Become a Certified Parenting Coach with Kerri Nachlas

 

Kerri “Nan” Nachlas is a certified pediatric sleep consultant, certified parent coach, newborn care specialist, and the owner and founder of The Parent Coach Certification Course. In addition to supporting families 1:1, Kerri offers mentorship to other consultants in the Pediatric Sleep and Parenting Coach arena and is currently serving as a board member of the International Pediatric Sleep Association and member of the National Parenting Education Network.
 
Over the years, she has supported over 2000 families as they have found their sleep, their joy and their sanity. While working with these families it became apparent to her that many times what presented as a sleep challenge within a family was actually more of a parenting boundary or lack thereof coupled with the need for a gentle behavior modification.

Parenting has never been more challenging than it is today for so many reasons, not the least of which is the information overload, comparison, and judgement that comes with our current digital age. All of this being the impetus behind the creation of The Parent Coach Certification Course and the desire to train and mentor “the village” that so many parents don’t have in their parenting journey. 

 

 

Links: 

Website: The Parent Coach Certification Course

Facebook: Becoming a Certified Parent Coach

Instagram: @solutions_with_nan

If you would like to learn more about the Becoming a Sleep Consultant, please join our free Facebook Group or check out our CPSM Website.

Book a free discovery call to learn how you can become a Certified Sleep Consultant here.

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Transcript:

Intro: Welcome to Becoming a Sleep Consultant! I’m your host Jayne Havens, a certified sleep consultant and founder of both Snooze Fest by Jayne Havens and Center for Pediatric Sleep Management.

On this podcast, I’ll be discussing the business side of sleep consulting. You’ll have an insider’s view on launching, growing, and even scaling a sleep consulting business. This is not a podcast about sleep training. This is a podcast about business building and entrepreneurship.

Kerri “Nan” Nachlas is a certified pediatric sleep consultant, certified parenting coach, newborn care specialist, and the owner and founder of The Parent Coach Certification Course. In addition to supporting families one to one, Kerri offers mentorship to other consultants in the Pediatric Sleep and Parenting Coach arena and is currently serving as a board member of the International Pediatric Sleep Association and member of the National Parenting Education Network.

Over the years, she has supported over 2,000 families as they have found their sleep, their joy and their sanity. While working with these families it became apparent to her that many times what presented as a sleep challenge within a family was actually more of a parenting boundary or lack thereof coupled with the need for a gentle behavior modification.

Parenting has never been more challenging than it is today for so many reasons, not the least of which is information overload, comparison, and judgement that comes with our current digital age. All of this being the impetus behind the creation of The Parent Coach Certification Course and the desire to train and mentor “the village” that so many parents don’t have in their parenting journey.

Jayne Havens: Kerri, welcome back to the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast. I’m so excited to have this conversation with you today.

Kerri Nachlas: I am so excited. Thank you so much for having me.

Jayne Havens: Of course. Before we get started, tell us a little bit about you and your journey as a certified sleep consultant.

Kerri Nachlas: Okay. So personally, I am a mom to two, a bonus mom to two, and a nan or a grandma to 12. My husband is retired. He was a podiatrist and a foot and ankle surgeon, so I’ve lived in the medical community quite a long time. He was in practice for 42 years, and I was in the medical community for 22 years. And we also owned our own medical spa — those things I loved, but they did not bring me true joy. Like, I wasn’t passionate about them but I loved them.

And so when he retired, he really encouraged me to find something I was passionate about. Because I told him I couldn’t just retire to the lake and be bored all day. And so he said, “Do something you’re really passionate about.” I said, well, that would include children. Because I really, really love children. I’ve always loved children. I wrote my first sleep plan when I was 14. I have always been involved with children. We’ve been foster parents. In so many ways, I’ve been with children.

So when I learned about sleep consulting, it really piqued my interest, and I started doing research. I found your course. I was so impressed. I had done quite a bit of research, and I really resonated with everything that you were saying, in our call, and then your course materials.

I started my sleep consulting journey. My business took off immediately. I’m not one to be much on social media, and I’m not one to have a website. But it has grown in spite of that. And my social media is truly pitiful at best. That’s the only way I could describe it. But it works, and I love my clients. I feel like my business is — to put it, I think, honestly, it’s been very successful and I’ve enjoyed every single minute of it.

Jayne Havens: I’ve always known you to be not just a sleep consultant but also a parenting coach. Can you walk us through what that looks like to wear both hats in your business? Do you show up as a parenting coach for all of your sleep clients?

