Care For You Coaching

Helping stretched parents and informal carers navigate their challenges to reconnect with who they are

Are you?

  • Exhausted from being everything to everyone?
  • Worried that you have lost touch with who you used to be?
  • Feeling guilty for not doing enough or not being the best carer/parent you could be?

Coaching offers:

  • A non-judgmental safe place to bring your thoughts, feelings, guilt, questions and challenges
  • A platform to help build your confidence and rediscover who you are
  • A supportive space to gain clarity, work through challenges, and formulate meaningful actions to make positive changes
  • A space where you are the priority with a focus on whatever you need
  • The option to ‘keep in touch’ by email between sessions to support you

Why choose coaching?

Support with managing overwhelm

“If you are feeling overwhelmed with everything and can’t get things done, or don’t know the right thing to do, give it a go. Coaching gives that sense of perspective and some time to reflect and think about what you might be able to do and have a space to explore options. Even if you don’t want to necessarily make decisions you have space to talk through options and what the pros and cons might be and then decide on whether or not you want to take action.”

Supporting you to connect to ‘you’

“I would really recommend it because I feel like when we are carers we lose our identity a bit and coaching’s a really important as part of trying to claw that back. We’ve got space to talk about our own needs in a positive way, which is also something that you can act upon. So you can actually measure and see how helpful it is.”

A safe space to share

“Sharing and what you’ve been doing as a carer, sharing your emotions, sharing your hardships, your triumphs and everything else. I personally I would recommend all carers to go through something like that.”

Care for You Coaching supports many carer groups across a range of different needs and challenges, including:

  • Carers/parents of neurodiverse children and parents of children who need additional support
  • carers navigating the impact of chronic or terminal illness
  • ‘sandwich’ carers who are parenting and caring
  • young people (18+) caring for parents or loved ones
  • those managing work and caring and/or life transitions and caring (e.g. expectant and new parents, working parents, those retiring)
  • people taking or returning from a caring break
  • those who have been a carer and ceased caring.

Book a free initial consultation

Hi, I’m Dr Jo Collins and I founded Care for You Coaching because I wanted to create coaching tailored for people who (like me) are busy parents, divided between caring for children and loved ones and finding it hard to prioritize their own needs.  I’ve been employed as a coach for 7 years and I specialize in supporting parents and carers ditch guilt and reframe their self-talk.  I have a Master’s degree in positive psychology and coaching psychology and I’m a researcher coach: my practice is informed by the latest evidence, and I also research coaching, sharing findings about practice.

Support for parents and carers of neurodivergent children

We offer opportunities for parents and carers of neurodiverse children to access free coaching:

Coaching to support parents of children with Autism and ADHD

If you are a parent of a child aged 4-19 who

  • is on an Autism/ADHD assessment pathway, or
  • has been diagnosed with Autism and/or ADHD

or

  • you are considering embarking on an Autism and/or ADHD assessment pathway for your child

you may be interested in this offer of 4-6 free coaching sessions!

Coaching can help with:

  • Building parenting confidence
  • Creating strategies to navigate parenting challenges in everyday life
  • Managing stress
  • Planning
  • Creating approaches to support your child’s and your own wellbeing
  • Supporting parents while children are in burnout

The focus of this coaching is specifically on you as parents, giving you a supportive space to be heard and to gain clarity.

The coaching is offered as part of my continuing professional development in which 60 hours of coaching must be undertaken as part of a qualification.

* This service is not diagnosis.

“Jo, was exceptional. She helped me identify my objectives in each session. I have addressed multiple challenges. I have gained confidence in my abilities and understood myself better. I have become more able to talk through barriers I encounter and to find solutions I can take. Jo was amazing, very good at asking probing questions and encouraging reflection.”

Coming soon: coaching to support the wellbeing of stepparents of neurodivergent children

Are you a stepparent of a neurodivergent child aged 5-18 years (with ADHD/Autism or both suspected or outlined as part of clinical diagnosis)?

This intervention offers

  • 4 free sessions of coaching
  • the chance to feed into the creation of coaching tools

for stepparents – either as individuals or in coaching for couples.

Coaching offers a space to:

  • Build confidence in routines, communication, supporting transitions
  • Explore how to navigate rules and boundaries in a household
  • Manage stress, guilt and overwhelm
  • Obtain clarity.

Stepparents are the fastest growing kind of family in the UK (Doodson, 2016), yet research on stepparenting rarely explores stepparenting neurodivergent children.  Help to increase our understanding of stepparents’ experiences, challenges, triumphs, and support needs by being part of this project!

“When you’re a carer you’re never the priority. This is time where the person you’re caring for is put to one side respectfully, because it’s your space and it’s a good space for you for some self-care.”

Free coaching: be part of a research project coaching parents of children with Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA)

The term PDA – still debated between professionals – describes a profile of autism where high levels of anxiety and nervous system activation can mean that demands and pressures become intolerable.  This can span everyday activities such as rejecting requests to dress, eat, or go out, to children feeling unable to cope with the demands of school (and sometimes entering burnout).  In this project an intervention is offered specifically to parents of children with PDA to investigate if and how coaching impacts on parents’ wellbeing.

In this coaching intervention you would attend 6 coaching sessions (free of charge) and participate in 2 (anonymous) interviews.

This project currently has two spaces: please email if you would like to hear more!

Our coaching philosophy

At Care for You Coaching we prioritise you as a person. Our offer is distinct from parent coaching which imparts specific techniques to support parents to interact effectively with their children. Our approach is holistic and works with the whole person – your story, your wellbeing, your motivations. We support you as a parent and a carer and we give you space to be all that you are.

We aren’t an advisory service or a diagnostic service – what we do promise is that we will put you and your needs at the centre of our work, and help you reconnect with yourself and find your own way forward.