Parent Coaching:
Coaching is our solution-focused approach, providing immediate answers to your parenting questions. During a home or office visit we discuss your individual parenting style, values, and priorities.
We come to know your family’s unique needs and balance of energy and time. We address specific concerns and questions with targeted strategies and creative problem solving.
Mobile Parent Coaching:
See our separate page for a complete listing of Telephone and Email Parent Coaching options.
We also work with parents in groups. Our Parenting Talks provide parents
opportunities to share ideas about aspects of family life and child-rearing.
Family-Life Coaching:
We address more practical concerns such as time management,
household organization, and physical fitness through home visits. These
vital issues are central to everyone’s needs. Even small changes can
yield profound benefits for all family members.
Co-parent Coaching for Separating or Divorced Couples:
Most couples find it difficult to separate or divorce amicably. Those with children have even greater issues to resolve. Anger and resentment are hard to avoid. Even the most loving parents may say and do things that damage the fragile balance of a separated family, inadvertently putting at risk the children they want to protect.
Family Matters NY believes a child’s needs always come first. We coach separating or divorced couples towards cooperative relationships focused on the welfare of their children. We address specific issues that are sources of conflict, and troubleshoot issues that have potential for future disruption.
We also offer co-parent coaching to individual parents when practical or emotional issues make joint sessions impossible.
New Parent Support:
A first baby brings much joy. But the first year of parenting can also take an emotional toll – post-partum blues, and feelings of being overwhelmed and isolated are common. Home visits enable new parents to talk through these issues. We join you in the flow of your day, eliminating the exhausting prospect of trips to an office with a baby in tow.
Also, relationship difficulties often develop in the year and a half after the baby arrives. In our Transition to Parenthood Workshop, we teach skills that help couples stay connected and become a great parenting team. Babies are welcome, childcare is provided, and the chance to chat with other new parents is available.
Psychotherapy:
Psychotherapy makes sense when deeper issues such as depression, anxiety, family or couples conflict arise. We can work with you on these issues, in short- or long-term explorations. Sessions can take place in your home; if a more neutral environment is desired, our Soho office is also available.
Community Offerings:
Family Matters NY is available for speaking engagements at schools, community centers, support groups, and other places where parents congregate. Our Transition to Parenthood Workshops and Parenting Talks provide opportunities to share knowledge in fun and informative ways. Our topic lists are always evolving and we welcome your suggestions or requests.
We offer guidance in the areas listed below. For more detailed descriptions, click on individual headings. For information regarding fees and scheduling, call us at:
(212) 502-7979
COACHING:
PSYCHOTHERAPY:
–PRENATAL AND POSTPARTUM COUNSELING
SPECIAL WORKSHOPS:
–TRANSITION TO PARENTHOOD WORKSHOP
–CREATIVE ARTIST/PARENT WORKSHOP
PARENT COACHING
Sleep strategies:
Family Matters approaches sleep issues with broad-minded flexibility. We believe no strict rules apply, as each family’s needs and schedules are different. Some children work well with consistent bed and nap time rituals, others thrive with a more fluid approach. Additionally, as children grow their sleep requirements shift dramatically, and reliable strategies become obsolete, literally overnight. When addressing your family’s sleep issues, we keep in mind optimal sleep, restful play, active play, and work times for each family member. Our goal is to maximize and structure sleep time in so far as possible and necessary.
Effective limit setting and communication:
We offer suggestions and tactics for effective limit setting and clear communication with your child, modeling our techniques and coaching you as you try them yourself. With our guidance, complicated family dynamics can be examined, understood, and freshly approached. We are particularly interested in the use of expressive play and affection with children as opportunities for connection and to help children allay their fears and face challenges.
