Want to become a parenting coach? 

Starting a parenting coaching business can be incredibly fulfilling. And today, you learn the exact steps to take to become a successful parent coach.

Want to learn more? Read on!

What is a parenting coach? 

A parenting coach is someone who helps families in different areas of parenting, including:

• Baby sleep coaching
• Potty training coaching
• Communication coaching
• Nutrition coaching

Coaching is all about supporting people to get the results they want. That’s why, to qualify as a parenting coach, you need to have helped others (or yourself) get past the parenting challenges you help your clients with. 

For instance, you might have had a baby with sleep problems and you developed your own sleep methodology to get your baby to sleep. Maybe your friends started using your strategies – that’s a great way to show your future clients that you can help them, too.

Or you’re a child therapist. That work experience translates directly into coaching.

A few examples of parenting coaching niches include…

• Baby sleep coaching
• Breastfeeding coaching
• Potty training coaching
• Birth coaching 
• Communication coaching
• Relationship coaching for parents
• Divorce coaching
• Grief coaching 
• ADHD coaching 
• Stress coaching
• Happiness coaching 
• Nutrition coaching
• Spiritual coaching
• Coaching for foster parents 
• Coaching for kinship parents
• Co-parenting coaching 

And here are two real-life parenting coaching businesses:

Now you know what parenting coaching is. But how do you build a business around it? 

How do parenting coaches make money?

How do you make money as a coach? There are three different pricing models you can use:

• Per session. If you charge per session, your clients pay you for every session. I don’t recommend this pricing option, though, because it trains your clients to believe that the value in your coaching lies in the time that you put in with them. 
• Per month. This is a retainer contract, which means that your clients pay you every month. I’m not a fan of this pricing model because it makes it harder for you to establish boundaries and the focus isn’t as much on the results.
• Per package (my favorite). If you charge per package, your clients pay for a specific package, such as a 3-month coaching commitment. I’m a big fan of pricing per package because you position your coaching and pricing based on the results you’ll help your clients get. 

The average coaching salary is, according to the ICF Global Coaching Study, $62,500. That said, as an online coach, you can build your coaching business to six figures and beyond, just like many of my clients have done. 

How? Let’s reverse engineer. If you charge $3,000/coaching package, you need to sell 3 packages/month to get to six figures/year. That’s completely doable.

That said, a good starting point for new coaches is to charge $1,500 for a 3-month package. As your coaching develops and you help your clients get better results, you can increase your prices. 

Learn more about coaching packages in this short video:

But how do you become a parenting coach? 

That’s what we’ll look at next. 

What do you need to become a parenting coach?

Do you need a bachelor’s degree in social work or child development to become a parent coach? Or a parenting coaching certification? The answer is simple – no, you don’t. 

Education isn’t what determines your value as a coach. Instead, what matters is the transformation you help your clients achieve. Here’s what you need to know. 

How do you become a certified parenting coach? 

What are the best parenting coaching certification programs? And do you even need a certification? 

The thing is: you don’t. Coaching is not the same as therapy or counseling (which require education and training). Yes, you help your clients but coaching is no substitute for therapy (just like therapy isn’t coaching). 

Instead, look at the results you’re able to help people get. That’s what your clients care about — not whether you are certified or not.

And if you’re worried about your lack of experience if you don’t get a certification, don’t worry. You gain experience as you’re coaching paying clients (but you charge less early on so that you can develop your coaching skills one client at a time). 

That said, there are some coaching niches that require a certification. Typically, they’re in the health or mental health niches, so if you’re planning on helping parents on these or related topics, you should be extra careful when researching whether your coaching niche requires a certification.

If you do decide to get a parenting coach certification online, make sure that you choose a good certification program. Too often, these certification programs aren’t recognized in any way, while they can cost $1,000-$3,000 or more. Going through one of these programs won’t help you at all or give you any credibility whatsoever. 

One program that is a recognized certification program? The International Coach Federation. 

But while you don’t need a coaching certification to become a parenting coach, you DO need coaching clients. Here’s how to find them.

