Health & Parenting

Dial a Coach for Parenting Advice

When Coaching Should Be Counseling continued...

Richfield, author of The Parent Coach: A New Approach To Parenting In Today's Society, takes a different approach when he coaches parents. He has developed a social and emotional coaching program that includes cards with different scenarios, which include one in which a child is being teased on the bus because she just got braces and one in which a child is overly frustrated by homework.

"Each one of these cards targets a typical, compelling encounter that gives a child information about what to do and not do when these things happen," he says.

So what should frustrated parents do?

"If you talk to a family member, you know more about their backgrounds so you have context to evaluate the advice, but you have no context when advice is given over the phone by a stranger with ambiguous credentials," he says.

"There are plenty of people to go to including pediatricians who run parenting groups or can make appropriate referrals to community-based professionals and services," he says.