Kerri Nachlas: So pretty much, if they’re over the age of 12 months — I’m sorry. 12 months. If they’re over the age of 12 months, I pretty much show up as a parent coach/sleep consultant or a sleep consultant/parent coach because they are so intertwined. A lot of times when parents get a hold of me for a 14-month or a four-year-old or a six-year-old, it’s not actually sleep that is the challenge. It’s a parental boundary and expectation that isn’t being set and held.

And so we kind of have to dance around both of those and decide. So what I find myself doing is really blending a lot of my sleep consulting methods and verbiage with my parent coaching methods and verbiage. And it works really well. I get really quick results. With the amount of verbiage and methods that I have available to me, I can meet pretty much any family and their dynamic almost immediately. That’s where we see those quick results. Because the two of those things together add so much to my toolkit.

Jayne Havens: How do you balance the practical aspects of sleep consulting with a more broader scope of parenting coaching? One thing I think about all the time is that sleep consulting is very results-oriented. I feel like in a couple of short weeks, we can see really measurable improvement. Are there ways to see the same results with parenting coaching, or is it more vague and more often a long game?

Kerri Nachlas: Both. But ideally, it’s the same in a lot of ways. What I mean by that is, there are methods, verbiage, and boundaries, expectations we put in place through a very specific plan that I write for these particular clients based on what we’ve talked about.

With sleep consulting, you’re right. There is a finish line, and there’s a goal that we’ve all set as parents and a coach team. And we meet that pretty quickly. With parent coaching, it is a bit of a longer game but it’s actually the same in a lot of ways. What I mean by that is, with parent coaching, I put a plan in place. We follow it. There’s verbiage. There’s methods.

What the success or failure of that ends up being is how closely do the parents follow the plan. But the difference again between sleep consulting and that, sleep consulting is one on one with the child. You may be doing more children in the family But the act of going to sleep and the expectations around it is one parent, one child.

With parent coaching, you’re actually working with the entire family dynamic. You’re working with so many variables. And with bedtime, you can be sure that the child has been fed. They’ve had a bath. They’ve had all of their needs met. Everything is in place for success. Parent coaching is a little different because sometimes they are working from a space of being angry, or not having had a good day at school, or not having slept well the night before. So it is the same in that I do get really great results. Because I base everything with sleep and parenting on a foundation of respect, communication, trust, and who’s in charge, basically. Then we move forward from there.

So to answer your question in a short way, it is a little bit of a longer game but the results show up pretty quickly, which really incentivizes the parents and really gives them a little bit of an empowered, okay. I really do know how to parent and run my family’s — the family dynamic that I want. So it works out both ways. I mean, they’re both the same.

Jayne Havens: You’re actually about to launch your own parenting coach certification program. And as you know, and I want everyone listening to hear it, I plan to be student number one. What inspired you to create your own training program?

Kerri Nachlas: I’m honored that you’re going to be student number one. I’m so excited. Okay. So I decided to create my own training program. Because as I was looking around at parent coaching and parent coaches, there seems to be, over the last five years, a really big push into gentle parenting. But there’s not a lot of information around how to do it, when to do it verbiage, methods, techniques, all of those so that it ends up being that a lot of people are living in permissive parenting.

All of the Facebook groups are full of “I don’t know what I’ve done. I’ve lost control of my house. My five-year-old is cussing at me.” All of these different things that are coming up that they’re like, “I’m trying to gentle parent. It’s not working.” And they can’t find anything else out there that isn’t related to gentle parenting. I saw that being really a regular post. What are you guys using other than gentle parenting? Now, that being said, I do have gentle parenting in the course because I do believe in it. But it has to be married to a couple of other methods to be successful.

And so when I saw that and I started thinking about it, I was like, we’re in a place in the world now where we need options. We need a lot of direction for our children. I decided to make my own course so that I could teach those things. Because I found myself mentoring and speaking to a lot of colleagues in the sleep arena and in the parent coaching arena, and they just were floundering on what to do with the parenting side of it. I thought this is a great opportunity to really share what I’m already sharing, but in a way that people can actually use it in their own businesses comprehensively.

Jayne Havens: What I love about what you do is, it seems like your practice in the way that you coach parents is very results-driven. And when I am inside of these Facebook groups and moms or parents are complaining about their child’s behavior, what I see is 50 other moms chiming in saying, “Oh, that’s normal,” or, “That’s age appropriate” and sort of normalizing the behaviors that we don’t want to see in our children.

You and I know, from coaching lots of parents and then also just raising our own children, that actually when you set high expectations for children, and you show up with a level of mutual respect, they are capable of behaving in a way that you can be really proud of. Parents just don’t have these tools. They don’t have these resources.

