A parent coach is also called a parent educator. You usually become a parent coach by completing a parenting counseling course. This is usually a course with a certificate. This requires a positive attitude to life and the ability to get started. A certain level of cooperation and independence is also important. Of course, you need to have parenting experience. However, if you want to work professionally as a parenting coach, you should ideally have completed training in adult education or training in the educational, psychological, social or medical field before training as a parenting coach. The profession usually involves freelance work.

Parent coaching training teaches you how to support parents in difficult situations. It teaches understanding and skills for dealing with resource-poor, overburdened families. In a coaching course for mothers and fathers, you learn roughly the following:

• Attitude of the parent coach
• Basics of systemic counseling
• Development and attachment theory
• Family psychology and conflict theories
• Marte Meo
• Parental presence

Graduates can expand their skills in working with parents in complex situations and deepen their understanding of family dynamics.

A systemic parent and family coach supports expectant parents, mothers and fathers as well as other parents:

• Responsible organization of growing up and living together in the family
• Strengthen educators in all family forms through specialist and methodological knowledge as well as social and transcultural skills

The following activities can be practiced after "Systemic Parent Coaching Training":

• Support parents and guardians in their parenting skills
• Plan, organize, manage and evaluate offers on various parenting, education and family issues
• Research and communicate up-to-date specialist knowledge
• Promote the exchange of experiences among educators, group learning and the formation of networks
• Market your own educational offers
• Create invoices

Ideally, professionals from the educational, social, medical or therapeutic field conduct coaching for parents. In most cases, however, there are no special requirements for participation - apart from experience in parenting (coaching parents) - and parents or guardians who would like support for their own educational work can also take part. However, please contact the schools to find out about the applicable admission requirements.

The following is important in parent coaching:

• Teach parents that it is quite normal to push boundaries in parenting.
• Sometimes it can help to talk to people from outside to bring order to the emotional chaos.
• It is important to find out what is going well and what is currently difficult.

Basically, mother coaching is not much different from parent coaching. After all, nowadays it is not always the mothers who do most of the parenting. At most, mothers are perhaps more concerned with boosting their self-confidence. However, the focus of parent coaching training is always on the following topics:

• Everyday family life
• Patchwork families
• Divorce
• Child development from infancy to puberty
• Integration
• Set boundaries
• Budget and pocket money
• Media consumption
• School questions and homework
• Roles as partner and parent
• Questions about nutrition, exercise and play
• Social and political framework conditions