Paula is a life coach from Portland, Oregon, who specializes in helping parents become more effective. Her focus on parents and children brings together all the deepest currents of her professional and personal history. Paula’s background in health care, her experience as a parent and her successful struggle to overcome chronic health problems have left her with a profound appreciation of the role of intuition in addressing complex life issues. Understanding the relationship between knowledge and intuition is at the core of her current practice. Her deeply held intention is to help parents learn to be more effective by combining their own intuitive skills with techniques built on solid scientific research. 

From the time she was a teenager teaching swim lessons to preschoolers, Paula has loved working with young children and their families. Working in health care, first as a registered nurse and then as a family nurse practitioner, her practice has centered on children and families. Her lifelong fascination with the miracle of early growth and development led Paula to train with some of the premier teachers and researchers in the field of effective parenting.

One of those researchers was Carolyn Webster-Stratton, Ph.D., whose inspired work on play deeply influenced Paula’s view of what makes a solid parent-child relationship. Carolyn’s groundbreaking parenting series, The Incredible Years, provided Paula with a perspective on engaging cooperation, handling misbehavior and setting effective limits that was central to the parent education groups she began leading in the early 1990s.

During that same period, Paula studied with Kathryn Barnard, Ph.D., one of the country’s foremost researchers in the field of infant attachment. Paula learned to appreciate the delicate dance of parent-child interaction and the way that interaction impacts a child’s language and cognitive development. She also learned what it means to build a base of support for our children, allowing them to experience the world as a safe and predictable place.

The work of T. Berry Brazelton, M.D., also made an impression on Paula, deepening the sense of how capable and competent newborn infants are, how hard they work to communicate with us and how important it is to understand the cues they give us. During the time Paula was in graduate school, Brazelton’s Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale was generating a lot of excitement in the world of pediatric medicine and changing the way many pediatric medical providers viewed infants. It confirmed for Paula her own intuitive sense that infants have much deeper levels of awareness and are much more interactive with their environment than the pediatric community had previously understood.

During her daughter’s elementary and middle school years, Paula faced serious health problems, culminating in a life-threatening crisis that required extended hospitalization. Overcoming that challenge led her to a deep exploration of the mind-body connection. That experience also reinforced her awareness of the importance of our intention and the importance of making choices that reflect our deeply held values. Paula approaches her coaching work with sensitivity, compassion and a philosophy deeply grounded in her own life experience: 

To bring a child into this world is a most sacred contract. Our children are our teachers. They present us with our greatest challenges. And, if we listen carefully and learn, we grow beyond our wildest imagination.