I am a parent coach / child and family therapist with a private practice called Enjoy Parenting Again. I help parents families and kids to make life more rewarding and enjoyable, according to their own definitions. That can be anything from helping parents to learn some tried and true approaches to eliciting cooperation from kids, to helping parents and children connect or reconnect emotionally, to doing individual work with a child who has some specific issues that need some support and guidance to more through. My role varies a great deal with different clients and with the different sorts of work we do together. For some I'm doing parent coaching, which emphasizes building new skills and is oriented to the present and future rather than the past. With other clients we are looking more at emotional processes, which often get into exploring their relationships and their family of origin. I also do couples and individual counseling. One sort of work sometimes flows into another. It is not uncommon for clients to begin wanting to dig into the practical with some parent coaching and end up learning that they want to do more work, that going a little deeper might be helpful. For a variety of reasons I see clients only in office and do phone appointments only when clients aren't able to come in.

EDUCATION | B.S. Elementary Education M.A. Counseling Psychology

HOW TO GET STARTED | For what I'm doing, you'll need a master's level social work or counseling psychology (or some equivalent degree). To experiment and see if this is really a good fit for you before make the commitment to one of these higher education degrees, you might get trained in a parenting class curriculum and see if working with the concerns of parents and families is something that really suits you. There are also lots of programs that work with families and children that you could volunteer with in order to get a feel. If you already have a counseling degree, teaching parenting courses is still a great way to get yourself some exposure and to find out more about what sort of family concerns you enjoy most and what populations you might want to work with. Another route is to get some training in coaching rather than in counseling, that will change what sorts of issues you are qualified to work with, but if you don't intend on doing couples counseling or trauma work for instance, and are really only interested in doing the coaching aspects of what I do, then the Master's degree in counseling may be a different sort of training than you would want. Also many people in my field don't begin a private practice as soon as I did. They do agency work instead where the supervision for licensure comes with they job, rather than having to pay for it privately as I have. There are lots of different ways to get started depending on your circumstances. If it suits you this can be a very rewarding line of work that will keep you on your toes and give you the satisfaction of helping others to enjoy life more fully, as well as the contributing to the a solid emotional foundation for the upcoming generation.

MUST HAVE TRAITS | Can handle ambiguity (this one is a biggie), Constant curiosity, Creativity, Humor, Relatively grounded, Doesn't get offended easily, Able to work with wide array of personality styles and with people whose values differ from yours, Caring about others is a central part of your personality, Able to self-motivate and self-supervise, Able to learn from others.

how I got started | I've always loved psychology even before I knew it was called psychology. I always was interested in people's back stories, and more generally I've always had an interest in knowing what makes people tick. I should have gone to school for psychology in the first place. My family was much more familiar with teaching than they were with psychology or counseling so that was what they were willing to help me go to school for. There's a lesson there, isn't there? I got my B.S. in elementary education and I taught school for ten years. I really enjoyed working with the kids. It quickly became evident that I was much more interested in my relationships with them and working with them on practical issues anywhere from teaching self-talk skills when they were facing work that was challenging, to helping them to work out issues on the playground. I also got interested in teaching parenting classes and did some of that on the side as an avocation. My interests lied in relationships, teaching kids to problem solve and in helping adults to see how treating children as being capable was a powerful route to having them act more capably. In the academic arena I grew frustrated in teaching with being held accountable for variables that were outside my realm of control. For many kids their academics weren't going to improve much until something shifted at home. After grading my hundredth spelling test I knew that I wasn't going to get much more satisfaction out of that process. I also was never great with coming up with elaborate integrated units. I was just more interested in being with kids than with creating curriculum, planning and grading.

why this job?| Just out of teaching school, I guess I wanted to explore something more removed from working with kids, hence I studied counseling adults. It took me a few years to get my masters degree as I went to school part time during the evening and watched my daughter during the day. By the time I was in my last year, I ended up teaching some parenting classes similar to ones I'd taught while teaching along with my principal who was a good friend. My intention was to bring in income to start paying student loans as well as to explore some new parent education curriculum that had grown considerably since my earlier stint teaching parenting classes. The weren't profitable in a monetary sense, but along with my daughter being born, they brought me back to my love of working with kids, and working with their parents in a whole new way. Once I'd finished my degree in counseling psychology I added parent coaching to the classes I taught and the speaking engagements I was doing. Before I knew it my practice was oriented to working with kids and families. Once I got going, it became clear that the decade that I'd put into teaching had given me a foundation that a good number of people who go into a counseling masters program right after undergrad don't have. I had a good sense of what young kids were like at each grade level. I knew for instance what a typical second grader looked like, what her cognitive capabilities were like and how she interacted. It wasn't abstract at all for me. That base of practical knowledge turned out to be very valuable. Having a few years of life experience before doing family counseling was worthwhile as well.

