Help for Parents from Business Training

How can business help parents? Simple – we’ll sell your children. Only joking.

I lead business training courses and in these participants who are also parents often say, “Wow, that’s great, I can use that with my kids” or similar. The joke has become they get a free “help for parents from business” workshop as well as the business training course. With this in mind and my impending uncledom 🙂 I have decided to write an article on this area explicitly rather than just helping parents by mistake. Please note, I am not a parent but have worked with children on five continents since I was one in various fields, so know a bit, but not a lot about children. I am including what parents on my training courses have told me is most useful.

Stress Management Training
Children are really stressful (as well as wonderful). Mindfulness, embodied techniques, good social support and cognitive reframing are all very useful for parents. Here are my top stress management resources and tips. I am particularly interested in resilience training currently and being a parent seems all about this! The research shows that talking about feelings, social support, good physical health and the meaning people make of events are all important for resilience.

Time Management Training
One reason I am in awe of anyone who raises children is that I wonder how they get anything done as kids are so demanding??!!!? With that in mind here are my top time management tips. Being able to say no and ask for help are critical as is understanding when you have made a commitment, and when children wreck your plans – how to renegotiate commitments in a way which looks after relationships and dignity.

Communication Training
Communicating with children and teenagers (retch) can be demanding. Good emotional intelligence skills are essential – listening often being the one that training course participants find the most useful, and I have noticed working with children that those that seem healthiest have parents who can listen well and encourage them to both express and manage their emotions. Looking for underlying needs, separating observations from evaluations and making clear requests are also all very helpful communication skills. Here are my top communication tips.

Leadership Training
Being a parent is being a leader. After about two years age children have to be lead and the core leadership skills for business people are the same for parents. I work with “embodied” approaches to leadership in particular which are particularly good with young people who pay more attention to what you do and communicate non-verbally than what you say. Here are some further details on leadership training (and a video). Note that good leadership is authentic (children have great BS detectors), and leading by threats and coercion will only get you so far (sooner or later you will get either rebellion or resentment). And as a final thought I would remember that all good leadership is servant leadership.

I hope these have helped – it is not my intention to tell anyone how to parent, only to offer what I have learnt form the business training world. Feedback welcome.