Parents live and parent in an eco-system inundated, and sometimes driven by, technological demands, priorities, and decisions. The virtual world impacts children and teens on every level while parents scramble, often stressed and overwhelmed, to make the best choices for their child’s optimal development. As technology grows to encompass more of daily life, the expectations on parents grow as well, presenting unprecedented challenges.

One major challenge of living in a technological age is that most of us unintentionally take on a pervasive, often unconscious, mechanistic worldview. This way of seeing the world ironically is outdated for our complex world. Yet a mechanistic mindset often drives parents for seeking coaching. They are looking for answers based on a mechanistic fix-it approach to child-rearing. “Here’s the problem, how do we fix it?” And often, unfortunately, the child is seen as “the problem.” When we contrast this with a living system approach, we now can truly help the parents resolve challenges with their children and even more, help them learn sustainable solutions in the process.

In this webinar, Gloria DeGaetano founder and CEO of the Parent Coaching Institute explains how a living system approach gives coaches important language distinctions, foundational principles, and strength-based coaching techniques to help parents gently move from a fix-it mentality and into a growth mindset.

We will explore language and concepts such as emergence, uncertainty, rhythm, adaptation and ambiguity and apply these to help common ways parents may be stuck to catalyze a meaningful change process for themselves and for their children. We will see how the principles of both/and, self-organization, and identity as a major self-referencing system, shift viewpoints naturally and engage new creative ideas. We will consider the significance of holding an image toward the preferred future (The Creative Tension model developed by Peter Senge, made popular by Robert Fritz and elegantly applied by David Cooperrider in Appreciative Inquiry) to help parents align with a living systems viewpoint to effectively and efficiently resolve their challenges. We will discuss other coaching techniques such as reframing, normalizing, and recapping that can help us amplify parents’ strengths and increase sustainability potential, as they now understand themselves as generative humans with vast untapped potential.

By exploring new language options, a few living system principles and coaching techniques, participants will be inspired (and maybe surprised!) by how naturally we can overcome resistance, blocks, and decreased motivation and instill interest, curiosity and increased aliveness with struggling parents. A living system approach works so well because it aligns so well with who we really are!

Key Takeaways

• Understand how a living system thinking paradigm paradoxically prepares families for human thriving in a complex, uncertain AI world.
• Learn a “Two-Basket” Technique to help parents see and respect the whole of their experiences and helps shift from a fix-it mentality toward a growth mindset.
• Apply new language options, a few living system principles and the Creative Tension Model to support parents more effectively in our technological age.