OUR STORY
From Parent Stress to Child Success
For everything in life there are instructions. For putting together a desk to driving to making dinner…there are instructions. Except for the most important role you will have in your life. JFK said it best “Children are the world’s most valuable resource and the best hope for our future.” While Haim Ginott noted: “Children are like wet cement: whatever falls on them makes an impression.” There is so much pressure on parents to get it right for our children, for their future, and the future of humanity, yet there is very little guidance out there for parents. Successful Parenting’s founder, Jennifer Szeghi experienced that pressure as a single mom in graduate school, submerging herself in all the education about child and adolescent development. She included her professional experiences as a child/adolescent mental health therapist, residential manager in a juvenile detention center, and a behavioral specialist in the children/adolescent psychiatry unit to identify how parents can meet their children’s needs, ultimately promoting positive behavior, mental health, and success in their children. In 2008, she opened Successful Parenting providing parent coaching & consulting services as a way parents can feel confident and proactive in raising successful children!
Working with children and parents, as well as some more personal experiences with co-parenting, Jennifer noticed another significant stressor that effects many families in our society today, and that is divorce and co-parenting conflict. The experience of divorce is worse than a death on a family. Not only does it result in grieving, but it also includes feelings of rejection, disappointment, and ongoing conflict leaves parents feeling caught up in a chaotic co-parenting cyclone and children are innocent bystanders in all of this. At times, the conflict can even interfere with the parent-child relationship. Jennifer explored the research and expanded her education via specialized trainings and found despite the hardships of divorce, the divorce itself does not lead to long-term consequences for children, but how it is handled by the parents determine whether the child is resilient or continues to struggle. Jennifer developed Successful Co-parent Coaching Program to help educate parents how to approach conflict in a manner that is child-focused and solution oriented, while putting boundaries on the new co-parenting relationship. She also developed Rescue the Parent-Child Bond Program to help repair and rebuild the estranged relationship between the parent and child.