Because Instagram is flooded with permissive parenting strategies. It’s not even gentle parenting. It’s permissive parenting. And what I’m so excited about for your program is I feel like you have the tools, the verbiage, the methods to really empower parents to make changes to the way that they show up in your household, at the dinner table, getting into the car, going to bed, whatever that looks like so that everybody can thrive, which is just beautiful.

Kerri Nachlas: Right. Those Facebook pages, when parents are like, “That’s normal. It’s a season,” I just let them do what they want. I let it work itself out. Basically, gave me a parent that is struggling who made the original post. They’re saying, “You need to get over it. You’ll be fine.” When really, they could be mentally and physically struggling as a parent because this behavior is not tolerable for them, whether they’re living through exhaustion or their own mental health issues and triggers.

In my course, one of the new — I say that in air quotes. One of the “new categories” is work-from-home parents. It’s a category we’ve never had before in the way that we have it now. They’re always saying, “You shouldn’t be working from home. You should be doing this. You shouldn’t be doing that.” Parents are being judged left and right on the internet. And I want to give those, like you said, a clear understanding of: this is okay if it’s not okay for you. That’s reasonable, and I have a way to fix that, instead of just saying it’s normal, let it go and deal with it. Because some parents cannot let it go and deal with it. It’s impacting them in very negative ways.

Jayne Havens: Can you give us a glimpse into what students can expect from your program?

Kerri Nachlas: Absolutely. So my program is 90 lessons. It’s 14 modules, and it’s got three required reading books. It’s going to cover literally topics that encompass A to Z child rearing, parenting styles and approaches. We’re going to talk about some of the parenting — there are four main parenting styles but some of them got rebranded. And so we’re going to talk about how they got rebranded and why and then what that looks like to bring those into your coaching. Foundations of effective parent-child relationships, behavior management. We’re talking about all of the different things that we can bring too. Some of these words sound harsh, like behavior management or behavior modification. But they’re really not. It’s truly the best word to describe what we’re doing.

Jayne Havens: I’m comfortable with them, by the way.

Kerri Nachlas: Okay. Good. Supporting emotional intelligence, resilience in children, fostering empathy, intellectual curiosity, imagination and creative play, strengthening child and parent relationships, sibling rivalry and conflict resolution. We’re covering it all. Parenting challenges and special circumstances. Those are, like we said, potty training, co-parenting strategies after separation and divorce, social media and the digital age. There are so many new work-from-home parents who are trying to work full time with little to no support with the children.

Cultural sensitivity and diversity in parent coaching, that was what I was not seeing a lot of when I was looking at what’s available for parents of other cultures, that type of thing. United front and parenting. Because if children feel like there’s a fracture in the parenting front, they know who can, there’s a weak link, and they know who can they can pick on as the parent. And so it’s like the parent, they say, oh, dad is the weak link here. I can pick on him. And they get their way with one of the parents. So we talk about that. So we really cover pretty much any topic that comes up in the arena of raising children.

Jayne Havens: I am so excited.

Kerri Nachlas: Good.

Jayne Havens: I can’t wait. I’m so excited. What advice can you give to sleep consultants who are considering adding this to their toolkit? How do you envision this education will help them in their businesses?

Kerri Nachlas: I would say: do it.

Jayne Havens: Of course. I agree.

Kerri Nachlas: It’s a huge compliment to what they are already doing. It’s not only going to give them an extra level of services to provide. It’s going to expand their knowledge in ways that they probably don’t even realize would be helpful or beneficial, and it’s also going to increase their value. It does increase their reach for who their ideal client might be or what direction their business may go. So where they may be saying, “Their sleep looks fantastic, but their behavior really is not great. I think you need to work with a parent coach.”

They can actually go ahead and write that plan and be that person. They already know the family. They already understand the dynamic. They have a little bit of history. They’re the perfect person to create that plan of parenting moving forward. And once they are a parent coach, they will actually do them simultaneously like I do. Because you cannot parent coach an exhausted child, and an exhausted child is not going to show up as their best self the next day. So then they get in a lot of trouble. So it’s really all intertwined to where one pats the other’s back so well, that it will add to their business exponentially.

Jayne Havens: That’s what I’m really excited about personally. I’ve been coaching largely, almost all of my clients these days are families with three-, four- or five-year-olds. And I feel really confident that I can get their children to respect the boundaries of bedtime and to gain their confidence around sleep. All of my verbiage and all of my techniques are really geared towards the hours of like 7 to 8:30 at night. And so I have started to use those same strategies to help parents with daytime stuff. But I’m really excited to have a sort of expanded toolkit to be able to really infiltrate the daytime.

