I started seeing a family due to concerns the mom was having with her two year old son. Mom is a childcare provider as well. I initially saw the mom and son for some in-home therapy where I shared play therapy strategies including child-directed and Theraplay, sprinkled with some Conscious Discipline®. The family was enrolled in Parents As Teachers and the parent educator had shared Conscious Discipline® with the mom several months before I started working with them. The child was evaluated for special education and started receiving comprehensive services last spring. All through my services with mom and child, the mom insisted that the child was “bad” and that he was the one that needed to be fixed. She also talked about her husband’s problems and the problems they were having in the marriage as his fault and that he needed to make some changes. I stopped seeing them clinically due to the addition of special education services, mom’s schedule and my own.
In January of last year, through collaboration with Child Care Aware as a part of the KELC grant, I started co-facilitating a Conscious Discipline® class for childcare providers that met once a month. I encouraged this mom to attend and she did. It ran for 10 months and she attended all the sessions – except for one when she had a baby. At the end of the class we had them share what was most helpful about the class, what was most difficult for them to implement and what they felt was the skill that they had the most success implementing. This mom could hardly get through her “presentation” because she was so emotional about what she had learned. She said she realized SHE was the one that needed to change, not her child or her husband and through that realization she has seen remarkable change in both of them and her relationships with them. Her child is in a 3-5 Head Start classroom where the teacher is very skilled and the child is doing well. The mom credits the class and the variety of opportunities for services (0-3 Parent Educator, myself, professional development classes, and 3-5 Head Start Teacher – which all received funding through the KELC grant). It is through the collaboration and funding that we were able to provided information and support to this family in a variety of avenues and make a difference in their lives.