This workshop provides mediators with valuable insights and practical strategies to help parents become emotion coaches for their children. The Gottman’s Institute’s emotion coaching parenting approach is an invaluable tool to help families navigate the challenging emotions that come with a family breakdown, help children learn to process and manage their feelings, and build strong parent-child relationships, when its safe to do so,  during and after divorce.

Emotion Coaching is a valuable tool to help parents appreciate their children’s emotional needs throughout the process, while also giving parents the language of emotions to help them recognise and tune into the emotional turmoil and distress parents experience during family breakdown.

During the workshop you will learn the building blocks of emotion coaching including tuning into children’s emotions, labelling and validating feelings, recognising emotions as an opportunity for connection, learning and growing, and helping children to recognise and regulate emotions and learn to problem solve.

We’ll use examples, case studies, scripts, and discussion to bring the process to life.  Emotion Coaching is an invaluable skill that helps us all build our emotional intelligence and agility thereby deepening our relationships and connections in our personal and professional lives.

Heather Rutherford

Heather is a parenting coach, founder of The Parenting Partnership, parenting consultant to the school’s advisory service Talk Education, Partner Coach at Careering into Motherhood, and a Care for the Family facilitator.

Heather’s mission is to share practical effective positive parenting skills that not only help parents raise contented, confident and resilient children but that transform family lives.  In all her work, she draws on the latest child development research as well as her own experience of parenting her three children while guiding her family through divorce.

Her goal is to empower parents with skills that include an understanding of temperament, growth mindset, emotional intelligence and positive discipline, that help them feel confident, calm, and deeply connected to their children.

She trains family professionals to use these positive parenting skills to help families through the challenges of separation and divorce.