Mental Health Continuum for Kids
Life Coaching for Kids or Counselor
Who Could Join Your Parenting Team?
Children’s mental health challenges are making headlines and in today’s fast-paced world, many families are struggling with how to support their children.
This infographic introduces life coaching for kids as a proactive solution within the mental health continuum–equipping children with skills to:
- calm their worries
- build resilience
- enhance self-esteem
- grow their confidence
- strengthen self-leadership
- improve academic/extracurricular performance
- navigate challenges
- develop healthy friendships
so that they can be confident and prepared to thrive in life!
Just like an athletic coach helps children develop the skills, confidence, and ability to thrive in their games, a life coach for kids helps children develop the skills, confidence, and ability to thrive in life.
Coaching and Counseling
If you view mental health as a continuum—with mental wellness on one end and mental illness on the other—counselors and therapists can support children across this entire continuum. However, their primary focus is often on helping children who are struggling move back toward a state of mental well-being and ability to function in daily life.
Counselors and therapists tend to work with children who are experiencing more serious issues such as severe anxiety, depression, addiction, OCDs, moving past neglect/ abuse, or going through a personal crisis. With the shortage of mental health professionals available to support children, very few counselors have the opportunity to work with children who are NOT facing immediate challenges but still need support—leaving a gap in helping them build skills for mental wellness.
Life coaching for kids focuses on mental wellness and helping children proactively develop a healthy mindset, which is the first step in managing anxiety in children. Life coaching for kids supports children in recognizing and shifting limiting thought patterns and proactively creating supporting thought patterns to help minimize anxiety – while developing strong coping skills and resilience so they can persevere and thrive.
Coaching and counseling both play a critical role in children’s mental health.
How to choose?
If your child is in crisis, self-harming (threatening to self-harm), or facing an issue that is impacting their ability to function in life, then contacting a mental health provider, such as a counselor or therapist, would be the best choice for your child.
If your child is NOT in crisis, and you are looking to support your child in improving self-esteem, building confidence, overcoming shyness, being more responsible, being a self-leader, and learning to achieve their goals, then adding a coach to your parenting team would be a powerful solution for your child.
If you’re not sure, talk with your child’s pediatrician and/or have a counselor assess the situation first. Many of our coaches have worked with children who were also working with a counselor because coaching is very different from counseling and both support children’s mental health.
A Parent’s Guide
What is Life Coaching for Kids?
A life coach for kids helps children develop the mindset and the skill set needed to be confident and prepared to thrive in life.
Mindset is our thinking as we move through life—it shapes our beliefs.
Skill set is knowing what actions to take to create the results we want to create in life.
How does WISDOM Coaching Help Children?
WISDOM Coaches help children learn the brain science behind how their minds work—helping them understand that their thoughts shape their experiences.
Children learn how to identify and shift limiting beliefs that can harm their self-esteem and hold them back in life. And they learn how to proactively develop supporting beliefs that help them feel empowered in their lives and make good choices.
It is important to understand that coaches don’t teach children what to think, they support children in learning how to think so that their mind is working for them and not against them.
Coaches also teach children how to navigate life’s challenges and build essential life skills.
Key areas of development include:
- Resilience and Coping Skills: Children learn to handle life’s ups and downs—overcoming mistakes, challenges, and disappointments—so they can bounce back and continue pursuing their goals.
– - Self-Esteem: Children build self-esteem from the “inside out,” basing their self-worth on who they are rather than external factors, helping them maintain a strong sense of self regardless of their circumstances.
– - Confidence and Belief in Themselves: They learn to move past anxiety and fear, stepping outside their comfort zones to build courage and pursue their dreams with confidence.
– - Inner Compass and Self-Leadership: Children develop core values such as integrity, self-responsibility, and respect. They also learn to think independently, resist peer pressure, and stay true to their values.
– - Intentional Living and Goal Achievement: Children learn to set a vision for their lives, understand the brain science behind achievement, and use tools like visualization, affirmations, and gratitude to reach their fullest potential.
See the 27 Skills WISDOM Coaches can help your children develop
Click to Get the 1-Page List of Skills and Stories
The time to work with children on issues they will face in high school is before they get there.
The foundation we help our children build at a young age impacts the rest of their lives–and ours too!
How does a WISDOM Coach work with your child?
A WISDOM Coach helps your child develop skills using the story-based coaching curriculum and proven STORY Coaching Process from Adventures in Wisdom®.
Before working with your child, the coach will meet with you (and often your child) to determine your family’s goals for coaching.
Based on your conversation, they will recommend a coaching package that includes a set of skills to achieve the goals–this could be boosting self-esteem, enhancing confidence, building resilience, developing self-leadership, achieving a goal, navigating a change, etc.
Coaches work LIVE with your child (in person or online).
Live coaching is critical because it creates a human-to-human connection–offering an emotionally safe space for them to learn, practice, and apply the skills to their own lives. It also enables the coach to shift the skills being taught if the child is facing a particular challenge that needs to be addressed.
A WISDOM Coach® is part of your child’s team and part of your parenting team!
A Parent’s Guide to Life Coaching for Kids
Renaye Thornborrow wrote A Parent’s Guide to Life Coaching for Kids – When to Add a Coach to Your Parenting Team to help build awareness amongst parents about the powerful impact that life coaching for kids is having on children and families.
Here is a Description of the Book
As parents, no matter how much we love our children, we can’t give them confidence, self-esteem, resilience, happiness, or success in their lives. What we CAN do is help them to develop it in themselves—and life coaching for kids can help!
Life coaching is a game-changer for our children when they learn how to develop the mindset (“growth mindset”) and the skill set needed to be confident and prepared to thrive in life.
This book answers key questions about how life coaching is helping children and when you might want to add a coach to your parenting team.
- Learn how coaching differs from counseling and parenting
- Learn why parents hire a coach for their child—get your checklist
- See real-life results of how coaching has helped children rebuild self-esteem, boost their confidence, bounce back from disappointments, manage stress, become self-leaders, achieve big goals, and calm anxiety in children
- Learn how WISDOM Coaches use stories to help your child develop skills for life