You trained for your job and took lessons before your driving test. Parenting is the one role you teach yourself, and that is where the blind spot sits: what we carry over from our own childhood feels so familiar that we never notice passing it on. This program closes that gap: you watch experienced coaches work with other parents in recorded sessions, see your own patterns from the outside, and practise at home, as a couple, around your normal week.
Please note: the first cohort runs in German. An English-language cohort is in the works, join the waitlist at the top of this page.
What reaches the child
What we say is usually well meant. Still, what reaches the child is sometimes something else. These scenes play out in good families every day, which is exactly why nobody notices them.
‘It’s not that bad.’
The little scraped knee that should not become a drama.
My pain is too much, better not show it.
In time the child stops coming even when something really hurts.
What changes with The Parenting MBA
The pain gets named instead of talked away. The child often calms down faster, because they feel understood.
‘Give it here, you have to share!’
The toy they are fighting over.
What is mine can be taken at any time.
The child clings tighter afterwards. Sharing is learned from safety, and that is what they just lost.
What changes with The Parenting MBA
The child keeps what is theirs and decides for themselves. Sharing grows out of that on its own.
‘That’s enough now.’
The crying that should finally stop.
Big feelings are something I swallow on my own.
They go quieter, yes. But the child is shutting down rather than feeling better.
What changes with The Parenting MBA
The feeling is allowed, and the boundary still holds. Both together can be learned; the program gives it a week of its own.
‘Well done!’
The praise that is meant to make them proud.
I am liked when I achieve something.
The praise goes to the result, so the child works for affection that was there all along.
What changes with The Parenting MBA
The praise goes to the effort, not the result. Over time the child dares more, because a fallen tower costs nothing.
Knowing the scenes and the theoretical answers is the easy part. Applying the craft in your own everyday life, in the loud moments and the quiet ones, is the part you have to practise.
Parenting is the only task with stakes this high that people usually take on without any training.
Faculty
Family therapy, child and adolescent psychology, and systemic coaching: each of our coaches is trained in more than one of these fields. You watch them work with other parents in recorded sessions.
Tatjana Rosenberg is a systemic therapist for individuals, couples and families as well as a child and adolescent therapist (DGSF). As a certified trainer at Munich's institute for systemic education she teaches therapists herself, from systemic counselling to child and adolescent therapy. In her practice she works as a parenting coach with families on exactly the everyday situations this program is about. Before training as a therapist she studied business psychology, so she knows both worlds her coachees come from. Her approach: parents are effective through presence and connection, especially in the hard moments.
Why a real education
We learn the ABCs of parenting by doing, and mostly it goes well enough. What we cannot see is everything we do not know. That is what a real education is for. We are not doing anything wrong. No one ever showed us what there is to know in the first place.
We are already good parents. What we lack is the craft for the moments when love alone is not enough, and the eye for what we miss without noticing: for fathers who want more than well-meant advice, for mothers who no longer want to carry it alone, and for couples with two different childhoods in their baggage.
Caregiving is leadership. Emotional steadiness is a skill. Family culture is something you design.
Method
Knowledge alone doesn’t change behaviour. So you watch real coaching sessions, recognise the same patterns in yourself, and train new strategies. This covers the whole spectrum from anger to anxiety and everything in between, depending on the character of parent and child, and just as much about what never gets loud and still leaves its mark: praise in the wrong place, pain that gets talked away.
You see, in concrete examples, how familiar everyday situations are taken apart with precision, without having to expose yourself. That is Mirror Coaching: you learn by watching.
You see which reactions and blind spots come from your own childhood and where no one ever showed you how to do it differently. The first you don't want to pass on; the second you can learn.
Short stylised videos (AI-generated, grounded in research) from the child's perspective show how your behaviour lands with your child and what changes when you do it differently.
With your Accountability Buddy, your fixed learning partnership from the cohort, and the physical workbook you train small, repeatable steps and anchor them in everyday life, until they hold even in the heated moment.
How Mirror Coaching works
Real sessions with parents who agreed to it, recorded in advance. You are never filmed or recorded yourselves, and no coach sits in your living room.
The same scenes you know from home, without you sitting in the hot seat.
With workbook and Accountability Buddy, until the new steps hold even on mornings when everything happens at once.
Curriculum · in six weeks
Every topic runs through the same four steps: origin, effect on you, effect on your child, strategy. Strategies are in every parenting book. The first two steps are why knowledge turns into changed behaviour.
The 4 to 6 hours are per person; the check-in with your Accountability Buddy is already included. A week can look like this:
An example, not a set schedule: you decide when you learn, each at your own pace.
Each of you reconstructs your own attachment biography: how closeness, feelings and boundaries were handled at home. That reveals your script, the one that automatically takes over under pressure. There are deliberately no strategies this week: recognising comes before acting, and simply seeing the pattern already takes some of its power away in daily life.
Your brain has three states; under stress the oldest takes over, and the part that calms things down goes offline. That is true for your child, whose calming region is not physically finished yet, and just as true for you. You learn to read your own state, in the jaw, the breath, the voice, and to step out before it gets loud. From week 3 you use the same lens on your child's behaviour.
