Flourishing Mothers: A Positive Psychology-Based Coaching Strategy for Women

Mothering is one of the most challenging, rewarding, uplifting, and frustrating experiences of a woman’s life. In this paper, I present literature reviews of positive psychology, mothering, and job crafting followed by a coaching strategy that incorporates this research to create a proactive, growth-oriented opportunity for women to feel more confident and happier in their parenting role. Positive psychology, with its foundation of strengths, offers an opportunity to match each woman’s strengths with scientifically valid interventions to create a parenting style that will increase a woman’s well-being, which in turn has the potential to increase her children’s happiness. The Positive Organizational Scholarship technique of job crafting enables women to examine and modify their daily lives to create more opportunities to develop meaningful moments in their parenting and for their children. These two approaches are combined into a coaching schema for use in my own practice that will help mothers apply these techniques to improve well-being for themselves and their families