Counseling, training and coaching with mothers and fathers: Pathways for promoting inclusion

We can say without a doubt that the complex society we live in – characterized by globalization, multi-diversity, rapid technological advancement, financial crises, just to mention a few aspects – impinges also on the challenges that parents have to face every day to provide a living for their families while trying to assure them a decent present and future. Parents have not only been recognized as having a crucial role in preventing possible issues in the social and personal adjustment of their children but also a social role as agents able to act in their life contexts to prompt change and improvement. Within this perspective, supporting parents in carrying out their duties seems nowadays inevitable if we want to guarantee acceptable quality of life and achieve the flourishing of family resources that can be exploited at best for them, their children and their life contexts. Parental involvement is today considered crucial also in the realization of a more inclusive society in which attention is paid to doing together and co-constructing contexts that value everybody’s uniqueness. Parents can not only be models for their children and foster tolerant attitudes toward diversity in them, but can also contribute to creating welcoming supportive contexts that promote everybody’s inclusion and participation (Ferrari & Nota, 2015). This chapter will focus in particular on parents of children with disability who, just because of their children, find themselves on the frontline when facing the issue of inclusion. Research studies on parents of children with disability are certainly not a novelty and those carried out in the past have not been very fair about parents’ characteristics, thus contributing, just as has happened for their children, to spread negative views of the conditions and prospects of these persons. Also prompted by the advent of positive psychology, the latest models have instead focused attention on the resources and strengths of these parents, underlined and, albeit slowly, diminished stereotypical and negative visions of them. For example, Blacher, Baker, and Berkovits’ (2013) model reminds us that bringing up a child implies joys and satisfactions regardless of the child’s specific issues and of the difficulties experienced by the family. Naturally, parents of children with disability have negative and positive characteristics similar to those of other parents, but they also have specific experiences coming from having a child with impairment. For instance, parents able to revise their objectives are the ones who report ‘growing’ more from living with their children’s disability and also becoming better able to cope with stressful situations. These parents seem to see themselves as more sensitive to and tolerant of diversity, better able to understand others, to open toward new life perspectives and life experiences, which include also taking up an active role in the community as regards disability and inclusion (King, Zwaignebaum, Bates, Baxter, & Rosenbaum, 2012). This suggests that people engaged in the services, counselors and coaches should certainly take into account parents’ difficulties and long-term levels of stress, but also exploit the potentials that accompany the life stories of these persons and the resources they have used to favor everybody’s inclusion. Therefore, in this chapter we have chosen to propose some suggestions that could be used to promote counseling actions that help parents develop a constructive mindset characterized by optimism and positive views of disability because of the role they can play in maintaining their quality of life and in adopting inclusive actions. Main interventions centered on parents, as proposed in the international literature, will be described namely parent counseling, parent training, and the most recently developed parent coaching essentially addressed to individual families, both for the proved effectiveness and for the preventive value that make these as necessary steps toward the inclusion and participation of children and their families to the normal contexts of people’s lives.