Urban upper middle-class parents under domestic stress are increasingly flocking to a new genre of advisory professionals: parenting coaches. These new-age gurus with professional qualifications in child and adolescence development, education, psychology and counseling are providing advice to parents to navigate the challenges of raising children in the disruptive pandemic era – Smiti J.N.

With schools, colleges, and universities countrywide under comprehensive lockdown for over 82 weeks — the world’s longest education shutdown — for fear of contagion by the novel Coronavirus, aka Covid-19 virus, and children learning best as they can, latter day parents of young and teenage children are obliged to discharge responsibilities that parents of preceding generations never experienced or imagined. In the pre-pandemic era, the responsibility of teaching and nurturing children was substantially discharged by teachers. Suddenly, the entire burden of teaching (or ensuring children learn), feeding, nurturing and counseling children and youth has devolved on parents, themselves obliged to work from home.

Confronted with the totally unforeseen and unprecedented challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, a large unquantified number of parents have buckled under the strain. Reports of women and child abuse, forced early marriages, alcoholism and substance abuse are rife. However, it’s safe to assume that these and other criminal acts of commission and omission are spreading in the bottom half of the country’s iniquitous socio-economic pyramid. Urban upper middle-class parents under domestic stress are increasingly flocking to a new genre of advisory professionals: parenting coaches. These new-age gurus with professional qualifications in child and adolescence development, education, psychology and counseling are providing aid and advice to parents to navigate the unique challenges of raising children in the disruptive pandemic era.

“Becoming a parent is natural. Parenting is not. It is a highly developed behavioural science. That’s why since ages, young parents have been seeking and getting advice from their own parents, family elders and later on from doctors, pediatricians and psychologists. Now in the 21st century disrupted by the social media and most recently, the unprecedented pandemic, parenting challenges have multiplied. Parents are confused and afraid of damaging their children’s psyche and lives. That’s why they want to go beyond guidebooks and seek meaningful advice from parenting experts and coaches to guide them through new-age parenting challenges,” says Sushant Kalra, parenting coach and founder of the Delhi-based Parwarish Institute of Parenting (estb. 2008).

For the past 13 years, Kalra has been coaching parents and teachers to nurture nine capabilities within children — “happiness, self-expression, self-confidence, determination, inquisitiveness, exploration ability, humaneness, self-esteem, self-reliance, and independence”. These qualities in children are imperative for developing “no-limitness adults,” he says.

Aarti Shah, a Mumbai-based child and human development specialist who has been coaching parents and teachers for over two decades, believes that latter-day parenting poses unique challenges to parents. She believes that external influences such as the internet, globalisation, rapid urbanisation, and unchecked information explosion have confused and frightened young parents. “With the Covid-19 pandemic mandating isolation and distancing, parents have lost the support of family elders and close-knit local communities. Therefore, parents are turning to social media and friends for inputs and guidance. Unhealthy comparisons, and constant pressure to keep up leads to fear-based parenting. In such circumstances, parenting coaches can play an important role by providing them reliable professional information to practice holistic parenting,” says Shah, a postgraduate in child development of Mumbai University and certified parenting coach from International Coaches Federation of Symbiosis Education, USA.

The unprecedented challenges of the pandemic era apart, parenting coaches are becoming popular because post-liberalisation India’s parents are more evolved and conscious of their obligation to equip themselves with knowledge and skills to do the best by their children. New-age parents want it all — to balance home and work and to be able to quickly flip between child care and nurturance and their own personal aspirations. Therefore, they are unhesitant about consulting parenting coaches to empower them to strike the perfect balance.

“New-age parents want work success as well as wish to be super-parents devoting quality time to their children. Balancing both these aspirations is not easy, and stress, anxiety and burnout are common outcomes. That’s why parents from urban double-income households are turning to parenting coaches to enable them to strike this balance without getting worn out,” says Anu Krishna, a Bengaluru-based neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) trainer and mind coach who conducts ‘conscious parenting’ workshops.

