Coaching Expecting Parents - Rhona Berens Coaching

EXPECTING & NEW PARENTS

Prep for your bundle of change

Rhona chose to become a Relationship Coach more than a dozen years ago to help new and expecting parents capably navigate the momentous shifts that occur with the arrival of a baby. Those shifts inspired her and Tina Stanley, MSW, LCSW to write their book, Fight Right for Your Baby: The How-To Guide for Expecting and New Parents to Shift From Conflict to Connection. While her clientele now includes other relationships–couples without kids, parents with children of all ages, even professional relationships like business partners–she remains committed to assisting new and expecting parents transition to the wild, wonderful, and woolly world of parenthood. The fourth trimester is when increased relationship conflict typically begins for new parents, while relationship satisfaction dips up to three years after the birth of your first child. Unfortunately, that timeframe is also when most new parents lack the time, energy, and finances to tend to their relationships.

If possible, the prenatal period is an ideal time to prep your relationship for your bundle of change . . . even if you’re convinced the increased tension and arguments you witnessed among your friends when they became parents could never happen to you and your beloved. Trust the research: Most new parents face relationship struggles and have good reasons to do so. Experiences like parenthood deliver new stressors coupled with a steep learning curve. Plus, negative prenatal patterns in communication and conflict-styles persist after the baby arrives and are exacerbated by sleep deprivation.

Whether you want to prepare for life with a baby, or find yourself in the thick of postpartum overwhelm, Rhona guides and helps you:

Prepare for, normalize, reduce and, whenever possible, avoid an increase in conflict and drop in relationship fulfillment that are common among new parents.

Focus on your unique relationship challenges, postpartum fears, and parenting priorities, and shift from distress to mutual support and more ease.

Tailor Prep for Parenting–a 7-session coaching program–to your vision of teamwork. You will learn:

Tips to support your baby’s healthy development.
Research on how your relationship impacts your baby’s wellbeing (and vice-versa).
Ways to craft your ideal parenting style(s) and effective coparenting strategies.
Tools to avoid common postpartum fights.
Repair strategies to ease conflict.
How to foster (and rekindle) intimacy and connection.

With her colleague, Tina Stanley, MSW, LCSW, Rhona co-authored Fight Right for Your Baby: The How-Guide for Expecting and New Parents to Shift from Conflict to Connection (2023). Rhona is a graduate of the Center for Right Relationship’s Organization & Relationship Systems Coaching program and is certified by the Coaches Training Institute. She is a Gottman Workshop Leader for The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work and a Gottman Educator for Bringing Baby Home. Rhona studied BeAbove Leadership’s Seven Levels of Human Relationship, attended Sue Johnson’s Hold Me Tight workshop, and took Level 1 of the Couples Institute’s Developmental Model training. She also completed the ND Compass Training for Professionals, a program for couples therapists and relationship coaches who work with neurodiverse couples: when one or both partners are neurodistinct (a.k.a., neurodivergent). Rhona has been delivering continuing education workshops to perinatal and parenting professionals for a dozen years, with a focus on stress management, reducing parental conflict, and enhancing relationship fulfillment. She is a credentialed Professional Certified Coach through the International Coaching Federation. Rhona shares her unique journey to parenting in this spoken word birth story.

* Rhona provides online coaching as a virtual Certified Parent Coach and Relationship Coach that delivers help to expecting parents and new parents with compassion and understanding. Whether you’re a new or expecting mother/mom, dad, or non-binary parent seeking support, looking for answers to parenting or relationship questions, curious about parenting or relationship advice, anticipating differences in parenting styles, or other concerns about your new family, Rhona is here to offer guidance.

Forget the bugaboo, the fancy crib…and the organic nipple pads. Rhona is definitely the number one brilliant gift when it comes to providing for the new arrival….Rhona makes the things we take seriously into fun. You discover much about yourself. Rhona is a diplomatic teacher who genuinely cares. Working with her has taught me things about myself that otherwise I would not have acknowledged. Thank you again for your endless compassion and patience.

