ABOUT US
Our Goal is to honor children's' individual differences & spark, and to nurture the capacity of adults who support children.
We combine educational neuroscience & social emotional learning with decades of experience in relationship-based parenting, speech and language therapy, and behavior management.
We offers meaningful tools for professionals, brain-based support to caregivers, educators, therapists and medical teams.
Our program emerged 20+ years ago in response to call for guidance in supporting children's cooperation.
Are you ready for something that will actually work?
Meet The Mother and Daughter Team
Dr. Robin Hauge
Positive Parenthood Founder, Speech Pathologist, Ph.D. Childhood Mental Health.
Dr. Robin’s depth of experience working with children with unique needs and profiles for over 30 years lends itself to supporting families who are experiencing very challenging behaviors, diagnoses, or situations.
Through her experience working in early intervention school programs, private practice and hospitals, Robin understands that the underpinning of any successful intervention program is partnering with families. Her experience results in an extraordinary capacity to understand how children and young people experience the world, and to support parents to reduce stress at home for their children. Dr. Robin’s orientation as a Speech Pathologist means that she focuses extensively on language and how to say things to children and young people in ways that reinforce positive and nurturing relationships.
She will help you to notice the subtle dynamics that are sabotaging your parenting relationship, and to shift towards more positive ways of relating to your child or teen so that they have more capacity to cooperate with you. Dr. Robin’s approach, in all of the educational programming she provides, is to work with a child’s individual strengths and build capacity in the child to foster ongoing development.
Dr. Chelsey Hauge Zavaleta
Positive Parenting Co-Founder, Ph.D. Education
Dr. Chelsey’s expertise lies in applied educational neuroscience, social emotional learning, educational equity, and building calm, cooperative family relationships. She has taught and researched at The University of British Columbia, Stanford University, and Mills College.
Dr. Chelsey’s sensitivity to relationship dynamics and building cultures of empathy enable her to work with families striving to become the kind of parents they were meant to be. A mother to three children, she brings both deep professional expertise and compassion from her own parenting journey to bear in her work with families.
She has experience working in applied educational neuroscience, literacy, justice, and gender issues, including girlhood, body image, gender identity and bullying. She has consulted with educational and governmental institutions on relationship-based learning, social emotional well-being, and how to support children in having positive relationships with digital worlds. Dr. Chelsey will support you to work with both the cultural pressures shaping your parenting relationships and family dynamics that make parenting difficult. Dr. Chelsey is bilingual and offers courses & coaching in English & Spanish.
OUR STORY
In 2000, Dr. Robin Hauge began teaching her signature 12-week course to parents asking for support on behavior, once a year, every year. Seventeen years later, she noticed her own daughter struggling with her three granddaughters. This was a point of revelation; Robin’s daughter herself had a Ph.D. in Education and was well-respected in the field of social emotional learning- and yet, Dr. Chelsey Hauge Zavaleta was challenged to put the theories she knew so well into practice in her own home.​
As two working mothers, Chelsey & Robin revamped the parenting tools they’d both worked with, combining social emotional and educational research with decades of experience in relationship-based parenting, speech and language, and behavior management. The tools we teach at Positive Parenthood work for all children and all families who desire calm, cooperative homes and who choose to invest in relationship-based parenting.
After years in academia and private practice, this mother-daughter, double-Ph.D. team set out to grow Positive Parenthood. We are honored to work with families coming from many different walks of life and to share in the vulnerability, challenges, and hopefulness that families bring to Positive Parenthood. It is in being together and sharing our biggest challenges, our most tender moments, and our sweetest triumphs that we begin to shift our hearts and souls – and it is in that shift, that we become the parents we want to be, and that we are able to reflexively and whole-heartedly support our children towards cooperation.
