When Parenting Coaching Meets Systems Thinking: Why Behaviour Is Never the Whole Story

by Dr. Bob Carey

In recent years, parenting coaching has emerged as a powerful alternative to traditional advice-driven or compliance-based models of child-rearing.  I recently read an excellent article in the Journal of Health Service Psychology (2025, Vol 51, Issue 3), by Dr. Antonio F. Pagan entitled “Discipline, Love and Authenticity:  A Psychologist’s Guide to Coaching Parents”.  This article on parenting coaching offers a timely and evidence-informed overview of how coaching reframes parent support by shifting the focus away from controlling behaviour and toward strengthening family systems, emotional regulation, and relational capacity.  I found that these principles align remarkably well with the Positive Systems Approach outlined in my recent book, What if It’s Not Just The Behaviour?, reinforcing a shared understanding that sustainable change occurs not through correction alone, but through transformation of the environments, relationships, and internal processes that shape behaviour.  In this blog post I will briefly outline some of the main concepts in the article (in case the reader can’t access the full article) and compare this with Positive Systems Approach. 

Parenting Coaching Framework

The article by Dr. Pagan presents a modern, relationship-centered model for supporting families that departs from traditional expert-driven parenting advice. It positions parenting coaching as a collaborative, strengths-based intervention designed to enhance parental insight, emotional regulation, and adaptive problem-solving rather than prescribing rigid strategies or standardized disciplinary techniques. 

Redefining the Role of Parents and Professionals

A central theme of the article is the redefinition of both the parent’s role and the practitioner’s role. Instead of viewing parents as recipients of expert instruction, the coaching model treats parents as capable partners in the change process. Coaches function as facilitators who guide reflection, encourage skill development, and help parents identify their own goals and values. This approach emphasizes empowerment rather than dependency, fostering long-term competence rather than short-term compliance.  The article highlights that this collaborative relationship is essential for meaningful engagement. Parents are more likely to sustain positive changes when they feel respected, heard, and actively involved in shaping solutions that fit their family’s unique culture, circumstances, and developmental needs.

Understanding Behaviour as Communication

Another major focus is the reframing of children’s behavior. Rather than interpreting challenging behaviours as deliberate defiance or poor discipline, the article emphasizes that behaviour is often an expression of unmet needs, emotional overload, developmental immaturity, or environmental stress. Parenting coaching encourages caregivers to view behaviour as communication — a signal that something in the child’s internal or external world requires attention. This perspective shifts parental responses away from punishment-based reactions and toward curiosity, empathy, and problem-solving. Coaches support parents in identifying triggers, recognizing emotional cues, and understanding how factors such as fatigue, transitions, sensory sensitivities, or family stressors influence children’s reactions.

Emotional Regulation and Co-Regulation as Core Skills

The article by Dr. Pagan places strong emphasis on emotional regulation as a foundational parenting competency. It recognizes that parents’ emotional states directly shape children’s ability to regulate themselves. When caregivers respond with calm, consistency, and emotional presence, children are more likely to develop self-regulation skills over time. 

Parenting coaching therefore prioritizes teaching co-regulation strategies, such as modeling calm behavior, validating emotions, and providing predictable structure. Parents are guided to reflect on their own stress responses and emotional triggers, allowing them to interrupt reactive cycles and replace them with more intentional, supportive interactions. 

Building Parental Self-Efficacy and Confidence

A recurring theme throughout the article is the importance of strengthening parental self-efficacy. Many caregivers experience feelings of inadequacy, guilt, or confusion when traditional discipline approaches fail to produce desired results. Parenting coaching addresses this by helping parents recognize their existing strengths, identify successful moments, and build confidence through achievable goal-setting.

By focusing on skill development rather than blame, the coaching process promotes a sense of agency. Parents are encouraged to experiment with new approaches, reflect on outcomes, and refine strategies in partnership with their coach. Over time, this iterative learning process enhances adaptability and resilience, enabling families to respond more effectively to future challenges.

