Caregiver Consultation & Parent Coaching for Complex Needs
A child sees a therapist for an hour a week. They live with you for the other hundred and sixty-seven. Coaching puts the clinical thinking where the hours actually are.
The person who needs the strategy is often not the client
Some of the most effective work we do never involves treating the person everyone is worried about. It involves sitting with the adults around them and working out, concretely, what to do at 7:40am when everything falls apart, and what to do differently at 7:20 so that it does not.
This is not a parenting class and it is not an assessment of you. You are not being observed for deficits. You are the person with the most information about this child or adult, and coaching is the process of putting clinical reasoning next to that information and seeing what the two of us can build.
Caring takes many shapes
Parents & guardians
Of children and adults with autism, ADHD, intellectual disability, complex medical needs, trauma histories or a combination that no single service seems to cover.
Foster, kinship & adoptive families
Where behaviour carries a history, information is incomplete, and strategies that work for other children reliably do not. Trauma-informed and paced for placements that are still settling.
Direct support professionals & staff teams
Group homes, day programs and support agencies — consistency training, plan implementation, de-escalation, and the shift handover that decides whether a plan survives the night.
Grandparents & extended family
Often providing significant care with none of the information, and often the person who most wants to help and least knows how.
The hours that are hardest
The pressure points of the day
Mornings, transitions, mealtimes, homework, bath and bedtime. We pick the worst one, we solve that one, and then the next — rather than trying to fix a whole day at once.
Understanding what behaviour means
How to read escalation early, what a behaviour is achieving, and what to change about the conditions rather than the consequence.
Safety & crisis planning
Aggression, self-injury, elopement and meltdown. A written plan the whole household knows, including what happens afterwards for everyone involved.
Consistency across people
Two parents, a grandparent, an EA and a support worker all doing something slightly different is itself a cause of behaviour. We build one plan everyone can actually follow.
Caregiver sustainability
Burnout, guilt, marital strain, siblings who get the leftovers, and the fact that nobody can run at crisis pace for years. We treat this as part of the clinical picture, because it is.
Caregiver coaching — common questions
Does my child have to be a client?
No. Caregiver consultation can stand entirely on its own, and often does — particularly where the person being cared for is unwilling to see anyone, or where a full assessment is not what is needed.
Are you going to tell me I am doing it wrong?
No. Families who reach us have usually tried more things than most professionals would think of, and are being told they are doing it wrong by quite enough people already. Our starting assumption is that what you are doing made sense given what you knew and what you had.
Can you coach a staff team rather than a family?
Yes. We provide training and implementation support for group homes, day programs, support agencies and daycare and school teams. See also daycare supports and school consultation.
How often would we meet?
Usually more often at the start — weekly or fortnightly while a plan is being built and tested — then spaced out. Many families move to a check-in every month or two once things are steadier, and come back when something changes.
Can sessions be virtual?
Yes, and for coaching it works well. That said, at least one in-person or home session early on is usually worth it — the physical environment tells us things a conversation does not.
Start with the worst hour of the day
Book a free 20-minute consultation and tell us about it. That one hour usually tells us most of what we need to know.