Are you struggling to raise a challenging child or teen?

  • Normal behavioral modification techniques backfire?
  • Lots of power struggles and arguing?
  • Escalating punishments don’t get results?
  • Simple requests are ignored?
  • Everyday life is a struggle?
  • Your child is not reaching their potential at home or school?
  • Want to decrease the drama and negativity?

Parent coaching is a very effective solution to equip you with the right tools and strategies to empower you and transform your child! Here’s why:

Parents are the prize!

Did you know that you are the best reward you can give your child? Your attention and energy truly are the prize your children desire. Every child’s heart longs for intense, positive connection with parents.  As a parent struggling with an intense child, deciding what type of help to seek can be very overwhelming and confusing. Remember this: when a child acts out, is defiant, or appears to shut you out, they are actually crying out for a connection with you. When you use the Nurtured Heart Approach™, you hold the key to transforming your child’s behavior from the inside out by giving your children what they need the most – loving interaction with you.


The NHA brings joy back into your family life

As a parent, you may be frustrated by the poor results you experience from correcting, lecturing, initiating time outs, or removing privileges. These traditional approaches to discipline rarely work with children who have behavioral disorders. To understand the reason for this, remember that the child desires your attention above all else. When most of your interaction with a child involves correcting “bad” behavior, the child gets the message that the way to get the attention they need from you is to behave badly. The NHA teaches you to turn this paradigm around, producing less need for discipline and more time to enjoy your child.

A Parent’s Story

“Our son had been diagnosed at age 10 with mood disorder and depression/anxiety, though the  symptoms were present as early as age 6. We had tried a variety of therapists and medications to help our son’s anger, disobedience, and mood swings. As his mother, I felt hopeless and helpless. I could not stop the continued chaos in our home, it affected my other two children as well as my marriage, I thought I was a failure.”

“… step by step, I was empowered by tools I learned from the NHA. First, I began to see myself through new eyes as a parent confident with skills to deal with my sons challenges. Soon I began to see my son and other children through a new lens as well. I learned to be calm; I learned new coping strategies, and a new dialogue to communicate with my entire family. I now use the NHA at work and when I coach!”.

The greatest gift the NHA gave me, was to learn to see “greatness” in my children, my husband, and MYSELF. What a legacy we can leave for our children to be parents that role model self-control, love, and strength, even when our children may struggle to do so themselves. – NHA Parent

What are your dreams for your children? Do you want them to be leaders, not followers? Emotionally equipped to resist peer pressure? Family-centered, close to parents and siblings? Would you like your child to resist bullies and bullying, model self-confidence in ways that help other children? As a parent, you are the strongest influence in your child’s life, and your parenting skills can help move your child to a level of success and happiness they are meant to have. The Nurtured Heart Approach™ helps you recognize and focus on what your child or teen really needs and raises parenting to a new level.

The Nurtured Heart Approach™ gives parents tips on how to adjust their energy and attention in order to focus on what is going right in their child’s life and not accidentally reward, with time and energy, what is going wrong. It helps develop the relationship you have always wanted with your child.

The first tenet of the NHA is Energizing Positivity. This concept governs how and when you should connect with your child. Most parenting approaches look at connecting with the child through negativity, or teaching the child after they have made a mistake; behavioral plans frequently try to motivate change in the child by giving primarily aversive consequences and punishments for mistakes, and they also give external rewards for continuing positive behaviors. Unfortunately, we have found that “intense and challenging” children do not respond well to these types of approaches.

By using the Nurtured Heart Approach™, you will instill in your childs self-control and a healthy feeling of power by recognizing and giving credit to them when rules are being followed and when they are not being broken. The NHA will teach you how to direct and emit your energy, emotion, and attention in the right doses and at the right times. It will help you create and celebrate success in your child in a very powerful and effective way.

The child labeled “difficult” has problems controlling his or her energy – either they have extremely excessive energy, or they appear extremely lethargic. The highly energetic, disruptive child unconsciously seeks the reward that your attention provides. The lethargic child may feel depressed or discouraged because they are never good enough and constantly feel the pressure to be perfect.  How do we reach these children? We show them that the reward (our energy and attention) is given as a result of doing well, and that negative behavior produces no emotional response.

This is why the fastest and most powerful solution to your child’s behavior may not be therapy for the child, but coaching for the parents. By adjusting your responses to a child, you become empowered to change their behavior. This is how Nurtured Heart Approach™ can help! Through parent coaching, Dan works with you to set specific goals and strategies to ensure positive future behavior.

The difference in your child’s behavior will be evident!

  • Improved self-esteem
  • Academic success
  • Ability to confidently make decisions
  • Enhanced social skills
  • Ability to manage strong emotions and impulses
  • More confidence when interacting with peers and adults
  • Value driven, not needing rewards to “do the right thing”

These strategies will address present behavior by helping you, the parent, gain the skills, tools and techniques you need to approach parenting with new confidence.  Using the Compass 4 Life Parent Coaching Program,  you will be able to help your child transform their behavior from adversarial to productive. How is coaching different from counseling?  While counseling is beneficial to getting to the root of the problem, coaching allows you to build on that successful discovery.  The key is that you are setting goals for the future, not trying to rework the past.

Build Your Child’s Character from the Inside Out

Dan’s Parent Coaching Program creates a new paradigm that shifts the energy and attention of parents away from negative behavior and places an emphasis on a child’s character and effort. Parents learn how to put NHA strategies into daily practice and how to de-energize a child’s negative behavior while energizing and encouraging more positive outcomes. The goal is to send the message that there is no longer anything to gain from “acting out” and instead, to focus on the greatness that lies within each child, developing them and nurturing them with relentless, evidence-based, positive attention.

Discipline and strictness are also essential parts of the NHA. However, Dan teaches parents specific “time out” techniques that are effective, short, and do not engage the parent’s emotional energy. When followed by a “time-in” of loving and positive connection, the child quickly learns that the rewards of good behavior far outweigh any results of acting out or disobedience.

The ideal NHA parent is…

  • Wanting to get rid of the guilt they have due to the constant negativity
  • Ready to try something new
  • Looking to restore peace, hope, love and respect to their home
  • Confused because “they would never have acted this way when they were kids”
  • Feeling resentful of their child’s negative behaviors
  • Worried about the path their child is on
  • Realize the parenting approach they are currently using is not working
  • Tired from the drama and stress

The Compass 4 Life Program is a 10-week training course, developed to educate parents on how to smoothly integrate the Nurtured Heart Approach™ (NHA) into their daily lives. Dan models the program on two books by Nurtured Heart creator, Howard Glasser:  “Transforming the Difficult Child” and “Transforming the Difficult Child Workbook”.

The Nurtured Heart Approach™ works most effectively as parents master the approach. The Compass Program works closely with parents to ensure that happens!

The Compass 4 Life Program provides:

  • Customized coaching using NHA strategies to meet your family’s specific needs
  • Continuous contact and support in managing your child’s difficult behavior
  • A guide to recognize opportunities for discipline that highlight learning and forgiveness rather than punishment
  • Instruction on proven techniques you can immediately use to transform difficult behavior

As social norms and cultural expectations have changed, so have our children’s needs and so must our parenting skills. That is why Dan’s passion and mission, utilizing the NHA through the Compass 4 Life program, is to help adults help ALL children flourish.

We are here to help coach you so that you can have a more positive impact on your child’s life. Call us today to get more information on parent coaching.