Creative Play:
Play time is fun for children, but it is also when they are hard at work trying to make sense of the world. Children test out appropriate social behavior through games and fantasy play. They also express and sort through fears, grief, anger, and life challenges, and integrate developmental steps. The parent who plays with his/her child has a great opportunity to help that child develop healthy values and good social skills, and to provide an open, accepting channel for feelings. Yet many adults find it difficult to get down on the floor and play spontaneously with their children. Not all grown-ups are comfortable being silly or wildly creative, but we believe all grown-ups have the capacity to be playful. Our goal is to help you find a comfortable way to engage in creative play, suitable to your temperament and style.
TIME MANAGEMENT
Time management is often one of the first things to go when a couple or a single becomes a family. The unpredictable rhythms and demands of children throw even the most efficient parent off-kilter. Each family member is affected by the way other members use or mis-use time. When schedules conflict, loved ones are at odds and resentment brews. Suddenly it seems there is no time for work or play. The solution to such seemingly unresolvable conflicts can be quite simple. Family Matters will offer you concrete time management strategies tailored to your family’s needs and help you find a way to fit it all in.
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HOUSEHOLD ORGANIZATION
A home with children, especially young ones, is bound to be messy. Sometimes it is hard to think and act clearly among the disarray. The more efficiently a home is organized, the more time and energy there is for the fun aspects of family life. Family Matters will help you arrange your household in a manner and style that suits you. We will help you tweak systems you may already have in place, and make suggestions for new ways to get things organized. Your home may not end up camera ready, but it will feel more comfortable and functional.
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FAMILY FITNESS
Finding time for exercise while contending with the immediate demands of family life can be a frustrating challenge. Many parents sacrifice some degree of physical fitness in order to be available for their children. Before you know it weeks, months, even years have gone by without any attention to your physical fitness. While we fully support all efforts towards increasing parent-child contact, we also know how important it is to have a healthy, strong body.
Family Matters can help you find the time, place, and means to restore your body. We offer techniques culled from our backgrounds as dancers, fitness instructors, and personal trainers. If it is impossible for you to leave home for exercise, we will construct a regime that works for you in your home. We can also construct programs for overall family fitness, addressing each individual’s needs in the context of togetherness and fun.
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PRENATAL AND POSTPARTUM COUNSELING
Right before, and in the first weeks after a birth, it is difficult to get to a therapist’s office. With so many intense feelings and issues coming up at this time, we believe parents of newborns need access to support. Anxieties about labor and birth, a desire to process the labor experience, post-partum depression, relationship problems, body image issues, worries about the responsibility of parenting can become highlighted and intensified. The chance to talk to someone about all of these concerns can be invaluable at this time. We offer home visit counseling sessions on a short term basis so that these concerns can be addressed as needed.
We are available to provide crisis intervention therapy for parents struggling with difficult pregnancies, who have had complicated or traumatic labors, or who have had babies born prematurely and/or with physical problems.
We also offer Transition to Parenthood Workshop, a special couple’s workshop for new parents and parents-to-be, created by John Gottman, Ph.D. and Julie Gottman, Ph.D. For more information, please click on “Special Workshops”.
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INDIVIDUAL CHILD/PLAY THERAPY
Sometimes children struggle with serious issues parents cannot address on their own. These children may need individualized attention and intervention. Using our skills as clinical psychotherapists, trained in psychodynamic, family systems and play therapy, we work with such children one on one. If the child’s needs dictate, we can use our office to provide a focused and comfortable environment.
Family Matters believes it is vital for the whole family to stay involved in the therapeutic process. Therefore, parents and siblings are periodically invited to join in sessions. Individual child/play therapy is serious and clinical in its objective, but can also be fun and healing for the entire family.
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COUPLES AND FAMILY THERAPY
Family Matters can provide couples and family therapy in your home or in our office. These sessions offer an opportunity to address family members’ concerns, and relationship dynamics in more depth. There is time to explore how childhood history is impacting your couple relationship and parenting, and to create shifts and changes that help to dissolve unwanted patterns. Specific communication techniques and relationship skills that create connection and empathy are integrated into the therapy process.
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