Mum of children 7 and 5 – Make a difference to other parents

Before I started the course, I was a per­son that seemed to get angry and frus­trated over the small­est of things, I felt I was over­loaded with work and kids and find­ing it really hard to jug­gle every­thing and con­se­quently let­ting myself and the peo­ple around me down, which resulted in arguments.

I could see the effects of this on my chil­dren and how they responded to a sit­u­a­tion, which was to shout, there seemed to be a real lack of respect and com­mu­ni­ca­tion in our fam­ily and I just felt myself going around in cir­cles and didn’t really enjoy life. I wanted to break this cir­cle but did not know how.

When I saw the advert for the Par­ent Cham­pion Course, it felt like some­one had read my mind; I rang to sign up straight away. It took me a cou­ple of weeks to open up to the rest of the group and really express myself deeply and I believe this was due to believ­ing oth­ers would judge me and my sit­u­a­tion, but as time went on, I real­ized every­one in the group was in the same boat, my trust grew and it was a relief to talk about my sit­u­a­tion and I came out of the course feel­ing empow­ered and know­ing I could change my situation.

The Par­ent Cham­pion course has helped me by firstly look­ing at myself and chang­ing things about myself, just mak­ing small changes has had such an impact to my fam­ily life. The two most impor­tant tools I have gained from this course were lis­ten­ing and chang­ing my thought process. I have learnt to lis­ten to my chil­dren, actu­ally in-depth lis­ten­ing, sit­ting there and really get­ting to know what they’re try­ing to say and try­ing to under­stand it by ask­ing them open ques­tions, which helped them to express them­selves a lot more which helped them to com­mu­ni­cate and express their feel­ings and emo­tions, I in return would also open up and express how I felt about things.

The sec­ond tool was the change my thought process, just under­stand­ing I could change my thought process at any time and react dif­fer­ently to sit­u­a­tions, for instance instead of shout­ing, I could just walk away, calm down and then deal with the sit­u­a­tion, I found this quite hard to do but, reflect­ing on sit­u­a­tions that I have used this skill in, makes me more deter­mined to continue.

Towards the end of the course I felt that things weren’t a prob­lem and more of a chal­lenge, which can be over­come. I have changed my way of think­ing and don’t worry about the small things any­more, chang­ing me has changed my hus­band and chil­dren. It is also a chal­lenge to con­tinue with the changes as it’s so easy to fall back into your old ways, that’s why I feel the weekly Fam­ily Coach­ing Café is a great idea as it gives you a boost and reminds you of where you were and where you are now. It is also pro­vides oppor­tu­ni­ties to make a dif­fer­ence to other peo­ple, by talk­ing about your sit­u­a­tion and to show them how far you have come and that they could achieve the same.”

Mrs R. Parent