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After the birth of her second son, Alexandra Ebner Blumencranz ’96 needed a parenting resource that didn’t seem to exist.
“Up to the point of my second son’s birth, I had thought that as a bright, educated person I would have no parenting troubles,” she explains. “But at that point I found myself struggling. Family and friends didn’t seem to be the right resource for the guidance I needed – and yet I could not find anything for parents like me.”
Later, she used that experience to guide a career choice.
“My major was in psychology,” she says. “However, I did not want to go into traditional therapy, which can sometimes involve a lot of negativity. My experience with my son led me to get involved in a specific kind of parent coaching that is positive, looks at where things are, and focuses on how to go forward.”
Blumencranz found a school in Seattle that offered an 18-month certification in parent coaching. Since this area is fairly new, there are no state regulations and she believed it was important to have the credibility of certification. She now is a “positive parenting coach,” a person who supports parents in addressing everyday challenges. The coaches aim to make the experience more rewarding, fulfilling, and fun.
Blumencranz focuses her practice on new mothers and those with young children. She also works with families through a local hospital’s support group and an athletic group. Topics she and parents deal with range from self-care, to setting limits and schedules, to sibling rivalry and sustaining parental energy. Blumencranz relies on the principles of appreciative inquiry (AI) in her work – asking questions that look at what is going well in a situation.
“By seeing the hope, parents can come to see that the challenge or problem is not the only thing going on in the situation.” she says. “Through the four-stage process of AI (discover, dream, design, and deliver), they become the parents they want to be.”
At this point, the hardest task for Blumencranz is making the concept of parent coaching more widely known.
“Part of my work is to get the word out that this is a good option for parents who are feeling overwhelmed,” she says. “While it is not yet well known, the good news is that in this day and age, parents are more likely to ask for help. Previous generations were a bit more bound by the expectation that they were supposed to know how to handle every situation that came up.”
Blumencranz has found that her Lafayette education prepared her in many ways for this work.
“It was a bit of a risk and somewhat intimidating to start something new that no one else had heard of,” she says. “The confidence and perseverance that it took came partially from my time at Lafayette. My thesis with Dr. [Robert] Allan [associate professor of psychology], and all my experiences there, convinced me that Lafayette would support me in any chances that I would take and that whatever ideas I had, they would be right there looking into them with me. Having that turn out positively enabled me to do the same later in my work.”
Alexandra Ebner Blumencranz ’96 and her two sons, Robert and Justin