Parenting Support
Child Parent Relationship Therapy
Child Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT) is an evidence based 10 session model designed to support parents and caregivers in their relationship with their children. Parents and caregivers get an opportunity to learn and understand the language of play, while the therapist supports the parents in providing a nurturing and strength-focused environment for their children.
CPRT helps facilitate a secure relationship between parents and caregivers and their child. Parents and caregivers learn to consistently provide love, acceptance, safety and security. Attunement skills allow for an understanding of the child’s behaviors and emotions.
The child’s symptoms are explored but a greater emphasis is placed on understanding the child’s needs.
How Does It Work?
Strengthening positive communication and interactions between parents and their young ones is an essential aspect of CPRT. Parents and caregivers learn and explore strategies that support kids in regulating their emotions. The child’s cues (verbal and non-verbal) are explored in a playful manner, while parents are able to practice reflective listening skills while building their child’s emotional vocabulary.
The therapist collaborates with parents and caregivers and will provide them with information on how to set limits (when necessary) for problem behaviours and utilize principles of play therapy. Parents and caregivers will also engage in at-home sessions while learning how to provide an empathetic, respectful, authentic, accepting, and understanding space in which their child will find safety to explore their own emotions and the relationship with their parents and their world. Subsequently, this naturally enhances the child’s self-esteem as well as the parent’s feeling of confidence. Caregivers often find that their child’s experience of anxiety and disruptive behaviors decrease over time as new skills are solidified.
Each parent, caregiver and child is unique in their experiences which include and are not limited to presenting concerns, family structures, strengths and struggles. As a result, additional sessions may be required. The counselling office offers necessary play supplies for families to engage in CPRT. Outside of the office the therapist will work with the family to develop an environment that has similar supplies and how to create consistent and scheduled play based interactions highlighting the goals of each module.
Any child parent relationship can benefit from this approach. Parents and caregivers recognize how their child’s struggles and behaviours change the way they view, approach and work with their child. There is a longing for both the child, their parent or caregiver to connect in the ways they would like.
Circle of Security
Becoming a parent is a monumental experience in life and with all of the advice thrown at us, it is quickly overwhelming how to decide what is best for our child. Circle of Security Parenting (COSP) is an 8 week immersive and experiential course that teaches a consistent, simple-on-paper (and thus easy to understand and apply) way to make sense of and most importantly how to respond to our children from birth to toddlerhood. Rather than compile hundreds of tools and tricks on how to respond to everything that can happen, COSP provides a simple framework that makes sense of everything our baby might ‘throw at us’ in difficult personalities and challenges, so that we can always know how to respond even when we feel confused and overwhelmed.
In a nutshell, the COSP framework frames the science of a dual-drive explanation of human psychology that we are at any given time mostly driven by either a need for security/safety, or a drive for exploration. As simple as this is, the science underneath it is profound and robust, and in contrast to a ‘million different ways to raise a child’ that is easy to fall into, it provides a straight simple line that has the backing of solid science and sets you up to know how to respond to your child even when you’re overwhelmed and ‘too emotional’, not just when you’re at your best, but when you’re at your worst too.
Through 8 weeks, you’ll learn the foundations of how not only infants but even adults understand and interact with their world, and in the youngest years when life is not too complicated, it is easier to see how this simple framework really does account for so much of our human experience. By applying the COSP framework on your infant/toddler, you will build the foundations of a strong bond that is the core of nearly all good mental health for the rest of their lives.
