Parent Coaching & Support Services
You can apply CBT-based tools to assist your child in moving past anxiety and related conditions as rapidly as possible.
Having a child or teen with anxiety or a related disorder often presents new challenges to parents. Light On Anxiety (LOA) offers Parent Coaching & Support Services to those seeking an evidence-based approach to guide their child through anxiety and decrease parental stress.
LOA’s Parent Coaching sessions involve working with a therapist to learn CBT-based skills to apply in day-to-day life with your child and promote positive behavioral change from home.
Parent Coaching & Support Services are sessions for parents that include:
- Comprehensive evaluation and customized treatment plan
- Education on CBT-based tools to utilize at home to guide your child through stress and encourage effective behaviors
- Mindfulness-based training to assist you in compassionately disengaging from the power struggles with your child’s anxiety and refocusing your energy on valued living
- Exposure therapy training to effectively coach your child to face their fears with confidence
- Relapse prevention training to maintain progress
Light the Way for Positive Change for Yourself and Your Child
Has your child tried therapy in the past without success? Does your average day involve more moments of parenting-related stress than joy and satisfaction?
Whether you are seeking guidance to support your child or relief from the stress and anxiety of being a parent, we are here to help. Parent Coaching was developed to not only decrease parent stress, but also provide you with the tools to compassionately guide your child past anxiety and related conditions. We are excited for you to take the first steps toward positive change not only for yourself, but for your entire family.
Through Parent Coaching, you will learn to apply new tools in day-to-day life and acquire enhanced parenting abilities
- Embracing the limits of your control and developing greater trust in your child
- Replacing harsh, judgmental self-criticism with supportive self-compassion
- Practicing techniques to manage stress that will benefit you and your child
- Seizing the present moment and reaping the rewards of mindful parenting
- Experiencing long-term, sustainable emotional well-being
Learn how you can support your child through anxiety
In the ADAA webinar, Dr. Kissen discusses how you can talk to your child about anxiety treatments as well as how you can identify if your child is experiencing stress vs. anxiety.
Get more support for learning how to manage anxiety as a parent
Do you worry about your child all the time? Maybe they are behind on certain milestones, struggling in school, having difficulty making friends, or heading off to college and away from home for the first time. Their problems or struggles become your own, and you end up feeling so anxious that you forget what it’s like to just enjoy being their parent. The good news is that you can rewire your “parent brain” to respond differently to these challenges. This book will show you how to replace parental anxiety with parental effectiveness. Practice a sample exercise.
Be the calm and collected parent you aspire to be with this powerful, neuroscience-based guide.
In Overcoming Parental Anxiety: Rewire Your Brain to Worry Less and Enjoy Parenting three anxiety specialists team up to help you change your anxious brain using the core principles of neuroscience and exercises from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and mindfulness.
We are honored to assist you in your journey through Parent Coaching!
Gain limitless possibilities of parenting with less stress and anxiety
Dr Kissen is a clinical psychologist who is the CEO of Light On Anxiety CBT Treatment Center. Edward Plimpton, Ph.D talks with her about her recent book on using cognitive behavior therapy to help with parental anxiety.
We can guide you through the many challenges of modern day parenting and assist you in becoming a more mindful, satisfied caregiver to your child (and yourself).
Light On Anxiety can assist you in learning to:
- Recognize when you are stuck in an unhelpful and ineffective shame-and-blame cycle.
- Dial down self-critical thoughts and increase your ability to engage in effective problem-solving.
- Guide yourself through parenting challenges with increased resiliency.
Light On Anxiety can assist you in learning to:
- Notice when you are engaged in an unhelpful catastrophic thinking cycle
- Disengage from catastrophic worry thoughts and more efficiently bring your attention back to the present moment
- Enhance your ability to evaluate life scenarios through a logical vs emotionally reactive lens
- Distinguish between a true problem to solve and general life uncertainty to tolerate
Light On Anxiety can assist you in learning to:
- Obtain a practical understanding of mindfulness and mindful parenting practices
- Improve your ability to attend to and connect with your child
- Slow down so you can CHOOSE how to respond rather than responding emotionally or impulsively to stressful situations
- Listen to your child and hear what they are expressing rather than your mind’s interpretation of what they are saying
- Enhance your mind’s ability to recognize vs. get caught up in mental noise
- Disengage from unhelpful thoughts/brain spam and re-engage in the present moment
- Spend more moments of your life connecting with your child vs. thinking or worrying about them
Light On Anxiety can assist you in learning to:
- Open up to, learn from and then move past your historic pain points.Enhance your ability to distinguish between a historic and a current threat.
- Signal to your amygdala that you are not actually in danger when you stumble upon a historic pain point.
- Make decisions in line with what you want your life to be about vs. what you want to avoid.
Light On Anxiety can assist you in learning to:
- Regulate your emotional temperature
- More efficiently move from frustration and fear to calm and peace
- Model effective emotion regulation for your child
- Predict and proactively plan for emotionally triggering moments
Light On Anxiety can assist you in learning to:
- Understand the benefits to letting go of control
- Move toward feelings of empowered acceptance, rather than exhaustion and defeat
- Work through inevitable power struggles with your child in a balanced and effective way
- Enhance the quality of your relationship with your child, while supporting their developing sense of self
Light On Anxiety can assist you in learning to:
- Identify and reconnect with what enhances your sense of vitality.
- Recognize your current patterns that impede your ability to make room for your own needs.
- Create a realistic, balanced lifestyle that incorporates the things that are important to both you and your child.
Intentionally commit to engaging in behaviors and activities in line with your personal values.
Light On Anxiety can assist you in learning to:
- Identify unrealistic parenting expectations and how they keep you far away from the parent you want to be.
- Embrace imperfect parenting with compassion and a growth-oriented mindset.
- Shift from parent guilt to resilience by aiming for ‘good enough,’ in service of valued (and imperfect) living.
- Take meaningful action and put a stop to avoidance and procrastination.
Sample Mindful Parenting Exercise
When parenthood calls for jam-packed agendas, racing thoughts, and multitasking, mindful parenting allows for increased connection, fulfillment, and joy in the present with your child and family.
Take a moment to complete the following 2 part exercise and really notice the difference in your experiences.
Part 1
- Sit down with your child and ask how their day is going.
- Ask your child to simply speak for 1 minute about their day.
- Your job is to partially attend to what your child is saying while at the same time attending to all other thoughts and feelings that show up. Feel free to think of what you need to get done, what else you’ve got going that day, if this is a good use of your time, etc.
Part 2
- For the second half of this exercise, ask your child to continue telling you about their day for 1 more minute.
- This time your job is to practice mindfully attending to the things your child is saying.
- When your thoughts and feelings surface and intrude on the present moment with your child, practice noticing and acknowledging the thoughts and feelings and then gently bring your attention back to your child and all that they are sharing with you.
Compare and contrast these two experiences.
After you try the above exercise, ask your child to guess which mental state (mindless or mindful) was which.
Next, reverse roles and have your child be the listener and you be the speaker. Have them either mindfully or mindlessly attend to you and then you guess which mental state was which. Together, discuss how it felt to be on the receiving end of mindful vs. mindless attention and how it felt to be the one providing either mindful or mindless attention.
Keep your family on a mentally healthy path forward
Book a time at a Light On Anxiety location or schedule a virtual session.
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How to Calm Your Stressed Out Parent Brain
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