to do the best we can for our kids. We want to do things that help them grow and thrive, and we don't want to do things that will hinder or hold them back. 

The truth is there's no such thing as a perfect parent. We're all imperfect human beings. Welcome to the club. And here's the good news: we don't need to be perfect parents to raise strong, healthy, resilient kids. What we need to know are some of the essential things that help us grow and raise healthy human beings. 

There is so much information out there about parenting. Trying to sort through it all can be overwhelming! How do we know what we should listen to and follow? 

Thankfully there has been a growing body of scientific research over recent decades on child development, attachment relationships, and emotion regulation that can help guide us so we don't get lost in information overload. 

My approach in counselling and supporting parents prioritizes four essential ingredients: 

1. Building secure attachment relationships
2. Supporting emotional regulation
3. Practicing "mindsight" with our kids (and ourselves)
4. Understanding our own relationship histories and attachment patterns

Along with prioritizing these four essential ingredients, I combine Emotionally Focused Therapy, Circle of Security Parenting, and mentalization-based approaches to provide you with support that is informed by the science of attachment and emotion regulation. 

I come into this work with the belief that you are your child's greatest support as they grow and mature from being kids to teenagers to adults. 

Dr. John Bowlby, the originator of attachment theory, wrote “if a society values its children, it must cherish their parents.” This is something I truly believe. That's why I want to value and support you as a parent and as a person—in the ups and the downs, in the struggles and the mistakes, in the joys and the fears. I have so much respect for what you do as parent and how you show up for your kids. In a world where parenting can feel like an invisible and thankless job, I see you and I appreciate what you are doing. And I want to support you so that you feel more confident and prepared as you support your kids. 

In The Power of Showing Up, Dr. Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson suggest building secure attachments with our kids is the "ultimate goal of parenting." To support this claim, they explain that "study after study has proven that kids who are securely attached are more likely to develop a huge number of benefits," which include:

• Higher self-esteem
• Better emotional regulation
• Greater academic success
• Better coping and resilience in times of stress
• More positive engagement with preschool peers
• Closer friendships in childhood
• More effective social interaction in adolescence
• Happier and better relationships with parents
• Stronger leadership qualities
• A greater sense of self-agency
• More close, trusting relationships in adulthood
• More empathy
• Greater trust in life
• And the list goes on...

"When we talk about secure attachment as the ultimate goal of parenting, these characteristics are in large part why. Put simply, when kids are securely attached to their caregivers, they have a much greater opportunity to thrive—in school, in relationships, and in life."

Our child's ability to learn, grow, and thrive is fundamentally influenced by how well they can regulate their emotions. Because when their brains are emotionally regulated, they are more capable of learning, thinking logically, problem-solving, empathizing, and cooperating.  

Research on child development and emotion regulation shows that co-regulating emotions is a foundational need for human beings. Research also shows that parents who reliably support their children in co-regulating emotions create a more solid foundation that scaffolds their kids in developing more robust capacities for self-regulation as they go through childhood and adolsescence. In other words, co-reguation is a necessary, ongoing foundation for supporting kids and teens in growing robust self-regulation. 

But as parents, many of us can struggle with this when we didn't experience reliable co-regulation with our parents growing up. For some of us, we experienced the opposite: reliable co-dysregulation where everyone's emotions would escalate out of control. No wonder some of us learned to inhibit and stay away from emotions when they would just make things worse. 

This is where I can help. Because the good news is we can grow our abilities to co-regulate our kids when we understand our own relationship histories and work with expanding our own emotional capacities. The rewards of working on ourselves are worth it when we can better show up and emotionally support our kids. 

Many parenting approaches focus on trying to shape external behaviours by dispensing "rewards" and "punishments." While these behavioural approaches have value, they can be limited and even damaging when we inadvertently treat our kids like mindless objects by addressing behaviours alone. Because when we only address our kids external behaviour, we ignore their mental experience and subjectivity—all the internal thoughts, feelings, motivations, and needs inside external behaviours. This kind of mind-blind parenting can leave our kids feeling unseen and misunderstood, which can actually exacerbate their emotional distress and reactive behaviours. 

The solution to mind-blind parenting is practicing "mindsight" (also called "mentalization"). Mindsight is about seeing the meaning within our kids behaviours. It's about seeing our kids "from the inside out," so we can understand their behaviours in light of their internal thoughts, feelings, motivations, and needs. Put simply, mindsight is about holding our child's mind in our own mind, so we're seeing and understanding them psychologically. 

Mindsight is a skill that can be developed with practice and research shows that mindsight increases secure attachment and improves emotion regulation. 

A common fear for many parents is that we will end up repeating the same mistakes that our parents made with us despite our best efforts to raise our kids differently. And the truth is we will repeat the things that we don't recognize and repair from our upbringing. 

Thankfully research on attachment relationships has a hopeful message for all parents. Because this research shows that we are not destined to repeat the patterns from our upbringing if we recognize and repair our own relationship and emotional patterns in the present. This process of change is called "earned security" in the attachment field. When we understand and work through the ways we have been shaped by our attachment histories, then we can change and reap benefits for both ourselves and our children. 

You can understand your history. You can change how it shapes you in the present. You can give yourself and your kids a better future. 

• Strengthening relationship bonds
• Improving emotion regulation for kids and parents
• Improving communication
• Resolving conflict
• Increasing emotional understanding and empathy
• Promoting the child's growth and resilience
• Understanding parental attachment history and how this shapes current relationship challenges