Why Knowing Isn’t Enough – What a Parenting Coach Actually Does

The gap between knowing and doing is where parenting falls apart.

Four of my six children were (or are!) competitive swimmers. Which means I spent roughly twenty years on pool decks across four countries, watching training sessions, talking to coaches, reading about technique, and absorbing everything there is to know about competitive swimming – as a dilettante, but an exceptionally well-informed one.

I cannot swim crawl to save my life. I do a shabby breaststroke I learned in the eighties, and that is the full extent of it. Twenty-five years of proximity to elite swimming, and I remain completely unable to apply any of it. Knowing, it turns out, is very far from doing. (I also cannot stand the term “swim mom” – but that is an entirely different blog post.)

The gap between knowing and applying/doing is one of the most fundamental and frustrating features of being human. We know what we should do. We know why we should do it. And then we don’t/can’t – or we do it for three days and stop, or we do it perfectly until the moment it actually costs us something, and then we fold.

Parenting is no different.

Why every parent already knows what to do… and does it anyway.

I have been a coach – and a parent – for twenty-five years. Here is what I know.

Every parent I have ever worked with already has a sense, on some level, of what they “should” do.

They know they shouldn’t give in to the tantrum. They know the fourth bedtime story is not actually necessary. They know that cooking an alternative dinner at 8pm is not teaching their child anything useful. They know that handing over the iPad to end the argument is a short-term solution with long-term consequences.

And then the moment arrives, the real moment, with the real child, at the end of a real day when they are tired and depleted and the path of least resistance is right there…and all of it evaporates…
Because knowing and doing are two entirely different things.

And this is exactly where parent coaching lives.

What a parenting coach actually does

There is a common misconception about coaching – that it is a more expensive, more personalized version of reading a parenting book. That the coach provides information the parent didn’t have before, and that information produces change.

This is not what coaching does. At least not what good coaching does.

A parenting coach does not teach you what you already know. They help you understand why you are not yet living it.

Because the gap between knowing and doing is never random. It always has a source. It is the guilt that makes holding a limit feel cruel. It is the anxiety that makes your child’s distress feel unbearable. It is the absence of a clear vision for your family that makes every decision feel equally weighted and equally terrifying. It is not knowing what is normal, what is a phase, what is a problem, what is just Tuesday, and filling that uncertainty with worst-case scenarios.

These are not knowledge gaps. They are personal, specific, deeply human obstacles that no book can identify for you because no book knows you.

A parenting coach does.

Why experience matters more than theory

I want to be honest about something. I do not work with the parents I coach by handing them a framework and asking them to apply it. I work with them by asking questions – the right questions, the ones that cut through the noise – and by bringing something that no certification program can teach:

Twenty-five years of parenting six children across four countries.

I have lived through every age, every stage, every ordinary crisis… and many extraordinary ones. I know what normal looks like at three and at thirteen. I know which battles are worth having and which ones aren’t. I know what it feels like to hold a limit when everything in you wants to give in… and I know what it looks like on the other side when you do.

That experience is not a substitute for the work my clients need to do. But it is the thing that makes the work feel possible. Because there is a particular kind of confidence that comes from sitting across from someone who has genuinely been there, not in theory, but in practice, and who can say: this is hard, and it is also survivable, and here is what I have learned.

The thing that actually produces change

Change in parenting, real, lasting change, does not come from knowing more. It comes from understanding yourself well enough to act differently under pressure.

That means understanding where your guilt comes from and what it is actually telling you. It means knowing your values clearly enough that the hard decisions have a foundation. It means having someone walk the process with you – not to do it for you, not to judge you, but to hold the space where the gap between knowing and doing finally closes.

This is what a parenting coach is for. Not the information. The implementation.

Most parents who come to me are not lost. They are stuck. They know where they want to go. They just cannot seem to get there alone. That is simply what it means to be human… and to be trying to do the most demanding job you will ever do without a guide.

If you recognize that gap – between what you know and what you can actually live – that is exactly the work I do with the parents I coach.