Have you reached a point of despair after trying out a range of approaches and tips to get your child to do ‘the right thing’?  

Do you blame yourself for your child’s behaviour?

Is your child’s behaviour putting a strain on your relationships?

Children have their moments; they will display a continuum of behaviour ranging from relentless anger and frustrations that present in lashing out, being destructive, kicking, swearing, shouting (hyper-arousal) to shutting down and seeming disconnected from life (hypo-arousal). Whether your child is hyper or hypo – aroused, this can be an unsettling experience for both the child and the parent / caregiver.

How can I help you with this?

Behaviour communicates emotions; children have not yet developed emotional intelligence and language to aptly recognise, name and cope with difficult emotions.  Distressing emotions will be played out in behaviour that we (adults) often find challenging.  With all the best intentions, we may give instructions, bribe, threaten, punish but none of these seem to work.  Perhaps you hardly ever get a good report from your child’s teacher and every pickup time is filled with anxiety about what the report is going to be about today.  

I use a neurobiologically-informed approach to give insight into yours and your child’s physiological and emotional states and how these might be linked to the behaviours you might find challenging.  Once you have this understanding, you will make a shift from automatically wanting to fix what is ‘wrong’ with your child to wondering about the emotion beneath your child’s behaviour.  With this approach, we remove shame, self blame and guilt and allow curiosity and compassion to flourish.  A sense of safety allows children to make better choices about how to behave.

We all have a window of tolerance; some people have a narrow window, others wider.  The narrower your window of tolerance the less effective you will be as a parent.  This means you might have a fight/flight or freeze approach to parenting.  This approach will only be met by similar reaction from your children.  They will fight back (be oppositional), flee (avoid you and activities) or freeze; (present as disconnected and have little interest in anything).  You and the child feel you are surviving your days; no one is thriving.  I will help you explore your window of tolerance and how this impacts your parenting style.  The aim of this is to help you widen this window so that you can respond to the demands of parenting with less difficulty.