An Interview with Steven Richfield, Psy.D. on Parents as Coaches

Wise Counsel Podcasts

An Interview with Steven Richfield, Psy.D. on Parents as Coaches. Mental Help Net (www.mentalhelp.net) presents the Wise Counsel Podcast (wisecounsel.mentalhelp.net), hosted by David Van Nuys, Ph.D. Drs. Van Nuys and Richfield discuss Richfield's coaching cards, a deck of cards designed to be used by pre-teen children and parents so as to help children understand, in a concrete and developmentally approprite manner, methods for coping that might otherwise be just above their understanding. For instance, the cantaloupe skin card shows the image of a child putting on a cantaloupe skin. This is a concrete representation of the idea that some people have thin skins (e.g., are sensitive and vulnerable) while others have thicker skins, and that thinner skinned children have the option to metaphorically choose to put on a thicker skin by focusing their minds on success experiences which help shore up their fragile self-concepts. The cards offer key concepts to children that enable them to cope better, helping to advance their development of social maturity. Richfield sees this approach as offering parents a way to fundamentally better understand what their children are going through and therefore respond in a developmentally sensitive manner promoting maturation (in the manner of an athletic coach) rather than as simple rule setters and enforcers.