From preschool teacher to Parent Coach

I’ve worked with kids ever since I was one. From babysitting and camp counseling as a teen to working with preschoolers in my early twenties and beyond, working with children has always brought me joy. From a young age, I knew I wanted to be a preschool teacher. What I didn’t expect was how much I’d come to love working with parents.

When I first started working with kids, the hardest part was interacting with parents. They intimidated me! I didn’t know how to talk to them! I felt comfortable watching their kids, but chatting with moms and dads? That was scary.

And this isn’t just me; plenty of childcare professionals will tell you that working with parents is the hardest part. Even my Montessori trainers joked about this. But by that time, a decade after my first year at camp, my perspective had changed from seeing parents as intimidating to seeing them as peers. We were teammates with a shared goal: helping their kids grow up right.

This shift in perspective happened when I worked at my first preschool a year out of college. I wasn’t a trained teacher yet, but I had a ton of experience with kids, so after a year of volunteering (because I missed being around kids the first summer I got a “real job” instead of working at camp) I took on a full-time position working with 2-5 year olds. I still felt nervous talking to the parents, but now that I was older, it felt less intimidating. What surprised me was that after I’d been there a while, the parents started coming to me with questions about their kids - despite me being much younger than all of them, and not a parent myself! What surprised me more was when I realized, I had answers for their questions.

I learned that a lot of the parents I was working with had very little, if any, experience around children - before having their own. For the first time, I understood what a rare gift it was that I’d had so much experience with so many different kids. These parents were smart, capable, and obviously loving - but preschool-aged kids are just so weird and mysterious and creative and different from adults. They have their own interests and their own drives, which don’t always mesh well with ours. But because I had experience, I wasn’t phased by some of the frustrating but normal behaviors I saw, and I had developed ways to handle these behaviors through trial and error with different kids over time.

For the parents, though, any new behavior could cause alarm, because they lacked a frame of reference. And because they’d never seen it before, every new behavior was something they needed to creatively respond to with no previous practice. I could only imagine how difficult it must be for parents to have all these new experiences for the first time with their own child, who they were, of course, completely responsible for.

I never expected to love this part of the job so much, but I started to really enjoy answering parents’ questions. I loved helping them to understand their child better, and helping them feel less alone in their struggles!

I carried this passion for helping parents understand their kids into my Montessori training. Montessori called to me because it’s founded on respect for where children are right now, while also preparing them to reach new levels of independence. And my training was life-changing. (I’ll go into much more detail about why I love Montessori in another post!) But it was striking to me that even in the granola-crunchy world of Montessori teaching, teachers still often talked about parents as a source of frustration more than a source for collaboration.

This really didn’t align with my experience. It’s not that I never got frustrated with my students’ parents - I’m human, it happens. But overall my relationships with parents have been wonderful, and more than anything I saw how deeply they cared about their children, and how hard it was for them to raise kids in our modern culture.

I think about parents a lot, and specifically how hard it is to be a parent in the 21st century. I don’t think there has ever been an era of human history quite so segregated by age. For a lot of young adults, even adults in our thirties, if you don’t have kids or close friends with kids - you’re never around kids. (So how are we supposed to learn about them?) The emphasis on separate kid and adult spaces often makes parents feel like they can’t bring their kids in public - which is isolating. And on top of everything, there’s a ton of parenting advice being shouted at them from every direction, and all of it contradicts what other people are saying! How are you supposed to know who to trust?

I want to provide the educational resources that have helped me most in the classroom, because I know I can trust those methods. But I also want to share some information that I’ve learned through my experience of teaching alongside other teachers.

Some of my best teachers have been my coworkers. From Rodney, who was my senior counselor during my first two years of camp, who I don’t think I ever saw get angry at a single kid, to Caitlyn, whose classroom I observed for a consultation, and who taught me several new songs in the course of a single day, the professionals I’ve worked alongside have taught me as much as any training.

I strongly recommend parents volunteer at a preschool (ideally, people who want to be parents could do this too!), not only to learn about what behaviors are typical for various age groups, but also to learn from the professionals who have been working with small children for years. You’ll be amazed at their treasure trove of knowledge. One of the things I love about coaching teachers is having the opportunity to pass along my knowledge, just like I’ve learned from other teachers. (I’ll be sharing some of the tricks I’ve adopted over the years in this blog.)

The final element that made me want to pursue working with adults as my main work was learning about Attachment theory, and specifically, the Circle of Security training. Circle changed how I teach (read more about that here) and I started proselytizing about it to everyone I know who has children in their lives. Soon enough, I took the training to teach the class to parents, then to teachers. Along the way, I’ve taken courses about Attachment coaching, nervous system regulation, and Somatic healing, as well as a yoga teacher training. It’s this combination of a decade(+!) experience with children, deep understanding of attachment relationships, and a growing collection of exercises to help adults bring their best selves into their parenting and teaching, that I now offer adults through coaching and classes. And now, this blog!

Thank you for being here. I have so much to share with you!