Because I agree with you. A lot of these families that I’m working with, they’re hiring me because they have a sleep challenge, and that’s their breaking point. It’s the fact that bedtime is hard. But really, they have a whole lot of other challenges happening all day long that they’re sort of either providing unnecessary or unhelpful accommodations, or they’re redirecting, or they’re just sort of defusing the situation in the fastest way they know how. And that’s not really lending to their child having the confidence and the tools to be better behaved during the day.

Kerri Nachlas: Exactly.

Jayne Havens: So I’m really excited about that. How do you envision your Parenting Coaching Certification Course making an impact on the lives of families?

Kerri Nachlas: Okay. So I’m really passionate about this. Because parenting has never been more challenging than it is right now. The three-, four- and five-year-olds that you are talking about are those babies during COVID. And COVID was a huge hiccup in our world but also in the parenting arena. And so those three-, four- and five-year-olds that are coming out of the COVID mentality of being shut down and having all of those things, parenting changed. Literally, parenting changed not even for the better in a lot of ways.

There were some positive things that came out of it. But the parts that didn’t, that weren’t positive, are showing up now. So I feel like in this age of judgment, the comparison, the information overload, parents just want somebody to say, “I’m cutting through all of that for you, and I’m going to create a plan that works for you. And it’s going to resonate with you not only as a parent, as a person, and in your family dynamic.” Then they can embrace it because it’s authentically there. It resonates with them.

If it doesn’t resonate with them or if they have to dig through so much information that is sometimes contradictory online, they don’t know which way to go or how to how to show up for their children. So that’s why I feel like creating a little bit of a village for people is so important. I feel like this course will put more village people out there, if you will, to be that for them so that they do have someone that they can say to them, “This is how we do it. This is why, and this is where we’re going to put it in place.”

And parents, after I work with them, they’re always like, “I don’t know how I’m going to work without you.” That’s not my goal. We work on setting them up for success independently, so they can move forward through all of the parenting developmental seasons. But they truly do, they really need and want and they really kind of attach themselves to that support. Because it’s life changing for them, and it’s such a stress relief for them.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, I totally agree. I think that what you’re putting out into the universe is just so special, so needed. And really, I always say sleep training literally saves lives. I think that what you’re doing is the same. Like, you’re going to position spouses to enjoy each other more. You’re going to position parents to enjoy their children more. Happier families lead to better outcomes all around. I think that this is just so, so needed. What would you say sets your program apart from others that are currently being offered?

Kerri Nachlas: This is a hard question. My program is comprehensive. It’s affordable, but it has exactly what you just said. It has the tools, the techniques, the verbiage. It has everything that they need to create a viable and effective plan for their clients to move them forward. My downloads in there are all written parent-to-child, so they don’t have to change the verbiage or the tense in it. They don’t have to — it’s there for them to use, to hand out.

It’s one of those where the community that we’re building is similar to the community that you’ve built in that the support and the interaction and the camaraderie on Facebook group for the graduates and for the people who are exploring the program is so comprehensive. It’s full of good ideas and collaboration. So those things in itself, I think, make this wildly successful and very much different than what I found out there. I have done pretty extensive research on a lot of the options that are out there, the coaching programs. I knew exactly what I wanted mine to look like, and I knew exactly why it needed to look like that. Then the last five years of parenting clarified that incredibly.

Jayne Havens: Before we wrap up, where can listeners go to learn more about your program, and how can they enroll?

Kerri Nachlas: So it’s parentcoachcertificationcourse.com, or they can also join the Becoming a Parent Coach Facebook group, or they can reach out to me on social media. We can connect and go from there. The website has the links for enrolling, and there will be also links to enroll on the Becoming a Parent Coach Facebook group. So those are two great places to start.

Jayne Havens: Perfect, I will make sure that all of those links, in addition to your social media, are all included in the show notes. As I’ve said a gazillion times, but I’ll say it again, I am beyond excited for this. I know that everything that you teach is gold. I know that this is tried-and-true stuff that you’ve been implementing with your clients, your families for years. And you have incredible success in your sleep consulting business, which has sort of evolved into parenting coaching as well.

I’m so excited to learn from you. I hope that so many people who are listening today will take this opportunity to, at a minimum, learn more, get to know Kerri, reach out to her and enroll in her program. I’ll be there with bells on, along with Kerri and everybody else who’s decided to join us.

Kerri Nachlas: I’m excited. Thank you so much. And I look forward to meeting everybody that’s interested in the program.

Outro: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, it would mean so much to me if you would rate, review, and subscribe. When you rate, review, and subscribe, this helps the podcast reach a greater audience. I am so grateful for your support.

If you would like to learn more about how you can become a certified sleep consultant, head over to my Facebook Group, Becoming a Sleep Consultant or to my website thecpsm.com. Thanks so much, and I hope you will tune in for the next episode.