Thrive Therapy Blog

How Thrive Helps Parents

3/26/2019

By: Dr. Erica Wollerman

Since Thrive was founded in 2016, it has been a personal and professional mission of mine to make sure that our office is a place where parents are supported. Now that I have become a mother myself, this has become even more of passion project for me. I thought it might be helpful to go beyond sharing about our goal to support parents to share more about exactly how we do that at Thrive.

We support parents in many different ways, but the top 3 ways are as follows:

1. Individual Therapy
Something that I believe makes Thrive a bit different from other offices who work with children and teens is that all of our therapists are not only comfortable but enjoyworking with the parents of our young clients. While, we only involve parents when the child/teen agrees and when it is in their best interest to do so, we always hope that we will be able to involve parents so that we can better support families as a whole. It is our belief that by helping families communicate and understand each other better, we can best facilitate change for everyone involved. We also work with adults in individual therapy and often support parents in their personal parenting journey as well as other challenges they might be experiencing.

2. Family Therapy
Another way we like to support parents at Thrive is through family therapy. We love it when families call and request to work on their family relationships through family therapy and also can incorporate family work into individual treatment. Since we all work from a whole system based perspective, we can accommodate most families’ needs in terms of family work as well as individual therapy or group therapy.

3. Parent Consultation
One of the services that I am the most proudto offer at Thrive is parent consultation. Parent consultation sessions are sessions where parents (with or without their co-parents) come in specifically to work on their parenting. Parent sessions are a great place to get specific advice and support tailored towards your families’ or child’s specific needs. I’ve found these sessions are extremely helpful for parents who either struggle in understanding their child/children or who are parenting children with special needs due to either a medical or psychological challenge. Plus, one on one parenting sessions are a great way to feel supported and create the much needed village in your parenting journey.

I hope that this blog helps our readers understand more about what we offer at Thrive and how we meet our goal and passion project of supporting parents! Please feel free to contact us with any questions about how we might help you or your family!

At Thrive, we take a positive, client centered approach to therapy that is focused on creating a genuine connection with our clients. If you would like to talk with a Thrive Therapist about yourself, your child, or teen attending therapy, please reach out to us by phone at 858-342-1304.

As always, thanks for reading and comments are always welcome regarding any issues around child or teen psychotherapy services in San Diego by Thrive Therapy Studio.

To stay in the loop on the services offered and to receive updated information about Thrive, please feel free to sign up for the newsletter through the following link: http://eepurl.com/cvGx5n.

Thrive in the Media!

3/18/2019

By: Dr. Erica Wollerman

Since I am at times quoted in different articles, I thought it would be fun to post all of those articles in one place! Check out the following articles, videos, and posts about Thrive Therapy Studio since we started 2 years ago!
Here is our feature in SDVoyager which talks about the beginning of Thrive and my vision in creating our practice.
Here are some tips about homework completion for parents, as soon on the website Learning Success System.
Check out this video where I present about Parenting with Anxiety to parents at a local private school!
In this article, I shared my thoughts about how it seems that people are always "fine" in response to being asked how they are doing.
Check out my contributions to this Romper article, discussing how spoiling your kids affects them later in life!
This article discusses social media use and those who don't necessarily want to use it.
Check out my thoughts about divorce and how parents can mitigate its' effects for teens in this article!
And this article highlights Thrive's accomplishments in our first year of being a group practice!

Call today to see how Thrive can help your family!

Parenting and Anxiety Blog Series (Part 3)

3/7/2019

The Dark Side of Parenting Anxiously
By: Dr. Erica Wollerman

For our final blog in this series, I would like to continue expanding our discussion of anxiety and parenting to explore what happens when we parent in such an anxious and possibly controlling way. As noted in the previous blogs in this series (check them out here and here if you missed them!), modern parents receive an overwhelming amount of information about parenting and this information combined with the belief that we control our child’s fate leads many parents to feel very anxious about parenting. When you combine parents who feel pretty anxious about parenting with the idea that we can curate our children to be different, it is my observation that this can lead to parents being very controlling and micro-managing of their children’s lives and choices.

I can completely relate to why parents want to control their children’s lives. Modern culture tells us, pretty much daily, that the world out there is scary, more competitive than ever, and that resources are scarce. Parents genuinely care about and love their children and just want to give them the very best chance to be successful in this world. So, they often work very hard to help them develop all the skills they might need to be successful and accidentally avoid having their child learn tough lessons along the way. What starts as bringing a forgotten lunch to school becomes bringing homework, which then can even become doing homework. Even worse is that as kids get older, doing homework can become applying to college for them or even applying to jobs for them.

One challenge I see is that we don’t really want to accept that we actually have very little control over our own lives, let alone our kids’ lives and futures. We love to believe we can make sure our kids will be okay and the truth is, we can’t. There are no guarantees in this world and I find this to be something incredibly difficult for many people to accept, especially when it comes to the wellbeing of their children.

