Coaching vs. Therapy in Parent Coaching

There is an important difference between coaching and therapy. Trained social workers, people with Masters or Doctorates in Psychology, and other professionals who have been through years and years of education are the ones who are able to deal with past trauma and mental health issues. We as coaches don’t specialize in this approach and are not equipped to handle these areas of concern.

One of the easiest ways to think about it is that therapy should really be used for anything that is looking backwards into the past. Coaching is incredibly supportive from the present moment going forward. 

Here’s a real-life comparable scenario: if you break your leg, and it requires surgery, you need a surgeon who has the expertise and skills to do the correct surgery, using specific skills and techniques so that you can heal. However, if you wanted to make that leg stronger, you would go to a personal trainer. Your trainer would help and support you through accountability, learning new skills, through patience, compassion and empathy, to build your leg muscles back up. So, I tell our parenting coaches all the time that we don't need to re-break people's legs in order to get amazing results with their families.

As coaches, it is not our job to rehash people's childhood trauma, or have them re-parent themselves. Although they'll start to do that naturally, as they go through their work, our work is to meet them where they are, help them define their goals and values and to live into their intentions going forward. 

Our job as parenting coaches is to explore with parents the way that they would love to show up in their family, to define and articulate their intentions for parenting their kids, and then support them with new skills, accountability, empathy and compassion, to create a new, better experience in their life, going forward.

There’s a big difference between being a coach and a therapist. I love coaching because I love the idea that we can help people have more and more of what they want in their lives. Out of integrity, I want to make sure that our coaches really stay in their lane, stay in their wheelhouse and refer out to therapists when needed.