About the PCI

The Parent Coaching Institute founded in September 2000, is the originator of the parent coaching profession, setting the highest standards for parent coaching professionals. Through our innovative coaching model we co-create with parents new levels of family fulfillment.

An important part of our mission is to intentionally co-construct effective, evidence-based strategies with the parents we serve so they can positively impact external pressures (such as the impact of media and the high stress of today's world) that directly affect parental decisions and the home environment. In our increasingly complex society, parents have more challenges than ever. Therefore, family support must shift dramatically to adequately address these profound changes. The PCI developed a new paradigm for supporting families, effectively shifting to a living systems, synergetic model with extraordinarily positive results.

In addition to granting Parent Coach Certification® through our Parent Coach Training Program, the PCI offers parent coaching services to moms and dads directly and through agencies, schools, and businesses. The PCI conducts on-going research studies with family support agencies.

As a dynamic institute, PCI students and graduates gather regularly for retreats, workshops, and meetings to share ideas and co-create new projects, synergistically bringing the PCI Vision into reality.

Proud Recent PCI Grads at University of Rhode Island Retreat Center, April, 2007.
Front row (left to right): Judy Kuenhert, Genevieve Fortuna, Linda Smith, Emily Mc Bean
Back row: Elaine Cooper, Liz Warrick, Gloria DeGaetano, Laura Murphy, Denise Nye.
(Photo Courtesy Cathi McGrevey Photography)

The PCI Offers New Frame of Reference

The PCI was born out of a recognized need for an understandable framework of reference that embodies the complexities of parenting in today's world, along with effective ways to adjust services to parents to compensate for those complexities. This framework of reference is based on Parenting as a Living System™.

When enmeshed in an outdated paradigm, it is very difficult to find what really works because systems tend to stay closed unless disturbed enough by outside forces to open up. A new framework of reference creates a small opening in the cultural cloth, so to speak, where something interesting begins to appear so that people want to reach out to rip open the small spot of their own volition to reveal the larger frame and the new world of possibilities that exist outside their current frame of reference. By catalyzing new awareness, at the PCI we begin a process of ownership as parents discover a way out of the old paradigm for themselves. You cannot impose a paradigm shift and those who try to only reel from its backlash.

A new paradigm enters quietly into a culture and is embraced enthusiastically by only a few at first. These individuals are sometimes called the "early adapters." But for the large portion of the masses, they will not be able to begin to live from that new paradigm, until they are presented with a frame of reference that begins to stir the seeds of passion to change and a solid belief in themselves to make that change manifest. Often the desire and belief comes out of suffering so long in the old paradigm, it readies them to try something new, after they have experienced frustrating failures and long for a positive direction guided by a new frame of reference. The PCI provides that new frame of reference—the needed guidance out of the hopelessness and despair plaguing so many parents today.