Parent Coaching
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Parent Coaching & Parenting Support in Los Angeles
You’re Not Failing. You’re Looking for a Map.
Parenting can often feel like searching for something without a map. There are moments of profound connection and then there are the moments when nothing you do seems to work. The defiance. The meltdowns. The guilt that follows your own reaction. The late night wondering: Am I doing this right? Am I damaging them? Why does this feel so hard when everyone else seems to have it figured out?
If you’re reading this, I want to say something clearly: wanting guidance doesn’t make you a bad parent. It makes you a conscious one. The fact that you’re here, questioning, reflecting, and looking for a better way, tells me something important about who you are.
Many parents come to my Los Angeles practice with a specific request: “fix” or “change” their child in some way. I understand that impulse. When your child is struggling, you want it to stop. But in my experience, something else often becomes apparent. It’s not only the child who needs attention. It’s the whole system, the family, the dynamics, and yes, the parent too. When one person in the family feels lost, the initial response to that frustration can be to displace the struggle onto another. Your child’s behavior may be real, but it’s often a signal pointing to something larger.
As a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist providing parent coaching in Los Angeles, I work with parents to understand these signals and find genuine harmony in their relationship with their children.
What Is Parent Coaching?
Parent coaching is a therapeutic process where I work directly with you, the parent, to explore your parenting patterns, understand your child’s behavior, and develop more effective, attuned ways of relating to your family. Unlike child therapy where the child is the primary client, parent coaching puts you at the center.
This isn’t about following a parenting formula or memorizing discipline techniques from a book. It’s about understanding the deeper dynamics at play: your own childhood, your attachment patterns, and the feelings your child stirs in you. You’ll become more conscious in how you show up as a parent.
Parent coaching can be done on its own or alongside your child’s individual therapy. Many Los Angeles families I work with benefit from a combination of both.
Why Parenting Feels So Overwhelming
Modern parenting is uniquely exhausting. You’re expected to be emotionally available, set firm-but-loving boundaries, limit screen time while managing your own, stay calm during meltdowns, avoid repeating your parents’ mistakes, and somehow maintain your own identity and wellbeing in the process.
Beneath the daily logistics, most parents are carrying something heavier: their own unresolved experiences from childhood. The way you were parented, the things that were said, the things that were never said, and the way conflict was handled or avoided, all lives inside you. It surfaces most powerfully in your own parenting.
This isn’t about blame. It’s about awareness. When you understand how your history is influencing your present, you gain the freedom to choose differently. That’s what parent coaching offers: not perfection, but consciousness.
Signs You May Benefit From Parent Coaching
You don’t need to be in crisis to seek support. Many parents I see in my Culver City practice come because they notice something isn’t working, and they want to address it before it becomes entrenched.
You might benefit from parent coaching if:
- You feel like you’re constantly battling with your child and nothing changes
- Your child’s emotional outbursts leave you feeling helpless or triggered
- You find yourself yelling, threatening, or reacting in ways that don’t reflect who you want to be
- You’re repeating patterns from your own childhood that you swore you’d never repeat
- Your teenager has become unreachable: withdrawn, defiant, or emotionally shut down
- You and your co-parent disagree on discipline, boundaries, or values
- You’re navigating a divorce, separation, or blended family and your children are struggling
- You feel burned out, overwhelmed, and like you’ve lost yourself in the role of “parent”
- Your child has been diagnosed with anxiety, ADHD, or behavioral challenges and you don’t know how to respond
- You simply want to be more intentional, connected, and conscious in your parenting
Common Parenting Challenges I Help With
Communication Breakdown
Your child won’t talk to you, or talks only in anger. Your teenager responds with eye rolls, slammed doors, or silence. You’ve tried everything, and nothing gets through. In parent coaching, we explore what’s underneath the communication failure, and what your child might actually be trying to tell you.