Underneath this hope that we as parents can “curate” our child to be all the kinds of success we hope for, is a more subtle form of avoidance. Essentially, by believing we are responsible for everything our child will do in their lives, we avoid feeling anxious about their outcomes. Control is often a mechanism of anxiety management and relinquishing control and acknowledging just how little we do control in our lives, especially as parents, is incredibly uncomfortable.

Another challenge is that if we let our children grow accustomed to us rescuing them all the time, they don’t learn how to rescue themselves and as time goes on, the potential consequences get much bigger and more problematic. A forgotten lunch is a pretty easy problem to solve but getting kicked out of college is pretty tough to recover from. This is why I often advocate for parents starting early with setting boundaries and helping their child(ren) learn to tolerate, face, embrace, and recover from failures they may experience. We can support them along the way, but we need to do better at letting them find their own solutions.

So where does this leave us? As parents, I think it is important to recognize our own experience and notice if we are feeling anxious about our child’s future and how that might impact our parenting approach. We need to consider what our child’s needs actually are and how we can help them develop more skills and resilience without obsessing about it and feeling that it is our responsibility.We can stop taking all the accountability for how our child’s lives turn out and let them make more choices that lead to different outcomes, positive and negative. Most of all though, we can learn to surrender to the uncertainty of parenting and our world and accept that while we can’t control a lot, we can always work to control how we handle things and react.

Parenting Tip of the Day: Accept that we can’t control how things turn out for our kids. Control less. Let them develop more on their own and stop having them be the gage of our successes or failures.

Thank you for reading our Blog Series on Parents and Anxiety! I hope you enjoyed it!

Parenting and Anxiety Blog Series (Part 2)

3/1/2019

The Curated Child
By: Dr. Erica Wollerman

As discussed last week in our first blog of our Parents and Anxiety Blog series (check it out here if you missed it!), one reason why I believe that parents are much more anxious parenting in our modern world is that we have so much advice and opinions about how to raise our child(ren). Not only do we not have strong foundations of a more central “American” parenting style that we all can believe in, we have what seems like millions of books, blogs, and opinions out there.

For this blog, I wanted to talk about another effect of all of these opinions. Many of these books and articles give the message that if parents just did “x”, their kid would turn out a certain way. For example, if you just phrase your praise correctly, your child will be internally motivated towards rewards. I think the challenge of this is twofold. One, parents have the pressure of feeling that everything that happens for their child is completely under their control as parents. Two, we genuinely seem to believe that we can curate our child. We can decide that there are qualities we want them to have and then almost force them to have them by our own actions and choices.

While I think a lot of this advice is well intentioned and probably extremely helpful, in our competitive world of child rearing, it is also only increasing a sense of anxiety and sense of guilt when things don’t turn out how we had hoped. For example, some children struggle with frustration tolerance and grit even though their parents are doing and saying all the “right” things to help them develop these traits. I meet with parents who are often doing “all the right” things and their children still struggle. Unfortunately, this leads parents to feel a lot of guilt and often, shame, around their child, parenting, and identity as a parent.

The challenge here is that the advice we are getting is usually very general advice that completely ignores the nature component of the nature v. nurture debate. And while as a therapist, I do believe that nurture is very clearly important, I also believe that it is not everything. The way our children are wired really does matter and lead them to make different choices. For example, some children learn well by being told information. Many others just seem to need to learn by doing themselves, or the “hard way” as some adults would call it. All of our personality traits that make us who we are impact our later choices and sometimes, no amount of parenting differently is going to affect that course.

I wanted to discuss this today not because I want to tell parents to stop trying to help their children develop different traits. I want to instead reduce the pressure that the parents might feel to have their children be the gage or report card of their parenting successes. I meet with amazing parents all the time who have children who are struggling. I fundamentally believe that a parent’s success cannot be judged by their children’s success.

Parenting Tip of the Day: We need to judge our parenting choices by our own views of how we feel we responded to our children and by how well we followed our own personal and family morals and values – not by our child’s outcomes or successes.

Check out more in our final Parents and Anxiety Blog Post next week! Thanks for reading!

How Thrive Helps Parents

By: Dr. Erica Wollerman

Thrive in the Media!

By: Dr. Erica Wollerman

Parenting and Anxiety Blog Series (Part 3)

The Dark Side of Parenting Anxiously
By: Dr. Erica Wollerman

Parenting and Anxiety Blog Series (Part 2)

The Curated Child
By: Dr. Erica Wollerman

Blogs from the Thrive Family!

Categories

Archives

Call Today! 858-342-1304

Contact Us

How Thrive Helps Parents

By: Dr. Erica Wollerman

Thrive in the Media!

By: Dr. Erica Wollerman

Parenting and Anxiety Blog Series (Part 3)

The Dark Side of Parenting Anxiously​By: Dr. Erica Wollerman

Parenting and Anxiety Blog Series (Part 2)

The Curated ChildBy: Dr. Erica Wollerman

Blogs from the Thrive Family!

Categories

Archives

Call Today! 858-342-1304

Contact Us

The Dark Side of Parenting Anxiously
By: Dr. Erica Wollerman

The Curated Child
By: Dr. Erica Wollerman