why I love this job!| On a daily basis I am able to help people with practical problems. It is hard to describe how good it feels to see someone come in frustrated, angry or discouraged and see their growth interacting with their kids and spouses. Having found some practical ways to approach the daily challenges of parenting and/or being a member of a couple, they find life more rewarding. For me working with children is now a very basic part of who I am. Because of that I am able to connect with them very quickly. That is comforting for both the kids and their parents when they are mustering the courage to ask for help in an area where society gives us signals that we shouldn't need it. The job is intellectually challenging. I am always looking for better ways to understand families, couples, individuals and children. And I'm always on the look out for more effective ways to help them. The amount of information there is going on in the room when clients first come in is daunting. Take two parents and their child for instance. I'm looking at the child's temperament (emotional reactivity and regulation traits that are inborn), the kind of parenting the child's temperament elicits, the family of origin experiences that each parent brings to the family, each of the parent's temperaments, and the way that each of the parents relate to one another. And that is just getting started. Part of the challenge is knowing among all this information what is important to look for first. If you grow bored with doing counseling it won't be for a lack of things going on. It is very satisfyingly complex. I enjoy the way I've got my practice set up. Working with just families would be too draining for me. Seeing individuals, couples, parents on their own and whole families allows me to switch gears frequently enough that I don't burn out, feeling like I'm doing the same thing day after day, session after session. Something new is always going on.

my typical day| Two days a week, I work from home, completing charting, thinking about particular families and clients and what might be a best next step with them, completing bookkeeping, mailing off invoices, etc. On the three weekdays, and the Saturday morning I see clients I always arrive early enough to get settled and to review notes and to make sure I'm grounded and ready to be fully available for the clients. When I see clients back to back, I don't have much time between to take notes, record payments, etc, so I usually save those for a break, for after all my clients that day, or even for of my working from home days. Add in some occasional speaking engagements and meeting with other professionals for networking purposes and I've got a pretty full plate. Since I only want to work part time currently, I see clients on Monday through Wednesday and on Saturday. This allows me to sublet my office on Thursday and Friday to reduce overhead costs. Keeping my office days clustered together also prevents getting a part time schedule scattered across an entire week, which would mean lots of trips back and forth from home to the office. Currently I'm using the flexibility this schedule affords to spend time my daughter and wife. Incidentally having enough time to not be so rushed to do homework, get out the door in the morning etc, decreases the family stress level. When I want full time work, it doesn't take long to adjust a couple of knobs a few notches and I have more clients coming in.

what they are | Every family and couple brings their full energy to the table. When I see families back to back this can be draining. When I did conferences as a teacher they felt similar in the energy that each family brings. And I need to be ready to meet that energy level one way or another. Being ready for this on the days that don't go smoothly at home or in other areas is definitely challenging. Starting a private practice more often than not requires a lot of up front effort and money before things become profitable. At my degree level anyway, this is not a profession that you would want to go for to make large amounts of quick money. To be effective you have to care. Caring about how things are going for clients has its price because when they are seeking help it is because things aren't going well. Striking a balance between providing for clients and being fully emotionally available for them; and making sure to have enough left for my family, and for myself is an ongoing challenge that every therapist faces.

all about growth | Since this is my own business there are a relatively unlimited number of directions I could go. Since I currently work part time, I can go full time. If I feel like spending relatively more time on some aspect of therapy or coaching I can go get additional training and explore and master other approaches. Even within one domain where I work I can always zero in on something at a finer grained level. For instance I currently don't do a lot of trauma work. But that is something I have an interest in and would one day like to do more of. When the time is right I can go take some continuing ed classes, and have a new area of emphasis, and recharge my professional batteries.

my website| http://enjoyparenting.blogspot.com