Defiant and Oppositional Behavior
When a child consistently pushes back, refuses to listen, or acts out, it’s usually not about disobedience. It’s about an unmet need: for autonomy, for attention, for safety, for control in a world that feels overwhelming. We explore what’s driving the behavior and how to respond in ways that address the root, not just the symptom.
Emotional Outbursts and Meltdowns
Whether your child is five or fifteen, emotional dysregulation can be exhausting for the whole family. Parent coaching helps you understand your child’s nervous system, develop co-regulation skills, and create an environment where big feelings are met with steadiness rather than more chaos.
Teenager Struggles
Adolescence brings its own landscape of challenges: identity questioning, peer pressure, academic stress, social media, substance experimentation, mood changes, and the developmentally appropriate but painful push for independence. Parent coaching helps you stay connected even as your teenager needs space.
Parent Burnout
You can’t pour from an empty cup, and yet you do every day. Parent burnout is real, and it doesn’t make you weak. It makes you human. Part of our work together is helping you recognize your own needs, set boundaries that protect your wellbeing, and model self-care for your children.
Co-Parenting After Divorce
Separation brings unique challenges: navigating different households, different rules, different parenting styles, and the emotional weight of the transition on your children. Parent coaching helps you establish boundaries, improve communication with your co-parent, and keep your child’s wellbeing at the center.
Blended Family Dynamics
Bringing families together is one of the most complex relational undertakings there is. Stepparenting, loyalty conflicts, sibling dynamics, and the delicate process of building new bonds all benefit from thoughtful, guided support.
Setting Boundaries Without Shame
Many parents I work with in Los Angeles struggle with the balance between firmness and warmth. They know yelling doesn’t work, but permissiveness doesn’t either. We explore how to create structure that feels containing and loving for your child, as opposed to dictatorial and shaming.
Childhood Anxiety
If your child is anxious, you probably feel it in your own body. The impulse to protect, to reassure, to remove the source of their distress is powerful. But sometimes it reinforces the anxiety. Parent coaching helps you develop responses that validate your child’s feelings while supporting their resilience.
Screen Time and Technology
This is one of the most common concerns I hear from Los Angeles parents. There’s no perfect answer, but there are more conscious approaches. We explore your family’s relationship with technology and what boundaries feel authentic to your values.
How Parent Coaching Works
What to Expect
Parent coaching sessions follow the same structure as individual therapy: we meet weekly for 50-minute sessions, either in person at my Culver City office or online.
In our first session, I’ll ask about what’s happening at home, your child’s history and development, and your own experience of being parented. I’m not gathering this information to judge you. I’m gathering it because your story matters, and it directly shapes how you parent today.
From there, our work may include:
- Noticing your projections and learning to own them
- Modeling healthy boundaries
- Understanding that boundaries are acts of love, not punishment
- Connecting meaningfully with your child
- Finding ways to be with your child that nourish both of you
- Encouraging independence
- Exploring whether the goals you have for your child are truly theirs, or yours
- Examining emotional inheritance
- Observing how much of your emotional life you ask your child to carry
- Coping with your child’s pain
- Learning to sit with difficult feelings when you see your child suffering
- Communication alternatives
- Finding ways to express yourself beyond yelling, withdrawal, or passive-aggressive behavior
- Exploring intimacy and connection
- Addressing any difficult feelings you may have about closeness
- Understanding how they impact your capacity to connect with your child
My Therapeutic Approach
My approach to parent coaching is grounded in psychodynamic and Jungian thought. I’m interested in the unconscious patterns that shape your parenting. I also draw from:
step 01
Attachment Theory
Understand how your early attachment experiences influence the bond you create with your child. Together, we'll explore how these patterns shape connection, trust, and emotional security within your family.
step 02
Family Systems Theory
Your child's behavior doesn't exist in isolation. We'll examine the family dynamics, relationship patterns, and emotional interactions that may be contributing to current challenges within your family system and relationships.
step 03
Depth & Developmental Psychology
Explore the unconscious aspects of parenting while gaining a clearer understanding of child development. We'll distinguish between age-appropriate behaviors and concerns that may need deeper attention.
step 04
Somatic Awareness & Growth
Learn to recognize how parenting stress shows up in your body and develop healthier ways to regulate emotions before responding. This creates more thoughtful reactions, stronger relationships, and lasting change.