[Rhona’s program for expecting] gave us a chance to get clarity prior to being sleep deprived and stressed by the changes that are associated with having a newborn. You are a great coach. We loved how animated you are and were impressed by your ability to really listen to us beyond our words. We found this program fun and therapeutic for us as a couple. It is a platform to help visualize, create and actualize the future you envision for yourself as an individual, a couple and as parents ,and a program to help unify and clarify parents’ goals and values prior to embarking upon the life-changing experience of bringing their new baby into the world. The importance of working out potential differences and getting aligned as a couple prior to the arrival of the baby is also a huge selling point.

Our new baby is now 10 months old. The prep work we did with Rhona was essential.…We had no idea what little tornado was about to hit! We have utilized the knowledge gathered during our sessions time and time again…. Now instead of spending time arguing we are tapping into our new knowledge and recover quickly from possible arguments and the defenses triggered by being new parents. This gives us more time to enjoy our new little one and ensures we are giving him the best parenting possible. We HIGHLY recommend this short useful program. Once the baby comes they will be very grateful!

The tools you receive help you navigate the uncharted path into parenthood with more confidence. We felt confident in your coaching skills and felt comfortable showing up authentically with you through the entire process. [Jayson adds:] I think the program offers dads a chance to really express what their needs are during and after the pregnancy. With all the focus on mom and the baby, dad’s needs can be easily forgotten. My needs were made just as important as mom’s in creating a healthy atmosphere for our relationship to flourish.

[Rhona’s program for expecting parents] is a way to address relationship issues more directly. It helped me understand the way my spouse approaches certain things that would have been difficult to see. It helped me understand how he thinks/approaches conversations. This is a process to address opportunities and issues that will affect your future relationship and the type of family environment you want to create. It’s a comfortable and safe environment to look into some uncomfortable and unsafe topics in a constructive light, giving your relationship and family another way to address needs and wants, beyond the patterns we have likely established.

We have been very blessed by Rhona Berens. [Her program for expecting parents] created a place for us to discuss and develop a team approach to how we want to parent in the weeks leading up to the arrival of our daughter. If we hadn’t made the time to work this program with Rhona, we think there would be things left unsaid, that we didn’t even KNOW were left unsaid, that might have caused problems later.

There were some fundamental elements to our current relationship (post baby) that had gone missing or faded away, and consequently new ones have introduced themselves – all without even noticing. Rhona talked about mourning the loss of our past lives – both as a couple and as individuals. This made a lot of sense to me and a number of light bulbs went off in my head. For sure both of us miss elements of our previous life. We also enjoy new parts of our relationship that we would never want to lose – foremost our daughter, who makes us smile whenever we look at her – except perhaps when she is screaming sleepless at 2 am. Regardless, we uncovered issues that rooted from the way things used to be and how they have changed. It was really enlightening and uplifting.

“[Rhona’s program for expecting and new parents] helped us establish a better understanding of how to approach situations that may arise as a couple and as soon-to-be parents. We highly recommend this program to help couples open their lines of communication and strengthen their bond as a couple and as parents. It prepares couples for open communication and how to acknowledge one another’s needs and it also allowed us to sit down as a couple and discuss the types of parents we want to be.”

“We began working with Rhona before the birth of our second child. We were stuck in individual and collective patterns as parents and as a couple that we knew we wanted to shift as we welcomed another baby into our life. We have learned a great deal from Rhona’s coaching and have developed a more common language that has strengthened us and our ability to problem solve and be more compassionate towards each other and ourselves. Rhona is incredibly skilled at working with our very different personalities and temperaments and she approaches us with an openness that we both value. She also brings evidence-based research into her coaching, which helps to normalize and ultimately navigate how we are in relationship to each other and to our children.”

There are no upcoming workshops.

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Please fill out the form below to be notified when Rhona schedules a workshop for expecting and new parents. Rhona also delivers workshops to organizations, as well as small groups, so please click the box below if you are interested in exploring that option, and Rhona will be in touch soon to discuss further.

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EXPECTING & NEW PARENTS

Prep for your bundle of change

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