From Tea Habazin, Behavior Health Specialist

Dear Parents/Guardians,
Our 7th Grade school counselor, Maya Dougherty, and I, Behavioral Health Specialist, Tea Habazin, are wanting to potentially offer a program for parents called Reflective Parenting and want to check for interest.
What is reflective parenting and how participating may benefit you and your child(ren)? The Reflective Parenting model introduces an approach to parenting that aims to promote family relationships and reduce parent-child conflicts. The idea is to help parents develop a better understanding of their child’s emotions and behaviors, helping the child to feel both understood and of value. The approach also helps to de-escalate difficult situations and reduces behavioral and emotional outbursts. Reflective Parenting is a model of parenting based on theoretical ideas from mentalization – the ability of a parent to understand the thoughts, feelings, and intentions behind the behavior of both themselves and their child.
This service is aimed at parents who are experiencing moderate problems in the relationship with their children, and where children are exhibiting moderate problems in their behavior and socio-emotional functioning across different contexts. This program does not offer solutions to specific behaviors or a set of strategies that it claims will work in a specific situation with any child. Rather, what it does offer is teaching you to think differently about yourself (as a parent) and your child, which will benefit both of you enormously. It promotes the idea that children’s behavior has meaning and intention. Reflective parenting helps you to think about your child’s inside story, as well as your own. Sometimes it is difficult to focus on the why – the feelings and thoughts underlying behavior – in parenting, due to internal and external influences. We are hoping that through this course, you can develop skills and enhance your awareness in order to observe yourself more from the outside, and to see your child more from the inside.
It is a manualized program developed by the Anna Freud Centre in London, UK, and is carried out over 8 weeks, with meetings once a week for 120 minutes. It is done as a closed group, which means people can’t drop in and out, and there is a maximum of 12 participants per group. The group provides both psychoeducation (there are slides and discussion points) and active support (sharing stories and struggles as well as successes with other parents). It would be done online, via Webex or Zoom. It is targeted at parents of children between 5 – 13 years old. Even if your child attending Niu Valley is soon to age out of that group, if you have other younger children, you’d be welcome in the group (even if they are not students of Niu Valley just yet).
If this sounds interesting to you and you would want to participate, please fill out a brief questionnaire below – if we get enough responses, we will contact the interested parents to see if we can form the group and start as soon as possible. The questionnaire is mostly to determine if enough parents would be available at offered times (we understand that this may be a little complicated for parents working full-time, with set schedules). If you are not available at any of the offered time slots, but are interested in participating, please indicate under “other” what time would work for you. Thank you in advance!
Reflective Parenting – availability questionnaire