“Conscious parenting focuses on parents and advises them how mindfulness can drive parenting choices. It encourages parents to look inward rather than strive to “correct” children’s behaviour. In my workshops, I train parents to introspect and evaluate their responses to children, and reflect on choices. When parents are mindful in their interaction with children, the latter feel loved, emotionally secure and empowered to realise their full potential,” adds Krishna, an alumna of the National Federation of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NFNLP), USA who has been conducting parenting workshops for the past ten years.

Evidently in the new era of the internet and YouTube, the pressure on parents of millennials to live up to media standards of super-parents has intensified. A 2018 survey of 2,000 parents in the US by the well-known Michigan-based breakfast food/cereals multinational Kellogg Company, found that parents clock the equivalent of a full day’s work (ten hours) per week getting their children ready for school. The total number of routine tasks parents perform every morning adds up to 43, including supervising children’s morning wash, getting them ready for school, packing the school snack, commuting and even uttering the words “hurry up” more than 500 times per year. Psychologists the world over are warning that parental stress and anxiety can lead to burnout with disastrous consequences for parents and children.

Maullika Sharma, a psychology postgrad of IGNOU, a National Board-certified Health and Wellness coach (USA), certified EAP professional and Bengaluru-based psychologist, counselor and coach, says that even in the pre-pandemic era, parents “led stressful action-packed lives,” and during the 82 weeks close down of education institutions, their stress has multiplied manifold. According to her, the solution for stressed parents is to “look inwards” and become better versions of themselves. “Most often parents pass on their insecurities and anxieties to their children. A parenting coach can train parents to cope with their emotional troubles and teach them to become mindful of their language and action, which will result in positive child behaviour. Parents are the most important influencers in a child’s life and therefore need to be mindful of their words and deeds. The values they want to inculcate in their children are values they need to practice. A parenting coach can help them overcome their insecurities for positive and effective parenting,” says Sharma.

Ideally, given the stress and strains of new-age pandemic era parenting, Anu Krishna (quoted earlier) advises couples to start counseling from the “time the child is in the womb”. “The time to start coaching parents is right from the time when pregnancy is confirmed. You can bring a child into a loving home or into an environment defined by stress and anxiety. Children absorb everything like a sponge. So parents need to start preparing and readying for parenthood as early as possible,” advises Krishna.

Nevertheless parental coaching can be availed at any stage in children’s lives, say the galaxy of parenting experts interviewed by ParentsWorld — during pregnancy, after a child is born, when children are in adolescence and even when they mature into adulthood. There’s no age barrier to acquire guidance to improve parent-child relationship. As parents struggle to cope with pandemic-induced financial and health-related anxieties, they are confronted with an unprecedented challenge of managing children and adolescents pressured by education disruption and forced home confinement.

Dr. Shivani Kapoor, an education and business management postgrad of Allahabad University awarded a Ph D in English literature by Jodhpur’s JNV University, and currently a Jodhpur-based educationist and parent counselor who has been coaching parents for over two decades, believes the pandemic has played “havoc with the mental health of children” and “parents are ill-prepared to address them”. “With schools under prolonged lockdown and in-person interaction with friends drastically limited, children have become impatient, angry, stressed, and indisciplined with many having lost their childhood. Parents, grappling with financial setbacks including job losses and reduced incomes, don’t have the time or patience to cope with children’s behavioural problems. In such circumstances, parents need counselling to ensure children’s emotional and mental well-being. Every parent needs to attend at least one counseling session to become aware of the socio-emotional damage their children have suffered, during the pandemic. Parents need hand-holding to manage children with compassion and sensitivity,” says Kapoor, who also anchors a YouTube channel ‘Home Guru’.

Uttarakhand-based Dipti Mathur, a mother of two boys aged 12 and two is grateful for professional parenting advice. She availed the services of a parent coach to help her address her preteen’s temper tantrums, mobile and gaming addiction, and anger management issues. After five counselling sessions, she realised that the problem was less to do with the child and attributable to the joint family environment at home. The child’s grandparents were too critical of his school report card, often faulting her for not teaching him. Mathur in turn vented her frustrations on her son.

“After a few sessions of professional counseling, I realised that for a child to change his behaviour, parents need to change theirs. Once we started mindfully practising positive and responsible behaviour at home, my son picked up those changes and developed a calmer and positive outlook. I also counselled the grandparents to stop transferring their negativity on to him. Where earlier he would refuse to bathe or talk, he became more communicative and less angry,” says Mathur.

