My workshops are designed to provide parents with powerful ways to more fully communicate with and understand your kids. I will help you decode your kid!
Never before have parents and their teenage and twenty-something kids faced the kinds of challenges we see today. Parents are working harder, earning less, stressing more. There are more emails (and texts, and tweets, and messages), more demands, more isolation, and more energy expended, but less connection, less communication, and less fun. Our high-school and college-age kids face unprecedented economic and emotional challenges, and in many families, it’s difficult to even find the time to talk, to guide our kids, or even to simply be together.
I work with parent groups in PTA settings, religious organizations, community centers, booster clubs, and so forth and can customize a great presentation for any group.
Some workshop examples include:
Riding the Adolescent Skateboard: A Workshop for Parents of High-Schoolers
Enjoy some wonderful live music while you gain knowledge, compare notes, share exasperation and joy, discuss the challenges, and acquire support and understanding for the unsteady, yet rewarding journey of parenting teens and twenty-somethings today.
Interspersing thought-provoking music, lecture and group discussion in a new way, I explain how to lessen the scrapes and bruises involved in parenting teens. You will leave far more prepared to guide your kids to safety, fulfillment and independence, having enjoyed some music along the way.
Some of the issues to be discussed:
- Responding skillfully to being tested by your teen(s)
- Learning when and how to seek help
- Self-care for parents!
- Nurturing the marriage
- Managing blended families
- Recognizing issues of substance abuse
- Dealing effectively with frustration and anger
- Smoothing out communication
- Responding to educational issues
- Understanding the single-parent household
Skateboard Workshop for Parents of College Kids & 20 Somethings:
- Self-care for parents
- Nurturing the marriage
- Letting go – stop micro-managing your college student!
- Enrich your own life, finding greater balance, meaning and fulfillment
- Enjoy relaxing, laughing and being together with other like-minded parents
- Do some dancing and singing if you like – at least enjoy some good, live music and intelligent teaching and conversation about being a “modern” parent of college-age kids
- Parenting challenging older teenagers.
Life Coaching for Parents
If you’re raising kids of your own and/or work with teens, you viscerally understand both the joys and satisfaction they can bring and their potential to engender frustration, anger, disappointment and even despair. Teens can really push our buttons! This workshop takes an in-depth look at the developmental challenges teens face, particularly in today’s climate of massive societal change and cultural “bombardment.” We will discuss ways the powerful techniques of life coaching can be used with your teens on a daily basis.
Life coaching is wonderfully non-threatening and action-oriented and is an effective tool for all teens, but it provides essential skills for challenged teens such as the angry boy, the disaffected girl, the insecure bully, etc., to get past their issues. Kids want to feel good about changes they can make, and with this set of life-coaching tools, you can be a powerful agent of transformation in your teenagers’ lives.
Strengthening the Bond: A Marriage Workshop teaches couples about compassionate communication, taking what might be a marriage that works to a marriage that nurtures, sustains and engenders mutual emotional, spiritual growth. Its core thesis involves working through individual changes together, undergirded by a mission statement developed together during the opening sessions.
The Successful Step-Family offers parents guidance in how to combine with grace and skill two families who have endured separation, divorce and much difficult change. Participants learn how to work from a shared Parenting Plan and experience the great value of effective communication as they model cooperation and growth for children and stepchildren alike.
Right-Brain Rehab: Writing Your Own Prescription for Creativity & Joy
Working, parenting and living today can be enormously demanding, and in the maelstrom of professional and family responsibilities, important dreams can be lost along the way. The Rehab workshop provides you with proven methods to re-connect with personal creative goals and energy. Is it the saxophone you’ve always wanted to play in lieu of those oppressive piano lessons you were forced into as a kid? Can you never find the time to pick up your old paintbrushes? Do you yearn to spend more time in the natural world? Whatever your creative/personal/spiritual desires, this experience will help you set your priorities, organize your time and invigorate your personal and professional lives as you begin to fulfill your deeper creative strivings.
You can expect:
- To leave with a concrete plan for increased joy and creativity
- To make a strong commitment to the specifics of that plan
- To feel increasing energy, passion and positive self-regard
- To begin right away actualizing your long-held and perhaps long- shelved creative, personal or shared family plans and dreams.
Again these are just a sampling: I’ll customize the perfect parent workshop for your group .