Steadfast Vancouver Counseling Services provides a wide variety of counselling services:
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Counselling for Parenting in Vancouver & New WestminsterAs parents, we need to be able to deal with both the behaviour and the human being behind the behaviour. Learn how to think and feel your way through important moments with your child as opposed to reacting to them. Parenting is one of the most amazing and, at times, challenging journeys one can go on. It can be filled with moments that touch your heart deeper than you've ever experienced; it also can stretch you as a human being beyond what you ever imagined. I often refer to it as my spiritual journey. It can bring you to your knees, by this I mean you can have exhausted all the things you know and things still are not going the way you would expect them to go. This is the moment I like to call a choice point; this is the point where you can tighten the reins and force what you want to happen, where you can up the ante or the consequences for your child, or you can surrender and open yourself up to what you are really being called on to learn and to teach as a parent. It is in those moments our worlds become more expansive and in those moments that we create more possibilities for our families. In counselling you will have the opportunity to learn how to think and feel your way through these important moments as opposed to reacting to them. You will learn what is really being asked of you and how to best respond to the current crisis. Children have an amazing ability to go right to the places that we have not healed in ourselves or places where our psychological growth has been thwarted. They have an ability to behave in a way that drives us crazy and is often difficult to understand. For instance, if you have a hard time showing big emotions, chances are you will end up with a child that has no problem yelling or crying loudly in a public place or maybe just at home. Or if you were a person that worked really hard to fit in, then maybe your child will be one that doesn't, or the one that acts up in "sociably" unacceptable ways. This ability children have is actually quite divine, as it brings an opportunity to grow as a family. Our natural instinct is to shut it down, to stop the behavior. I am not saying that behavior does not need to be changed; however, I think, often we focus on changing the behaviour as opposed to understanding our own reaction to it, when both are necessary. Young children are only ever trying to get their needs met. Again this does not mean that all behavior is acceptable. It means that we, as parents, need to be able to think clearly in these situations. We need to be able to evaluate effectively. What are the needs of this child? Have they been met? What are they really asking for? Have my needs been met? Whose job is that? Are my expectations age/developmentally appropriate for this child? For instance, asking a young child not to feel something is not a developmentally appropriate request. They can't. Their brain is not set up to do that until about the age of 7. If a child is upset the best thing you can do as a parent, is to empathize and help them give words to their feelings and their experience. For instance, your child grabs a toy from another child. You take the toy away and give it back to the child that first had the toy. Your child then loses it. Sometimes this can feel embarrassing or frustrating and we would just like our child to share nicely and not grab. However, our job now is to enter our child's world and help give language and meaning to their experience. Our job is to keep their self esteem and personhood intact and still let them know the behaviour is unacceptable. As our children grow up their problems become more sophisticated and complex. This can appear in many different forms, such as lying, stealing, excluding, bullying, name calling, being a victim etc. As parents, we need to be able to deal with both the behaviour and the human being behind the behaviour. It is helpful to have a solid understanding of our children's needs and developmental stages. In addition, it's beneficial to understand and work with our own places that have not been healed. Counselling offers an excellent opportunity to do this. |