Similarly Neha Katuria, a Chandigarh-based mother of a son (15) and daughter (13), testifies to the beneficial impact of parental coaching. She has been attending parental counseling sessions since 2015, “for pre-emptive reasons before problems blew up”. “Parent counseling sessions are always very helpful. Professional advice on how to manage rebellious teens, learning positive role modeling and one-on-one communication with children without nagging and being judgemental are the positive outcomes of counseling. I recommend parental coaching to all parents without waiting for an emergency. Especially in contemporary times when children have unprecedented access to information on social media, parents should equip themselves with expert advice to manage children effectively,” says Katuria.

Incremental willingness of parents to seek advice and counsel of professional parenting coaches to improve parent-child relationships is likely to intensify in the post-pandemic era as an entire generation of children struggles to make up for the education and socio-emotional damage inflicted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Although currently accessing professional parenting advice is an urban upper middle class phenomenon, it’s a positive socio-economic development that a rising number of parents are becoming aware of the need to avail the services of parenting coaches to raise content, secure and confident children.

“Since confident, decisive parents tend to raise confident, secure children, it’s a very positive development that they are turning to professional coaches to avail expert advice. A parenting coach prepares parents for each developmental stage of their children’s lives and equips them with the skills to cope with children’s behavioural changes,” says Monica Khaneja, a psychology postgraduate of IGNOU and a Delhi-based parenting coach who has been conducting parenting counseling sessions for the past 12 years.

With the Covid-19 pandemic come but not gone, and psychologists, educators, and parenting experts still gauging the full impact and import of damage inflicted upon children’s mental health and education, parenting in the post-pandemic era is likely to become more challenging and demanding. Therefore, the emergence of the new-age parenting coach/guru is a positive and welcome development for millennial parents struggling to nurture happy, confident and successful children in the 21st century VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complexity, ambiguous) world, disrupted by an unprecedented pandemic.

Parenting coaches shortlist

Dr. Pallavi Rao Chaturvedi
Parenting coach & Founder, Get Set Parent, Bhopal
Ph: +91 79745 77181
Email: pallavi@getsetparent.com
Instagram: getsetparentwithpallavi

Sushant Kalra
Founder-Director, Parwarish Institute of Parenting, Delhi
Ph: +91 88025 85595
Email: sushant@parwarish.co.in
Insta: parwarishcares
www.parwarish.in

Dr. Shivani Kapoor
Founder-director, CafeParent, Jodhpur
Ph: +91 97994 28111
Email: shivani@cafeparent.in
Insta: CafeParent
YouTube: HomeGuru with Dr. Shivani Kapoor

Maullika Sharma
Psychologist, counsellor & coach, Bengaluru
Ph: +91 98459 46040
Email: maullika@hotmail.com
Insta: @sharmamaullika
Blog: https://personalorbitchange.wordpress.com

Aarti Shah
Child & human development specialist, Mumbai
Ph: +91 98200 64563
Email: aartivorashah@gmail.com
Insta: aartishahcoach/

Anu Krishna
Mind coach & NLP trainer, Bengaluru
Ph: +91 98454 97085
Email: anuk@unfear.io
Insta: anu.kri

Kesang Menezes
Co-founder, Parenting Matters, Chennai
Ph: +91 95660 75368
Email: parentingmattersindia@gmail.com
Insta: parentingmattersindia
www.parentingmatters.in

Poulami Sarker
Parenting coach at DEEP; career strategist at International Institute of Career Coaching (IICC), Kolkata
Ph: +91 75850 45385
Email: poulamidigital@gmail.com
https://poulamisarker.com

Monica Khaneja
Parenting coach, New Delhi
Ph: +91 99583 83547
Email: monicakhaneja@gmail.com

Nivedita Garg
Founder, Joyful Parenting, Ludhiana
Ph: +91 84370 20080
www.joyfulparenting.co.in
Facebook: newperspectiveonparenting/

Also read: 10 parenting strategies to reduce children’s pandemic stress