Parent Power

Parents involved in family restructuring often have deep concerns about their children’s wellbeing, and rightly so. Parental separation is a serious risk factor in children’s lives on many levels. Parents often seek out our services for help in how best to understand their children’s needs and to support them through the separation. A central aspect of this work, beyond the dos and don’ts of creating a two-household family, is the direct communication between parents and their children as the separation process unfolds, particularly when emotional hotspots arise. Children deliver emotional packages to their parents through their behavior, their language, or their facial expressions. These hotspots or emotional packages create powerful opportunities for parents to connect with their children and to help their children process the strong emotions that parental separation evokes. Parents can be powerful debriefers of their children’s experiences of the separation.

During the intensity that often comes with separation, parents can feel overwhelmed or powerless to protect their children from the negative impact of the transition. Parenting Practices that are generally sufficient for the children in a one-household family may need to be upgraded to fit the two-household family. Although it may be a relief for the parents to no longer be parenting together, parenting in a two-household family can also have its challenges. Single parents are generally overwhelmed with tasks with little back-up. Parents no longer witness each other’s parenting, so trusting that the children are well-cared for may be harder to maintain.

Parent education is primal in the two house hold family. The task of supporting our clients to learn new parenting skills is a part of Collaborative family practice which takes our clients through marital transitions from separation through divorce and stepfamily development. No matter what description, one aspect of parent education that frequently comes up is coaching parents to become “debriefers” of their child’s experience of their separation.

We at Amicus offer our clients any type of help, within the scope of Collaborative Family Practice, that can assist them to reach the best possible outcome for their evolving family with highest level of wellbeing with the minimal level of conflict. Structurally, this can look like one-on- one meetings, four-way meetings (with the other coach and other parent), three-way meetings (with the other coach and the child specialist who has a primary relationship with the children), parent feedback meetings, etc. We also stay connected with all other team members through team meetings. The focus of the teamwork varies to accommodate the capacities and complexities of the family as they navigate the divorce transition.