Individualized and Context-Sensitive Interventions

Dr. Pagan excellent article also underscores that effective parenting support must be tailored to each family’s context. Cultural values, family structure, socioeconomic pressures, and developmental stages all influence parenting needs. Parenting coaching is presented as a flexible model that adapts to these variables rather than imposing universal rules or expectations.

This individualized approach allows parents to integrate strategies that align with their beliefs and lived realities, increasing the likelihood of sustained behavior change and family stability. Coaches assist parents in identifying realistic goals that consider time constraints, stress levels, and available supports. 

Long-Term Outcomes and Systemic Impact

Finally, the article highlights the broader impact of parenting coaching beyond immediate behaviour concerns. By improving emotional awareness, communication patterns, and relational security, coaching contributes to healthier family systems overall. Benefits include reduced parental stress, improved parent-child relationships, increased emotional resilience in children, and stronger problem-solving capacity across the household.

Rather than targeting isolated incidents of misbehaviour, the coaching model aims to create lasting systemic change. This shift reflects an understanding that sustainable improvement occurs when family dynamics, emotional climates, and interaction patterns evolve together.

Why This Mirrors the Positive Systems Approach

These principles in the article by Dr. Pagan are strikingly consistent with the foundations of the Positive Systems Approach (PSA) described in What if It’s Not Just The Behaviour?  At the heart of PSA is the understanding that behaviour does not occur in isolation. It is shaped by neurological development, relational safety, environmental structure, emotional states, and systemic stressors. Focusing solely on surface-level behaviour change ignores the complex network of influences that sustain patterns over time.

Just as parenting coaching emphasizes relational and emotional context, PSA reframes behavioural challenges as indicators of system imbalance rather than individual failure. In the book, I describe how families, classrooms, and care environments function as interconnected systems in which change in one area inevitably influences the whole. This mirrors the coaching model’s emphasis on working with parents to adjust interaction patterns, routines, and emotional responses rather than attempting to “fix” the child alone.

Another point of alignment lies in the emphasis on capacity-building. Parenting coaching seeks to strengthen parental awareness, regulation, and confidence. Similarly, PSA prioritizes building adult capacity for co-regulation, emotional attunement, and consistent support structures. When adults develop stronger regulatory skills, children benefit from greater stability and predictability — two conditions essential for behavioural growth and emotional resilience.

Moving Beyond Compliance Toward Connection

Both approaches also challenge traditional behaviourist models that prioritize compliance over connection. The article underscores the importance of maintaining secure parent-child relationships as the foundation for positive change.  In PSA, this same principle is central: behavioural improvement is most sustainable when children feel emotionally safe, understood, and supported.

Rather than relying on external rewards or punishments, both models advocate for intrinsic motivation through relational trust and collaborative problem-solving. This shift is not about being permissive. Instead, it reflects a more sophisticated understanding of how the nervous system responds to stress, threat, and safety — and how these responses directly influence behaviour.

A Shared Vision for Sustainable Change

What makes the convergence of parenting coaching and the Positive Systems Approach so compelling is their shared commitment to long-term, sustainable outcomes. Both reject quick fixes and instead focus on strengthening the underlying structures that support healthy development. This includes improving emotional regulation, enhancing communication patterns, reducing systemic stress, and fostering environments where children and adults alike can thrive.

In What if It’s Not Just The Behaviour?, I argue that meaningful change occurs when we stop asking, “How do we control this behaviour?” and start asking, “What does this system need to function more effectively?” Parenting coaching offers a practical application of this philosophy by equipping families with the tools to make those systemic adjustments in everyday life.

Final Reflections

The alignment between contemporary parenting coaching models and the Positive Systems Approach reflects a broader shift in how we understand child development and family wellbeing. Both recognize that behaviour is not the problem to be solved, but rather the message to be understood. When we listen to that message and respond at the system level — through connection, capacity-building, and emotional safety — we create the conditions for genuine growth.

For parents, practitioners, and educators alike, this convergence offers a hopeful and empowering roadmap forward. It reminds us that lasting change is not about doing more discipline, but about building stronger systems — starting with ourselves.