Parent Cafes
Develop resilience, get support, and build amazing friendships at Parent CafesThere’s nothing like a friend to support you while you’re parenting your kids. Parent Cafes are safe spaces where parents can talk through both positive and negative parenting experiences with other parents just like them.
Parents Need Peer-Support To Thrive
Have you ever felt alone while raising your kids? Well, you’re not alone in feeling alone. Feelings of isolation and overwhelm are common to parents, and one of the essential ingredients to overcoming these feelings and improving parenting stability and self-care is peer-to-peer support and community.
A Safe Space For Parents To Connect, Communicate, and Grow
Resilience
Increasing parent resilience and ability to deal with conflict and adversity.
Relationships
Creating positive, encouraging social connections.
Knowledge
Bolstering knowledge of the early childhood development stages.
Support
Establishing a consistent source of support for the good times and the difficult ones as well.
Communication
Fostering social and interpersonal competence with peers, spouses, and your kids.
What’s So Cool About Parent Cafes?
Parent Cafes were designed by leaders in Strengthening Families Illinois to facilitate growth across parent gender and ethnicity. Thousands of parents have already been inspired, energized, and excited by the things they learn and take with them from Parenting Cafes.
Parent Cafes appeal to broad demographics of parents by being:
Bilingual: Parent Cafes are translated into Spanish, Chinese, Swahili, French, and Arabic.
Inclusive: There are dedicated Parent Cafes for mothers and fathers to get support.
Exhaustive: Cafes empower parents to take care of themselves across the “six Vitality domains” including physical, mental & emotional, spiritual, social, financial, and environmental.
“What I love about Cafés are that they set the tone from the beginning that everyone is equal… Everybody is learning, and everyone feels comfortable to open up. ”
“…I wasn’t that patient and didn’t have lots of ways to deal with children other than yelling or [threatening]. I didn’t know to just take a good ten seconds before I react to anything, and then to … just listen, rather than going into a rage.”
“What did we learn? To love ourselves more in order to better love others. ”
Looking for an honest, safe space to talk about and improve your parenting experience? Find a parent cafe near you and tap into the power of your peers!