Where do you get parenting coaching clients?

You might be thinking, “Why would someone want to buy from ME? There’s nothing special about me. What if I’m not good enough?”

At least, that’s what a lot of my students tell me. 

But if you have results in some shape or form (your own results and/or you’ve helped someone else get results), you are ready to take on paying clients.

And building your own online coaching business can be surprisingly simple if you let it be. 

You don’t need much more than these strategies for getting coaching clients (pick one and roll with it): 

• Asking people who you’ve helped before (family and friends) if they want to work with you as a coach
• Pitching podcasts and guest posts 
• Being active in online or offline groups where your target audience hangs out (such as online mommy groups or local parenting groups)

That’s how I got my first few clients as a career coach, by asking friends to whom I had previously given career advice if they wanted more of my help. 

And these are strategies several of my students have used to quickly grow their coaching businesses. 

If you want more steps to find your first clients, take a look at this short video:

But once you have your first client, how do you coach them? That’s what we’ll look at next. 

How do you coach parents?

Here’s the thing: 

Coaching is a skill you learn. So don’t worry if you don’t feel like you’re an amazing coach right now. The more clients you work with, the better your coaching skills are going to get. 

And because you charge a lower rate early on, your first few clients get a sweet deal, too. They get to work with you for less, while you’re developing your skills as a coach. 

When you’ve earned your stripes and you have a few testimonials to share with new clients, you’re ready to raise your rates. 

Here are a few ways you can develop your skills as a coach. 

Become a great coach 

The word “coaching” is actually a bit misleading. I like to talk about coaching as “coach-sulting.”

You see, while coaching used to be based on Socratic questioning (asking probing questions such as, “how do you feel about that?”), coaching these days is more and more a mix between coaching and consulting. 

You as the coach don’t only help your clients find the answer themselves (=”traditional” coaching), but you sometimes also give them the answer and help them figure it out faster. 

For instance, if your client is struggling to get their baby to sleep full nights and you know what they could try to get the baby to sleep better, you’d give them the alternatives rather than leave it to your client to find the answer. 

Now that you know what coaching looks like, how do you hold a parenting coaching session? Let’s take a look.

Hold a coaching session 

I remember my first coaching session. I was so nervous that I ended up prepping for hours and writing down word-for-word what I would say. 

But for every client I worked with, coaching got easier and easier. I learned what questions would come up, how to structure my calls, what material I needed to create, and so on. Ultimately, I could just hop on coaching calls without needing to prep beforehand. 

Before your first call 

That’s why you don’t need anything before your first coaching calls — no website, PDFs, or other material. 

Instead, send a welcome questionnaire to your coaching client so that you understand what they’re struggling with (you can use Google Drive to share the document). Be thorough; I keep my questionnaire to about 30 questions. 

During your calls 

You can hold your calls using Zoom, Google Meet, or Skype. And Calendly makes it easy to schedule your coaching sessions. 

Every coaching call should have a goal that supports your client’s overall goal. For example, if their goal is to help their baby to sleep better, one session might focus on a specific sleeping strategy as a subgoal. And the next focuses on another strategy, and so on. 

Every coaching call supports that month’s goal, which in turn supports your coaching package’s overall goal.

You can break down the months like this:

Month #1: Getting the foundations in place for better sleep (nutrition, routine…) 

Month #2: Test proven sleep strategies to see which ones work for your baby 

Month #3: Bringing it all together with a baby that sleeps full nights 

After your calls 

Your coaching is so much more than just the coaching sessions. 

In between, your client works on the things you discussed on your previous call. 

I always send a recording of the call so that my students can revisit them if they need to. 

Coaching is also all about checking in with your clients between calls and answering their questions. Maybe you do a quick tutorial, share some extra material… Whatever helps your client achieve their goal. 

Over to you!

There you have it! Now you know how to become a parenting coach.

Parenting coaching is all about helping parents succeed and what it comes down to is that you build a sustainable business based on your clients’ testimonials. 

Are you ready to launch your parent coaching business? 

Let me know in the comments below!