When parents come to me for Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS) Parent Coaching, they usually expect that our first session will be all about understanding their child. They’re often hoping I’ll help them figure out why their child is melting down, refusing, arguing, or shutting down – and, of course, we absolutely do that. But there’s something that happens in nearly every first session that catches them completely off guard.
We begin by looking at the Assessment of Skills and Unsolved Problems (ASUP), which is a tool that helps us identify the skills a child is still developing. We talk about skills like shifting from one plan to another, estimating time, managing frustration, staying organized, recognizing internal cues like hunger or fatigue, and considering another person’s perspective. It seems like we’re talking exclusively about their child until, almost inevitably, one of the parents stops and says, “Wait…I do that too.”
I smile every time because they’re realizing that these aren’t just challenges specific to their kid. They’re human skills that continue developing throughout a lifetime. The difference is that adults have usually spent decades figuring out how to compensate for the skills they can’t reliably access.
Just last week, I was working with parents whose six-year-old daughter was struggling with transitions. As we worked through the ASUP together, they began laughing. The father realized that when he tells his daughter they need to leave in ten minutes, she doesn’t really understand what “ten minutes” means. Then he paused and admitted that he often underestimates how long things will take himself. The mother, who also has ADHD, shared that she’ll suddenly look up at the clock and realize it’s two o’clock in the afternoon because she’s become so hyper-focused on a project that she forgot to eat lunch. Neither of them had ever connected those experiences to the very skills we were discussing in relation to their daughter.
That’s one of the reasons I love this work so much. It moves us away from seeing children’s struggles as evidence that they’re being difficult or oppositional and toward recognizing that they’re still developing skills that many adults are also working to strengthen. Once parents see that, the conversation changes. Instead of asking, “How do I get her to do this?” they begin asking, “What’s making this hard for her and how can we help?”
I often tell parents that adults rarely perform these skills perfectly either. We forget appointments unless we put them in our calendars. We set timers because we know we’ll lose track of time. We meal prep because we know we won’t notice we’re hungry until we’re starving. We wear noise-canceling headphones, ask people not to wear perfume around us, build routines, make lists, and create reminders because we’ve learned where our brains need support. We don’t expect ourselves to simply “try harder” and be successful. We build systems around the places where we know we’re vulnerable.
Children haven’t had years to build those systems yet. They don’t automatically know they need an extra ten minutes to transition away from something they love. They don’t always recognize that they’re hungry, overstimulated, or emotionally flooded until they’re already melting down. They certainly don’t have the life experience or available resources to design accommodations for themselves. That’s where we come in – not to force the skill into existence, but to partner with them while it’s still developing.
One of the biggest mindset shifts in CPS is recognizing that concerning behavior is almost always the smoke, not the fire. The refusal, yelling, arguing, withdrawing, or explosive behavior is the stress response we can see. Our job is to become curious about what’s causing the stress in the first place. When we focus only on changing the behavior, we often miss the very problem that caused it.
That curiosity extends to parents as well. During coaching, I’ll often ask a parent, “What was happening for you in that moment?” At first they’re surprised that I’m asking about their experience instead of staying focused exclusively on their child. But parenting is a relationship, and relationships involve two nervous systems, not one. If a parent is overwhelmed, anxious, exhausted, or rushing out the door, that matters too. It’s important to understand the entire system.
In fact, one of my favorite concepts in CPS is that adults can also solve the problems that are creating their stress, too. If you notice that you become frantic whenever you’re running late, that’s an unsolved problem worth exploring. If you realize that you consistently skip lunch because you hyperfocus at work, that’s a problem you can solve collaboratively with your partner. Parents are often delighted to discover that CPS isn’t just a parenting model; it’s a framework for solving problems respectfully in every relationship.
Parents sometimes worry before our first session that I’m going to evaluate them or point out everything they’ve been doing wrong. Instead, what usually happens is that they leave feeling lighter. They realize their child isn’t failing because they lack motivation or because they’ve somehow “messed up” as parents. Their child is showing them where support is needed, just as adults do every day in often more socially acceptable ways.
By the end of that first session, something important has shifted. Parents are still deeply invested in helping their child grow, and they also have a little more compassion for themselves. They recognize that they’re no longer going to ask their child to master skills that they themselves struggle to perform flawlessly. They’re supporting their child as they develop the skills that every human being continues practicing throughout their entire lifetime.
For me, that’s the moment everything changes. Once parents stop seeing us, the adults, as the experts trying to fix a broken child and start seeing us as collaborative partners helping another human build lifelong skills, the atmosphere in the room begins to change. There’s more curiosity, compassion, flexibility, problem-solving, and understanding and connection. In my experience, that’s where the real work – and the real healing – begins.
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