Redirecting Children

About Saskia West

​

Saskia West lives in Oatley NSW with her husband and three children. She holds a Bachelor Degree in Applied Social Science (Counselling) and is a certified Parent Educator of Positive Discipline, and a certified Teacher Educator of Positive Discipline in the Classroom (www.positivediscipline.com).

 

Saskia works in schools as a behavioural consultant helping teachers to empower students with confidence, self-respect and resourcefulness.She also works with parents and families to create a loving, cooperative and peaceful environment in the home. 

​

Saskia runs many parenting talks, workshops and courses. She is passionate about the importance of parenting and believes that, despite its challenges, parenting can be very rewarding and fun.

​

"We all arrive at the first day of parenthood with a preconception of how our parenting journey will be played out. This preconception has been constructed by our own experience of being parented as a child, what we believe was good parenting practice and what was not so good. This is then mixed with how our partner on the parenting journey was parented and how society today tells us we should parent.

 

We are then faced with a completely different environment of growing up to what we ourselves had experienced. There is less time spent at home, more technology to contend with, greater pressures to achieve, to have, to get it right and less opportunity to do it in.

 

Early on in my own parenting journey I began to dislike myself more and more as a parent. More and more my days were ending with the feeling that all I had done was to yell at the kids and become angry and frustrated. I found myself joining in with other parent’s usual complaints (anything from how kids ‘press our buttons’ or ‘they just don’t listen’ or it’s the ‘terrible twos’ or anything else that they could aim at the child and therefore not look at themselves) and consciously I thought well at least I’m not the only one, but subconsciously it made me dislike myself even more. Somehow I couldn’t accept that my children were out to deliberately ruin my time as a parent. I had to find a better way.

 

I began to read as many parenting books as I could get my hands on. I trained and became a certified parent educator with the Positive Parenting Network of Australia and went back to university and achieved a Bachelor of Applied Social Science Degree (counselling). 

 

Having strategies that allow me as a parent to be firm and kind gives me a sense of peace and calm because I am able to work from my compassionate, empathetic and more spiritual side. It focuses on looking at what children are communicating through their behaviour and strategies to redirect that behaviour into a way that allows them to fulfil their needs and feel good about themselves at the same time.

 

I want mostly to tell parents that having children does not mean the unhappy existence that society will have us believe. It can be a truly rewarding and life enhancing experience. All you need to do is use strategies that will allow you to create that nurturing, cooperative and respectful environment that we all deserve and can achieve."

​