How to Meet Parents Where They Dream

HealthySteps Specialist meets with mother during a well-child visit.

Source: Rebecca Drobis Photography/ZERO TO THREE

This post was co-authored by Sarah MacLaughlin, LSW, and Rahil Briggs, Psy.D.

As report after report details the current mental health access crisis across the country, professionals have seen an increase in demand for their services. If you work with families with young children—or want to—you can create a large positive impact on your practice and your clients by "meeting families where they dream."

What does it mean to meet parents and caregivers where they dream?

Bring a strength-based approach to your work with families. This approach takes many skills and a specific perspective—one that holds your patients and clients in the best possible light. It means listening to caregivers’ hopes for their children’s future and their own goals—meeting them where they dream. Supporting caregivers in actualizing their goals, like getting a picky toddler to try new foods or to repair a relationship with a partner, can be challenging, but also very rewarding.

What does this approach look like?

When it comes to maintaining professional connections with families that are rooted in encouragement, optimism, and strength, psychologist Jeree Pawl’s classic quote, “How you are is as important as what you do,” is still relevant. What promotes better connection and communication with families? Here are some strategies and skills for building positive relationships:

• Slow your pace. It might seem obvious to mention that working with families—especially those caring for young children—can be quite busy. While some practices are more hectic than others, it never hurts to pause and take a break during the day. Because how you show up to the interaction matters, it is helpful to slow down and bring intention to your interactions with families. Demand for mental health services has increased amid the pandemic, meaning your calls have increased and your available appointments have decreased, so taking a pause is more important than ever. It’s hard to connect with someone who is moving at a breakneck pace from session to session.
• Focus on strengths and skill-building. Ask about caregiver strengths, strengths in parenting, and their children’s strengths as well. By focusing on the positive, you highlight what’s going well instead of what isn’t. This not only helps you shift your perspective on a family but also helps caregivers see the positive in their children, too. After acknowledging what is going well, then turn your focus to building the skills needed to bring increased success in other areas, so that goals can become reality.
• Be aware of parallel process. The way that you communicate with caregivers impacts not only how they feel in that moment, but how they might interact with their children later. When you engage in a reflective manner—paying full attention when caregivers are speaking, using their body language to convey interest, and managing their own emotional reporting to what is being shared—you model how caregivers can interact with their children.
• Build connections with other community resources. Practitioners also improve outcomes for families through connection-building with other providers and resources in the community. Need a good rule to follow when you are feeling frustrated trying to meet families where they dream? Consider who else can join the team.

Taking a relationship- and strength-based approach to working with families is a series of small shifts that can create a large positive impact in your practice. When caregivers have the support of responsive, caring providers, they are more apt to fully realize their dreams and those of their children. Because how you are really is as important as what you do.