Parent Coaching: Uncovering Influences and Promoting Change (Apr 28, 2025)

Parent Coaching: Uncovering Influences and Promoting Change is organized by TZK Seminars and will be held on Apr 28, 2025.

Description:
Therapy with adults or couples with children frequently presents opportunities to help parents understand and improve parent-child dynamics. Parenting reveals implicit and unconscious expectations about raising children that are often culturally determined, and based on each parent’s own childhood experiences. This seminar draws on theories from systems, object relations and the parenting literature to show how unconscious factors get played out in the parent-child relationship. Therapists can help parents identify ways that their own childhood experiences, and aspects of the marital relationship, are played out in the parenting process. Through presentation of theory, and case examples, participants will be able to understand how to raise and explore parenting dynamics in the therapy session, and help parents find new ways of relating to their children and each other. This is particularly import in work with highly conflicted couples, even those who have divorced but have difficulty co-parenting.

Learning Objectives:
At the end of this seminar, participants will be able to:

• Identify the ways that culture and extended family can influence expectations and parenting practices.
• Become familiar with the concepts of identification, disidentification and projective identification, and the way that childhood experiences are revived in the parenting process.
• Define a parenting-team approach that allows couples to recognize and accommodate each other’s strengths and differences.
• Identify how power and triangulated conflict effects parenting, particularly in families with high levels of conflict.
• Identify ways to point out how unconscious processes are impacting parents.