Parent Coaching and Relational Aggression

Often when I do my parent workshops on Helping Your Daughter Handle Tough Friendship Problems, a few parents will come up to me after my speech wanting individual ideas for their unique situation. 

Obviously, in the context of a two hour workshop, I can only give tips and advice for general situations.  Sometimes I spend a long time with the parents after the workshop (or in a subsequent phone call) helping them come up with strategies that fit.   

I have felt for a long time like it would be great to have more of a structure to work with individual parents when their daughters experience tough friendship problems or relational aggression (RA).   This issue is so IMPORTANT.    It is my belief that it disables so many girls from being tapped into their authentic selves and fully embracing their power.   If you want proof, ask a bunch of women you know about their experiences growing up.  Chances are, most (if not all) will have a sad story of being the victim of RA or of being the perpetrator of RA. And many (myself included) will have been on both ends of the spectrum.  

My training in Parent Coaching http://www.thepci.org/ (I'll be fully certified in the Fall)   is giving me the ideal venue to constructively help and co-create with parents strategies for helping their daughter's handle tough friendship problems.  Here's why:

First off, one of the goals of parent coaching is to help parents tap into their own wisdom and create their own solutions.    I am there to help co-create and guide the questions in a productive way.    I can help a parent realize when it is time to approach another adult (school or law enforcement) and when to give your child a chance to solve it on her own (with the use of creative strategies).

Secondly, we focus on the growth sphere of you and your child.   In this way, we make sure that they have positive things in their world that are feeding them and forming a contrast to the relational aggression.   My goal here is that whatever relational aggression your daughter is experiencing becomes an empowering challenge rather than something  that destroys her confidence.   As Jodee Blanco says, we can focus on  building relationships "one town over,"  or on creating more positive adult connections.  

As a parent coach we are given skills to help parents know how to approach a school in an empowered way and I think that this helps too.  In my experience as a School Counselor, I have seen many parents enter the school irate, wanting their daughter's classes changed, threatening to go to the school board, or demanding to know what consequences the other girl faced (and often this is confidential).    On the other hand, I have encountered parents who don't intervene at all, saying "girls will be girls."   In my opinion (and from my observations over the years), neither of these approaches are ideal.  So as a parent coach, I could help you to find out how to use the school as an ally to help get your needs met.  

Finally, and this may be the biggest one of all, when a daughter is experiencing relational aggression it may tap into our own fears, issues, insecurities and things that happened to us when we were kids.  A parent coach can help you discern between the two and also look at the ways in which you were resilient as a child.   The parent coach can help you reflect how you can use your own successes as strengths to help empower your daughter.   I can also help you tap into the strengths that your daughter has to handle a tough situation in a healthy way.

The best thing about the parent coach experience is that it is really positive and most likely it will help you feel good about you, your family, your future and the emerging of your daughter as an empowered and authentic teen.