Coaching
Want to parent and partner with more confidence?
Coaching can help you bring more love, joy, and connection to your family by providing personalized guidance that takes your family relationships to the next level.
Classes
Want to add to your parenting toolbox?
Our Parenting with Positive Discipline and Keeping the Joy in Relationships classes are and are designed to provide interactive learning in a group setting. Classes are online and in-person.
Speaking
Looking for a speaker for your next meeting or event?
Heartful Parent Coaching presents workshops, presentations, and keynotes for corporations, schools, churches, parent organizations, and conferences on a wide variety of issues facing parents.
How can we work together?
Schedule a free call and let's find out.
Christy came to our family's rescue when we were in a place of true desperation. She brings compassion and professionalism to all that she does and is highly skilled at listening to the issues, distilling key information, and targeting them.
We feel that we have left with an important mental re-framing and new tools in our toolbox. I now cherish my time with my wee ones, when previously I felt like I was drowning at times.
Summer O.
Are you a good candidate for heartful parent coaching?
Our clients ...
- seek to parent intentionally and are willing to examine their own parenting choices.
- understand that parenting well takes energy and effort and are willing to do the hard work to help their family thrive.
- want to feel more love, joy, and connection.
- are open to using new approaches to solving old problems.
- strive to parent differently than they were parented.
- want new strategies for putting themselves on the to-do list.
- long to send their children into the world happy, healthy, and whole.
Find out how Heartful Parent Coaching came to be.
I do not parent perfectly, but I am the perfect parent for my children.
I try, and that is all that matters.
Christy Keating
Founder and CEO of The Heartful Parent Collective
Frequently-asked questions.
The wonderful thing about coaching is how many different types of parents it can help:
- Parents beset by feelings of overwhelm and struggle
- Parents baffled by their child’s behavior
- Parents looking to bolster their parenting “toolbox”
- Parents committed to parenting intentionally and examining their own parenting choices
- Parents simply looking to take their family’s life from good to great.
Coaching is for parents that have read every parenting book out there and are struggling to make sense of them, and parents who have no time or interest in reading any parenting books and do better working one-on-one with a guide.
Coaching is as individualized as the client!
As a coach, I work collaboratively and co-constructively with my clients to help them live into their best selves and their ideal futures for themselves, their children, and their family as a whole.
I help my clients identify what is currently working in their homes and help them figure out ways to “grow the positives.” I am energized by each of my clients and this helps me to show up and be present as my true self as I provide accountability and action steps to help you realize your dream future.
We will spend time identifying your unique strengths and how we can harness those strengths to tackle whatever challenges you are facing. And although I have knowledge and training, we will work together to craft solutions that work for you and your family; after all, you are the expert on your family just as I am the expert on mine.
I may make suggestions or provide information where needed, but I will never dictate how things should be done. You and I will be in partnership throughout the change process as we craft creative, sustainable, and sometimes outside-the-box solutions so that you can experience long-term success.
In truth, there can be many similarities between them depending on the style of any practitioner in either field.
However, as a general matter, therapy is focused on interpersonal health and identifiable issues, such as depression or anxiety. Its attention tends to be retrospective, addressing and repairing damage from earlier experiences.
In contrast, coaching is typically future-based and tends to be more goal-directed, action-oriented, and outwardly defined.
In coaching, the coach and client tend to work in a collaborative partnership where, although the coach may have the expertise and make suggestions, the solutions are generated as a team within which the client takes responsibility for his or her own process and outcomes.
Coaching provides more flexibility in theory and practice to help spur clients into action and move them forward in a positive direction.
For more information see Hart, V. et al. (2001). “Coaching Versus Therapy: A Perspective.” Consulting Journal: Practice and Research, Vol. 53 (No. 4), pp 229-37.
Not at all—and I don’t want to be! TV shows like “Super Nanny” are designed to keep audiences watching—they highlight and emphasize the incompetence of the parents, the abhorrent behavior of the children, and create can’t-look-away entertainment out of a family’s struggles. The “solutions” suggested are typically not the type that create transformative, sustainable change, and the demeaning tone and emotion of the nanny are anything but helpful.
In contrast, I work on the principle that YOU are the expert on your family and that you’ve always acted in the best interests of that family as best you could.
I create a safe space of non-judgment and know that you are neither incapable nor incompetent. I offer a supportive, encouraging, and empowering approach—and maybe a few new ideas and skills—to catalyze and maximize lasting positive change. I want you to walk away from our time together feeling not inept but uplifted, optimistic, and hopeful.
No! Parenting is the toughest job any of us take on and we are all doing our best—the fact that you are on this website tells me you care deeply about that.
We can only do as well as we can do, and when we know more, we can do better. A coach should never serve to judge your parenting or make you feel guilty for past decisions. A coach should be a partner and a guide in helping you learn different approaches to your parenting that will help you bring more love, joy, and connection to your family.
I have no stake in the outcome (like a friend or family member might) of our time together, so I am able to cheer you on from the sidelines without feeling attached to how you get there. My job is simply to help you see the big picture and then design personal action steps to help you fit all the pieces of your individual and family puzzle together in a way that helps you experience your most authentic self.