Transition Coaching
Our Transition Coaching Services are designed for parents who have adolescents and young adults transitioning home, to a step-down program, or to independent living. Your coach will help you to hone in on achievable goals, own what you can control, master new techniques and enact new strategies and change within your parenting construct and in your home. If you are ready for support in planning a transition and sustaining the therapeutic work done in out-of-home care then this is the service for you.
What's Included
- 12 weeks of parent coaching sessions and as needed support.
- Weekly scheduled phone or video coaching sessions for skill building and strategic support.
- Access to your coach and non-crisis support between scheduled sessions.
- As needed crisis support for parenting and transition challenges.
- Collaborative contact with other professionals on the therapeutic support team to ensure the best possible treatment.
What Will I Learn?
- How to empower your children while being clear and confident about your own parental boundaries
- How to effectively increase proactive parenting and decrease reactive parenting
- How to increase skill and confidence in parenting strategies and techniques
- How to create a stronger emotional connection with your child
- How to increase your skills in resolving conflicts within the family
- Strategies to integrate the growth your child achieved in their treatment program into your home environment
- How to manage your child's home technology usage in a healthy way
What will our sessions focus on?
- Creating a place to openly discuss challenges in parenting and personal struggles with your adolescent and young adult children and to process, plan and focus on what to expect, how to slow your reaction time, regulate your emotions and respond
- Support with the emotional process of transitioning your child from treatment to home or independent living
- Providing guidance and instruction in effectively preparing and executing parent agreements and home contracts
- Assisting you in identifying your role in repairing and strengthening the parent child relationship
- Assessing the current strengths and struggles within your family. Helping to address any immediate challenges you are facing with any of your children. Understanding the experience of siblings and how to support them effectively through this and through their own challenges.
- Getting both parents on the same page to ensure healthy collaboration that best supports the child
- Predicting and preparing for common pitfalls that can impact success at home
- Developing healthy communication skills between all members of the family including siblings
- Addressing your family situation as a whole, not just working to change your child's behavior
- Empowering you to bring peace back into your home
- Assisting you in translating the skills gained in treatment and integrating them into the family system and home environment, as well as support and guidance when the execution of the plans and goals are challenging or seem ineffective
Transition Coaching FAQs
We work with families for a minimum of three months during a transition from therapeutic placement to home. Ideally, our work starts a few weeks prior to a child’s completion of their therapeutic program to assist parents in their proactive planning of having their child return home. We start the collaboration process, assist with moving family agreements forward and start the process of supporting parents during this transition. Once the child is home, we spend the next months supporting the parents through parent coaching sessions, crisis support, collaboration with outpatient therapists, educating, strategizing and guiding parents in deepening their work and understanding of their roles as parents and how they influence the success of the transition and the sustaining of their child’s work in treatment.
We have seen the “wait and see” approach backfire many times. Many of our parent clients say that they wish they had enlisted our support earlier in the process. Parents experience significant relief and stability in having our support in developing their parenting position.
Our parent clients also say that working with us helped to increase the emotional connection between themselves and their child despite the geographic distance and limited communication within a therapeutic placement. The growth from both sides during the treatment process means that the relationship is usually more solid than it ever was prior to the treatment. Additionally, many parents during this process experience therapy fatigue and interestingly, utilizing a parent coach and embarking on this work decreases the therapy fatigue and makes navigating this therapeutic journey so much easier.
Solutions Parenting Support has worked with many mentors over the years and often collaborates with private mentors who work with adolescents and young adults. Our encouragement is that a child coming out of treatment should continue to utilize an individual licensed clinician even if participating in a mentoring relationship. Our experience has shown that having your child work with an outpatient therapist who has both clinical expertise and life coaching skills allows for more consistent, affordable, longer term, ongoing support for the adolescent/young adult and the family.
