Learn how stress can affect your parenting and how you can manage stress.

Parenting Through Stressful Times has been designed as a course to support parents understand, recognise stress, and to provide tools on how to manage stress.

This personal development programme explores gently with parents the influence stress plays on how we parent and how we manage the challenges that are presented to us daily. It incorporates a proactive and creative approach to analysing and understanding our daily challenges that can create stress. The course allows parents the opportunity to explore many tools that can aid and support one to cope with stress, preventing the build-up of stress and maintaining a healthy balance.

Understanding healthy conflict and building positive relationships

The aim of this programme is to provide parents a foundation which they can use to build on other skills which will help them to support healthy relationships. It will support you to communicate assertively with your children and avoid conflict. It will support separated parents to communicate more assertively to achieve share parenting with reduced conflict.

Family Communications, Coping With Family Life and Teens

This programme introduces the concept of the strong family unit, supporting parents to build relationships by ensuring the core ingredients of good communication and assertive parenting are in place within the family. With these elements in place parents begin to understand the ‘life of a teenager’. You are supported to explore the many changes and challenges that occur for teens as they move through puberty and how you as a parent can support your teen at this vulnerable time. Parents will have an opportunity to reflect on the many behavioural challenges that teens can present with such as power struggles with parents and sibling rivalry. As a parent the programme helps you to learn when to step in and when to step back. The programme asks you to look at the development of the teen brain and introduces the concept ‘flip the lid’, whereby we start to understand that teens are still on a journey of emotional and social development, requiring a lot of support and patience from parents.

Further to this we explore : relationships and sexuality; risky behaviours; motivating teens; family mental health and wellbeing and parent self care .

Sharing Parenting Successfully Post Separation

In this programme parents who are parenting post separation or are planning to separate are supported to firstly understand the impact of separation on children. The programme aims to support parents to have a child centred approach post separation, ensuring children are supported to manage the transition well, achieving positive outcomes. Parents are asked to explore and understand the needs of children and parents at the time of separation and how these needs can be met. In the programme parents are encouraged to have pride in the new family form, inviting children to ask questions and being available to answer the awkward questions about family forms as they arise. We explore what shared parenting is, why it is beneficial to children when done well and how parents can develop a shared parenting plan to support them to move into the business of shared parenting post separation. Finally the programme asks you to develop new family traditions to support you as move through this transition with your children, while also exploring how you can manage conflict in the future while maintaining a healthy balance of meeting your needs and those of your children.