Parenting Support

You knew that parenting was going to be hard work. But maybe you are wondering, “is it supposed to be this hard?”

Raising a kid with big feelings and big behaviors (we lovingly call them BigBigs) IS harder. Raising kids with disabilities comes with challenges, frustrations, and worries that can be overwhelming. But you are not alone. The Village Well supports parents with effective tools that work for BigBigs. We guarantee that you will see significant progress after three sessions with one of our coaches.

Our Method

Ed Center developed our parent support curriculum from many sources including brain science, psychology, education pedagogy, and wisdom from multiple cultures. These are the basics:

The Positive Parenting Program or Triple P™ is a parenting curriculum originating in Australia. It is the only curriculum with proven evidence-based results for families of children with disabilities. Triple P is the foundation of our work.

Adlerian psychology focuses on a child’s search for belonging and significance as the primary drivers of behavior. We take Alfred Adler with a healthy dose of suspicion. He was one of the founders of modern psychology who studied Austrian women with neuroses and extrapolated his findings to create theories for all of humanity. Still - we find his models useful and effective in many cases.

Triple P’s provides limited support for parental regulation, in other words, helping you stay calm when your kid is not. We use techniques from mindfulness meditation and cognitive behavioral therapy to help parents shift from triggered reaction to prepared response. Don’t worry, we won’t have you sitting on a meditation cushion for hours. Often this work leads to realizations around both the cultural wisdom and intergenerational wounds that we inherit from our families. We help you unpack both.

In traditional child-rearing practices around the world, we find these common values: community care (our village), communal learning and healing, family connection, core family values, a strong sense of purpose, practices around health and wellness, giving children space for independence, unstructured play, and self-expression (yes, including our kiddos with disabilities), clear rules and boundaries, processes for conflict and repair. We help families tap into their own traditions and create these structures in their homes.