Why Counselling Can Help You Become A Better Parent And Spouse
Today’s parents live in an increasingly complex world, which makes our parenting duties more complex and difficult than any time in history. It is very unlikely that modern parents have had received sufficient help and guidance from their own twentieth-century parents to learn the necessary emotional skills as to how to act, what to do and how to react in stressful situations, often when balancing work and life.
The concept of being a nurturing dad, or even a stay-at-home dad was unfamiliar parenting territory until the last ten years or so, and now greater demands than are placed on career oriented mothers to achieve work and life balance.
The issues and problems that modern parents encounter and have trouble overcoming often go missed or completely ignored in the hustle and bustle of family life. So what can a modern parent do to improve both their emotional health, inter-personal and parenting skills, so as to fulfill and enjoy their modern parenthood duties?
Why “Counselling”?
Professional counselling has been defined as a collaborative effort between a counsellor and a client to identify goals and possible solutions to emotional problems, and that aim to improve communication skills. Let’s take a look at how counselling in its various forms can be an invaluable aid that can help parents better cope with the pressures of parenting.
Counselling for couples normally involves dealing with conflict over parenting, money and sex.
Parenting Counselling
This can be especially important when two parents have completely differing styles of parenting. These styles are sometimes broken down into categories:
Permissive – where parents are loving but do not want to give guidelines or impose parameters to children for risk of upsetting them;
Authoritarian – where parents always assert that they know best and impose excessive discipline:
Authoritative – where parents react with tact and responsiveness to a child’s emotional needs, whilst still enforcing consistent standards and limits for the child
So it can be seen that is the two parents fall into different parenting style categories the situation is almost certain to cause conflict. Also, it is very likely that before marrying that couples discuss religion and politics, but rarely discuss in advance how they would deal with a 2-year old’s tantrums!
Money Counselling
Another way that a professional counsellor can help parents is how to deal with the almost unavoidable issues caused by family finances where their differing parenting styles come into play. If you search Google, you will find a multitude of searches for help with questions such as
financially dependent parents
adults financially dependent on parents
at what age should your parents stop supporting you
son keeps borrowing money
my parents are in so much debt
parents enabling grown children
The average American household carries $137,063 in debt, according to the Federal Reserve's latest numbers. Yet the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the median household income was just $59,039 in 2016, suggesting that many Americans are living beyond their means.
As children grow up, the financial responsibilities of providing for them, their education and more can mount rapidly, placing strain on the relationship. Money counselling and therapy can help parents to find common goals and their feelings of stress, and to uncover what aspects of their upbringing may have caused them to have an unhealthy relationship with money.
Sex Counselling
The demands of parenting can often cause a gulf to form between parents in regard to their sexual needs and desires, and lead to awkward communication issues to form. There seems to be little or no time for each other, so little energy left after attending to the needs of growing children. If left undealt with, this can lead to feelings of loneliness and lack of self-esteem, especially if the parents have a mismatched sex drive.
Sex counselling can help parents to reconnect with each other emotionally and physically, and rediscover romance, and teach the couples methods to work through emotional and physical difficulties that contribute to sexual issues.
The Takeaway
Therapy and counselling for parents can be an essential aid in helping parents to not only improve their parenting skills, but at the same time to evolve and thrive as people, and happy well-adjusted parents will be better able to raise happy well-adjusted children.
So if any of the problems described in this article resonate with you, do not hesitate to seek counselling help as soon as possible, and get back on the path to a fulfilling relationship with your spouse or partner and enjoy your parenting.