There are four components to the PCI coaching model:
- Parenting as Living System™ forms the basis for seeing parents and children as living, dynamic beings with individual strengths, talents, and creative capabilities, which are shaped and developed by the relationships within the system.
- Understanding Current Society’s Impact on the Family, including the influence of screen technologies, mass media, and a consumer society, helps to better understand and address today's unique parenting challenges.
- Brain-Compatible Parenting™ focuses on meeting the developmental needs of children and teens through a most efficient means—giving the growing brain what it needs at each stage of development.
- Appreciative Inquiry as Process Methodology provides the framework for coaching conversations, helping parents to focus on the positive and to use a vocabulary of hope.
Historical Development of the Model
a note from Gloria DeGaetano
This model grew out of my work over the past 20 years as parent, teacher, and educational consultant. I was first introduced to the concept of aliveness in 1986 during a year-long series of workshops led by Dr. Charles Johnston, Director of The Institute for Creative Development, in Seattle, WA. Since then, the concept of aliveness and elements of Appreciative Inquiry have been integral in all of my work with parents and educators. In 1987 I focused my educational consulting on articulating the complex societal/cultural impacts on the family and helping educators and parents implement principles and strategies of Brain-Compatible Parenting™. In the 1990s I was introduced to the concepts of living systems theory, which became the larger framework that facilitated a better articulation of the cultural impacts on the parenting process, and the needs of children for Brain-Compatible Parenting™.
Over the last two decades of presenting workshops and lectures I worked closely with many schools, social service groups, and parent groups. I looked for what brought aliveness to parents; and I looked at how parents used the information presented to them to bring about change in their lives. Gradually, I realized that workshops and lectures can communicate concepts, but they don't provide the ongoing relationship and focused support that is necessary to bring about effective and sustained change in the lives of most parents. Through this realization and through my own experience with coaching, I came to understand that the coaching model could provide the necessary relationship to support effective, sustained change.
My re-introduction to Appreciative Inquiry in the late 1990s as a
coaching tool provided the final component to make the PCI coaching
model truly effective. It provided a process methodology for the
coaching relationship that meshed synergistically with the other
components of the PCI model.
Why This Unique Synthesis Works
The PCI coaching model reclaims the role of the parent as a primary
transmitter of culture to the child—a role that parents have
traditionally held, but a role whose boundaries have become blurred
within a popular, mass media culture that has impacted both
parenting priorities and children's conceptions of self. An emphasis
on parenting as a living system within our techno-mechanisitc
culture supports a new way of thinking about the de-humanizing
aspects of modern society on parents and children. Within the PCI
model, the role of the parent coach is viewed as that of a catalytic
change agent, who encourages brain-compatible parenting™
through Appreciative Inquiry process methodology to effect changes
within the parent-child-family system. We believe that such coaching
over time with millions of parents will significantly help to
reshape how our culture is defined and transmitted.
A PCI Coach linked with a parent over time creates a new society and a new world standard for families.