About the Parent Hope Project
The Parent Hope Project is a social enterprise that supports parents in recovering their confidence to be the best resource for their children’s mental health and wellbeing. It includes the parent coach manualised programs (Parent Hope Project & Parent Confidence Project), the Confident Parent Course, with training for professionals to deliver these programs. Plus there are resources and courses for schools, community groups and for parents and carers.
The main premise behind the Parent Hope Project is that:
Children do best when:
- parents reduce their focus on them and,
- reclaim their own self-awareness and role clarity.
Most parent education programs help parents to be better attuned to their children. The problem is that in anxious times a parent’s natural protectiveness and care for their children becomes exaggerated and they become overly sensitised to how their children are. Programs that encourage connection (as important as this is for children) may be inadvertently feeding this anxious child focus in conscientious parents.
The resources at the Parent Hope Project support parents, and those who assist parents and families, to redirect focus of attention from their children to themselves.
If you’re going to assist your child to grow their resilience, the first step will be to increase your own resilience in tolerating your child’s upset without feeling compelled to rush in and smooth over everything for them. The grown-up parent, who really wants to be a loving resource to their child, is prepared to work on themselves.
Dr Jenny Brown
Grown Up Parenting
Ch 8 in Growing Yourself Up, p 108
Read more about Jenny Brown
About Dr Jenny BrownChildren can flourish when parents reclaim their self-awareness and confidence.
The resources at the Parent Hope Project support parents, and those who assist parents and families, to shift from making children a project – to making the parent the focus of attention.
Most parent education programs help parents to be better attuned to their children. While there are sound ideas in such programs, they risk cultivating parents making a project out of their children rather than growing their capacity to facilitate their children’s maturity. The problem is that when tension inevitably mounts in family life, a parent’s natural protectiveness and care for their children become exaggerated and they become overly sensitised to how their children are. This may crowd the child’s breathing space for developing age-appropriate independence and management of their emotions.
Parents can also lose confidence in their common sense and wisdom with society’s growing offerings of expertise about children and parenting. Increasingly parents are prone to step aside and let experts address concerns about their children.
The Parent Hope Project resources help parents regain their confidence as loving leaders for their children (of all ages). It does this by sharing research-based* principles for fostering their child’s development of responsible independence and calm connection.
*Jenny Brown’s published research on parents and their symptomatic children; and the life work of Psychiatrist Dr. Murray Bowen 1913-1990.