This isn’t surface-level parenting advice. It’s a deeper exploration of who you are as a parent, the patterns that shape your family relationships, and who you want to become.
Why Work With Saman Khazani
I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with License #MFC 104017, trained at Antioch University Los Angeles, with over a decade of clinical experience working with parents and families across the Los Angeles area.
The title of my credential, Marriage and Family Therapist, isn’t accidental. My entire professional training is built around understanding how relationships and family systems work. When you bring me your parenting struggles, you’re working with someone whose expertise is specifically in the dynamics between parents, children, and families.
I also bring my own humanity to this work. I know what it’s like to grow up in a family where dynamics were painful and confusing. That personal experience doesn’t make me an authority on your family. But it does make me someone who understands that family life is complicated, messy, and deeply meaningful. I won’t judge you for the moments you’re not proud of. I’ll help you understand them.
Learn more about me and my approach on the About page.
Serving Families Across Los Angeles
In-Person: My office is located at 11949 Jefferson Blvd, Culver City, CA 90230. I welcome parents and families from Culver City, Venice, West Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Marina Del Rey, Beverly Hills, and the greater Los Angeles area.
Online: I provide virtual parent coaching sessions throughout California via secure, HIPAA-compliant video. Many parents find online sessions particularly convenient. You can attend from home during nap time, a lunch break, or after the kids are in bed.
Fees: Parent coaching sessions are $225. I offer a free 15-minute phone consultation. I’m an out-of-network provider and provide superbills for insurance reimbursement. Many California PPO plans reimburse 50 to 80% for out-of-network therapy. I accept Visa, Mastercard, American Express, cash, check, HSA, and FSA.
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FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions About Parent Coaching
Parent coaching focuses specifically on you, the parent, and your parenting patterns, reactions, and relationship with your child. Family therapy brings the whole family into the room. Both are valuable. Parent coaching is ideal when the parent recognizes that their own growth is key to the family's wellbeing.
Sometimes both. If your child is struggling with anxiety, depression, behavioral challenges, or emotional regulation, individual therapy for children may be appropriate alongside parent coaching. Often, the most powerful changes happen when parents and children are both getting support, working from both ends of the relationship.
I work with parents of children at every stage: toddlers through teenagers and even adult children. The issues shift with age, but the underlying dynamics remain the same: attachment, boundaries, communication, emotional attunement.
It depends on the complexity of the issues. Some parents come for 6 to 10 sessions around a specific challenge. Others find that deeper work on their own patterns benefits from a longer engagement. We'll check in regularly about what feels right.
Yes. But the approach may surprise you. Rather than giving you a toolkit for managing defiant behavior, we explore what's driving it: from your child's perspective and from the family system. Often, defiance is a bid for autonomy, attention, or safety. When you understand the root, the behavior begins to shift.
Absolutely. Adolescence is one of the most common reasons parents seek coaching. The push for independence, the communication shutdown, the risk-taking, all of it is developmentally normal, but that doesn't make it easy. Coaching helps you stay connected without being controlling.
This is extremely common. Parent coaching can help you align on values and approaches, or we may recommend couples therapy to address the relational dynamics beneath the parenting disagreements.
Yes. Co-parenting after separation requires clear communication, firm boundaries, and the ability to put your child's needs above the residual emotions of the relationship. Coaching provides structure and support for navigating this.
No. Parenting classes teach general information to groups. Parent coaching is one-on-one therapeutic work tailored specifically to your family's unique dynamics, your personal history, and the specific challenges you're facing.
No. My role isn't to judge your parenting or give you a grade. It's to help you see patterns you might not see on your own, understand where they come from, and make more conscious choices. This work is collaborative, not prescriptive.