Mastering the Art of Parent Engagement: Empower Parents to Be the Change Agent in Their Child’s Treatment

CPD

Planning Committee Disclosure - No relevant relationships

All members of the PESI, Inc. planning committee have provided disclosures of financial relationships with ineligible organizations and any relevant non-financial relationships prior to planning content for this activity. None of the committee members had relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies or other potentially biasing relationships to disclose to learners.  For speaker disclosures, please see the faculty biography.

Handouts

Speaker

Victoria Grinman, PhD, LCSW Related seminars and products

---

Victoria Grinman, PhD, LCSW, is the founder of Permission Slip Parenting™, a groundbreaking approach to guiding parents in connecting to a more fulfilled parenthood journey that supports their joy, confidence and sustained connection and growth with themselves and their child throughout their lifetime. She is an expert in the experience of posttraumatic growth, the parenthood experience, autism and relationships.

Dr. Grinman earned her PhD at Adelphi University and Master of Social Work at Columbia University. She served as a contributing lecturer at Columbia University, Boston College and Adelphi University, and speaks nationally to professionals dedicated to the healthcare arena. Victoria is a trauma-informed and trained yoga and mindfulness instructor, a certified aromatherapist and a dedicated long-time clinician volunteer for Experience Camps, a free one-week grief camp experience for children who have lost a significant person in their life. She nurtures Growing Kind Minds LLC, a private therapy and coaching practice and lives with her sassy yorkie, Vanna Goh Goh, named after Vincent van Gogh. She resides in New York City.

 

Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Dr. Victoria Grinman maintains a private practice and has employment relationships with Hudson Valley Professional Development and New York Therapy Placement Services. She receives a speaking honorarium and recording royalties from PESI, Inc. She has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.
Non-financial: Dr. Victoria Grinman is a member of the National Association of Social Workers and the New York State Society for Clinical Social Work.

Objectives

1. Evaluate how therapist’s own self-awareness can be used to support parent and caregiver engagement and understanding of their contribution to child outcomes.
2. Analyze trauma from a developmental, psychological, and physiological perspective to understand children’s emotional and developmental needs.
3. Construct effective plans to respond to resistance and challenges when supporting parents and caregivers and children in therapy.
4. Demonstrate how involving parents and caregivers in child therapy will improve child’s treatment goals by engaging parents and caregivers in being models of the kinds of outcomes they want to see (regulating their own nervous systems, teaching them how to speak to their children so they will listen, etc.).
5. Integrate coregulation techniques such as yoga-based exercises/breathing and emotion regulation exercises, to promote more effective parent/caregiver-child interactions.
6. Demonstrate competency in utilizing role play techniques to self-regulate prior to and in sessions with parents.

Outline

• Empower them, inform them, create sustainable change
• Guide parents to be good assessors and solution finders
• Use themselves to support their child - be the best tool (external resource)
• Developing resilience and healing happens in the context of relationships

• Therapist as “influencer” / influencing with integrity
• Teaching parents to know their “why” and intention for the work
• Get parent buy-in to leverage own self-awareness of creating dynamics
• Strategies for teaching parents to be coachable (willing to learn, listen and lead)

• Misconceptions about role and power they have in child’s outcomes
• Disempowered to empowered
• Chaotic and unclear to confident and calm
• Building confidence at every developmental stage
• Parents facing their own challenges –
• Can’t go somewhere with their child they haven’t gone themselves
• What to do when parents think they are always right
• Considering culture and personal family dynamics

• Setting intentions
• Addressing everyone
• Being straightforward and clear
• Containing everyone’s needs/intentions
• Take-aways and wrap-up
• Homework to focus on

• Preparing yourself/nervous system
• Developing own self-awareness and removing blind spots
• What triggers you about parents –
• Hostile, negative, all-knowing, uncoachable, anxious, negative, and more
• Two nervous systems dancing - exercises to do with therapists
• Using your feelings as information
• Letting go of expectations
• Empowering the involved parent to carry forward and self-lead

• Unpacking ways in which parents have influence and ways they don’t
• How parents support the therapy process with their children

• Co-parenting
• When parents remarry-involving new partners in the work

• How to effectively ask for help and build a support network
• Coregulation exercises
• Foster interoception and mindfulness

• Kids inner resources to support themselves
  • Breath, body, and mind
• Parents as child’s resource:
  • Staying regulated
  • Giving child space for big emotions

• The 4 questions you can ask yourself and share with parents that will change their way of being with their kids and help make the best decisions for their child and family

Target Audience

• Psychologists
• Counselors
• Social Workers
• Marriage and Family Therapists
• Educators
• Occupational Therapists
• Occupational Therapy Assistants