On March 24th, Exult Healthcare put on a fantastic workshop for parenting workshop lead by licensed professional, Astrid Thomsen. It focused on learning new techniques to understand and communicate with their children. The seminar was three hours long and was filled with interactions, lectures, and of course snacks and water.

The workshop’s theme was to give parents, who still use traditional parenting styles, the skills to understand how kid’s think today.

Astrid broke it down with, “We have parents who are still used to the old-school type of parenting. The idea that when the parent says jump, the kid says how high. Parents have to understand that children just do not work the same way. It has come to the point that when parent’s say jump, the children say why. Many adults have trouble with this and there needs to be an understanding of today’s society and just how different it is.”

She went on to point out the “wall of resilience” that comes from the inability to understand the differences. A parent can use ‘because I told you so’ but children today are not responding to a blanket statement. When you take the resilience down then the child can not only better understand the parent but the parent communicates better to reach an affective boundary with their child.

Some other highlighted points from the seminar came from the importance of letting your child fail. We are not talking, major failures that you could have prevented. But parents learning not to rescue their child every single time. This allows the child to have a better transition into later years of emerging adult and adulthood.

Taking a look at the therapist leading the seminar was Exult’s own Astrid Thomsen. Astrid has been a therapist for almost thirty years and is LPC-S certified, dual-certified as an Equine Specialist in PATH and EAGALA, and certified in Chemical Dependence specializing in Addiction. She owns a farm in East Texas, where Astrid practices her “farmacy”. It is an integrated approach to using therapy, nature, and animal rescues to benefit your mental health.