Lindsay Trowell, counsellor and parenting coach, will be offering a new program for parents of children with behavioural or developmental challenges.
Trowell provides therapeutic support to families, caregivers and service providers and has 17 years of experience as a caregiver and parent of children with special needs.
She is planning to have the program ready to roll out this summer. Trowell mentioned that self-care is a very important resiliency tool and she wanted to create a flexible program that makes it feasible for parents to participate.
The purpose of the program is to provide parent coaching at a lower cost than one-on-one coaching, while spending the same amount of time with clients and the addition of peer support integration. Trowell said other programs that provide this level of counselling service are usually referral based, but her program provides the opportunity for self-referrals.
The program will span one year and include one cohort of people, roughly 12 families will be involved in this journey together. It will include one or two Zoom conference group meetings each month as well as a Facebook group for peer support. Trowell will also do one private Zoom session with each family per month. Trowell said she prefers to use Zoom because it has more feedback protection and more privacy settings to ensure confidentiality of their discussions.
Trowell said an obstacle parents face when getting help is that they do not have the time, so the group sessions will be recorded and posted on her website, accessible by a link only sent to cohort members, if parents need to access it afterwards. Parents will also be sent populated emails with the curriculum. She also said group sessions can far exceed what she can accomplish one-on-one because it creates community. In group sessions, some parents will address problems that perhaps other families haven’t encountered yet, or thought of, allowing more breadth and depth of topics.
A summertime start means Trowell will begin by giving parents tips on how to travel with their children, preparing parents for communicating their child’s needs with a new teacher, education planning, and how to be there for their child, she said. As the school year starts and progresses she will address holidays, milestone events, dealing with external societal pressures and how to approach them with the children.
Trowell is planning on rolling out another five or six programs based on other areas she specializes in. Trowell feels her strongest area to provide help is for adolescents, some who have at-risk behaviours.
For more information about the program, people can contact Trowell through her website at lindsaytrowell.com.
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