The Good Enough Parent Program
You want to raise happy, kind and respectful kids. Kids who have the skills they need to get through life without too many physical or emotional bumps or scrapes. You imagined parenting would feel mostly fulfilling with the inevitable frustration here and there. But the balance of stress and fulfillment is flipped and you’re too exhausted to switch it back. Or you and your partner disagree on what it’s going to take to get there. It feels like you’re stuck in the cycle of meltdown-react-repeat with no signs of progress for any of you.
meltdown
react
repeat
Charts. Plans. Rules. Threats. Ultimatums. They’ve been made and ditched over and over again. You are well aware of the kind of parent you don’t want to be, but haven’t found strategies that work for you in the heat of the moment.
As a busy parent juggling multiple roles and tons of responsibility, you dream of having
- Calm responses to your kids’ attitude and meltdowns
- Patience for the “normal” annoyances of parenting, and
- No more power struggles with your kids!
What if you could get off the hamster wheel and accept that you’re good enough? What if you could gain new parenting skills that get you through the harder moments guilt-free and the reassurance that you’re not missing out on a super secret parenting hack?
*Spoiler alert*
There is NO SUCH THING as a hack for parenting.
If there was, we wouldn’t have 60,000+ options to choose from in the Amazon “parenting books” list.
There are a ton of great parenting books! But they’re not enough. I get it and I can help.
I’m Melissa Terry, PhD.
I’m a clinical psychologist
and a working parent.
I have two kids who keep me on my toes in different ways.
And I parent with a partner who is wonderful AND whose brain thinks differently than mine. What works for one kid (or parent, for that matter) rarely works for the other in our house. I love that for us. 😏And in spite of it all, we’re learning and growing and figuring it out together.
I became a parent in the midst of becoming a psychologist. Talk about personal and professional juggling and two different voices in my head! In those years, I’ve learned that I thrive on:
- Efficiency
- Predictability
- Repeatable processes
- Supportive friendships
Meanwhile, my kids thrive on
- Inefficiency: waking slowly; long, leisurely meals; socks stashed under the couch, etc.
- Exploration: how far can I push my sister before she snaps?
- Creativity: the more steps and the more art supplies involved, the better!
- Rest: a need we can all agree on!
Through it all, I’ve had to get good at creative distractions, creative consequences, and creative ways to calm myself.
If you’re looking for a perfect parent to learn from, you should stop here and continue your search elsewhere. Best wishes on your quest! But if you’re looking for support from another mom who happens to know some things about parenting and child development, who’s climbing her own Mt. Everest of parenting, and who would love to help share your load, then stick around!
In my work with parents, I’ve found that we need a framework, not a checklist or set of rules. No one can follow rules with 100% consistency. Parenting is so complex that we’d need a million rules to prepare us for all of the unique challenges to come. Instead, we have to get to know ourselves better and then have a way of increasing the predictability of our responses. Frameworks are like a well-traveled trail. They give us some general boundaries, a few hard and fast do’s and don’ts, and a lot of room to grow and adapt with our ever-changing kids and circumstances.
Sign up for this program and become a perfect parent in 6 weeks!
Just kidding. I hate cheesy promises like that so I won’t make them here.
What I CAN offer is dedicated time to help you clarify and focus your priorities and build a framework that works for you. I’ll support you and offer my insights. I’ll be available between sessions for quick pep talks, in-the-moment feedback, and trouble-shooting. We’ll highlight the many things you’re doing right, and map out a course for where to go from here.
We’ll get practical. I have scripts and tools that you can pull out when your “emotion brain” is taking over and you’re struggling to keep your cool. It’s not all pie-in-the-sky, touchy feely work. It’ll be rubber-meets-the-road work too. We’ll work hard and maybe cry a bit, but we’ll also laugh. A lot. We have to find and keep a sense of humor about parenting, lest we lose our minds.