Parent Lab: New Skills to Meet the Challenges of Parenting

Today, being a parent is one of the greatest and most rewarding challenges you can face. For working parents, however, balancing family and professional responsibilities can become a huge undertaking. The pressure to excel at work while being there for your children requires skills and resources that often feel inadequate. It is precisely to respond to these needs that our new project was born: Parent Lab.

The challenges of working parents

Working parents often find themselves managing a dual identity: that of professionals and that of parents. This dual role requires flawless time management, a great ability to adapt and considerable emotional resilience. With increased professional demands and rising expectations, many parents feel overwhelmed and struggle to maintain a healthy balance between work and family.

Explore new skills

In order to better address the challenges of parenting and work, it is essential to explore and develop new skills. Skills such as active listening, managing priorities and implementing effective strategies for dealing with change are key. These skills not only improve family life, but also make parents more effective and aware in their professional role.

Parent Coaching: what it is and its benefits

Parent Coaching is a journey of awareness and growth, where the Parent Coach acts as a guide to help parents find a balance in managing their roles. Through Parent Coaching, parents can acquire practical tools to better handle daily challenges, improve communication and strengthen their leadership both at home and at work.

The birth of the project

Parent Lab originated from the intuition of our colleagues Catia Trinchillo and Giorgia Di Massimo. This Parent Coaching initiative is designed to support all the mums and dads among our Business School staff, with the aim of promoting awareness and effectiveness in parenting, improving the emotional wellbeing of all participants.

Parent Lab is an innovative service that offers individual and group coaching sessions aimed at developing core skills for managing family and work life. Each meeting is designed to provide practical knowledge and tools to help you tackle your daily challenges positively and energetically.

The voice of the creators and the first meeting

Catia Trinchillo, one of the creators of the project, says: "When the company asked us to come up with a project that could make an impact, Giorgia and I had no doubts. As mothers and professionals, we know how much parenting – however wonderful it may be − can be tiring and exhausting at times. But we're also aware that being a parent isn't just about our family system, but also wider society, because the way we "relate" to our children today will have a consequence in the way they navigate the world and leave an impact in their turn. And it is in the ambition to create this virtuous circle that the Parent Lab journey was born, in the hope of planting some small seeds for the future."

Giorgia Di Massimo adds: "The Parent Lab path has allowed us to cultivate and nourish our personal as well as professional wellbeing, just as our School’s Purpose teaches. It was an opportunity to look at parenting from another standpoint: knowing the dynamics of children’s cognitive and emotional development makes us mindful and safer parents. And that’s what really matters.”

We are confident that Parent Lab will prove to be an effective support for all of our staff, helping parents feel more confident and on top of things in their daily lives. This project is just the beginning of a path of growth and awareness, which may also extend beyond the sphere of POLIMI GSoM employees, offering mothers and fathers valuable tools for reconciling study, work and parenting.