This is about the small, constant boundary crossings: putting shoes on a child mid-tantrum, dictating what they eat and wear. The effect on the child is bigger than it looks: they learn that their body, their pace and their will do not count. A child whose no never holds at home will later find it harder to recognise someone else's boundary violation at all. You learn co-regulation, real choice within a frame, and why a tantrum is not a teaching moment but needs safety first and language second.
You practise naming the feeling before you fix the problem, even over a broken banana. The harder part is the other one: you find out which feelings you struggle to bear, and those are almost always the ones that had no place in your own childhood. A child whose feelings are routinely made small stops showing them, and eventually stops feeling them.
You decouple affection from performance: away from the result, towards what your child actually did. The origin question is especially uncomfortable here, because many of us learned exactly this: that love has to be earned. A child whose worth depends on functioning becomes an adult who can only allow themselves rest once the list is empty.
A child senses immediately when a parent is struggling, and tries to compensate: they become good, they comfort, they make themselves small, they take on responsibility that is not theirs. This role reversal is one of the ways patterns travel into the next generation. Taking care of yourself lifts that weight off your child. That is why your own needs are not a reward at the end of a good week but the precondition for everything else holding. To close, you compare your self-assessment with the one from the start and decide which routines stay and how you keep in touch with your Accountability Buddy.
Founder and architect of the program
Juliane Berger is the mother of two spirited girls (2 and 4). She is building this program from lived experience as one of the people it is for. Professionally she brings experience from BMW, Allianz and consulting; she is a mechanical engineer by training.
For The Parenting MBA she sits on the side of the coachees. Knowing a lot is still a long way from being able to do it. The coaching is done by the experts.
Questions, doubts, objections? Write directly to juliane@theparentingmba.com
Founding Members · our twelve founding couples
The first founding couple is on board · 11 of 12 places open
For calmer evenings, a home with fewer power struggles, a child who is allowed to show their feelings, and the experience of responding, for the first time in a hard moment, the way you meant to. For the ordinary afternoons in between, where closeness grows because you know what matters. And with the prospect that the Accountability Buddy becomes someone you stay in touch with well beyond the program.
The twelve deposits are the starting signal: once the founding couples are together, we start producing the coaching sessions and videos.
The founding price applies to Cohort 01 only. If you'd like your employer to help cover it, we handle that conversation.
€500 deposit now, €2,300 at the start in early 2027, in instalments if you prefer.
Please note: Cohort 01 runs in German. An English cohort is in the works.
Q&A session
Every other Tuesday at 8:30 pm, Juliane spends half an hour answering your questions about the program, by video call, in a small group. No sales pitch: questions, doubts and objections belong on the table.
Next session: – · 8:30 to 9:00 pm (German time)
Voices
From conversations with parents while this program took shape.
If this saves me from fighting my way through the endless jungle of parenting guides, it is worth its weight in gold.
Men talk to each other far too little. In a structured program like this, the barrier finally falls away.
What would convince me? My child as an adult, telling me in hindsight: thank you for doing that program back then, it meant a lot.
Not decided yet?
The questionnaire walks through the situations this is about and shows where you stand as a family. Anonymous, no sign-up, no obligation, in about 8 minutes.
If only one of you is convinced: send this page on. It covers the time commitment and the cost in one place.
Not there yet
If the program sounds interesting but the timing is not right yet: we will send you updates as the program takes shape. The names of the coaches, the start date, how the founding places stand.
FAQ
The program
A parenting book gives answers, therapy works through the past. Here you practise. A structured education for the most consequential task no one prepares you for. Six weeks of practical craft, as a couple, with a fixed Accountability Buddy. You taught yourselves the ABCs of parenting; now you can truly master it.
At the core is Mirror Coaching: you watch experienced systemic coaches work with other parents, parents talking about why the child won't listen, why it so often ends in shouting, or why the closeness is missing even though everything seems fine. The coaches get to the bottom of what's behind it and show how to do it right. You recognise yourself in these parents, without sitting in the hot seat yourself. Alongside these come short video lessons on the parenting methods, a physical workbook and your Accountability Buddy. Then you practise yourself, because when it counts at home, alone with your child, no coach is there. Knowledge alone doesn’t change behaviour; repetition, accountability and a partner do. That's why it takes six weeks.
One personal, confidential coaching session just for the two of you, live with the coach of your choice, is included in the price. It is the counterpart to Mirror Coaching: in the 12 hours you watch coaches work with other parents, in your own session it is about your situation and what you want to put into practice at home. From the midpoint of the program you pick your coach; by then you will have seen each of them at work and know whose style suits you best. The session itself is guaranteed for every couple. Only the number of appointments per coach is limited, and if your first choice is fully booked, you pick someone else.
Your Accountability Buddy over the six weeks: another person from your cohort, same gender, confidential, with a similar life situation, not a random match. Once a week you check in, roughly 20 to 30 minutes, by call or voice message, whenever it suits you both, that time is already part of the 4 to 6 hours. These are things most people talk about with almost no one; with one fixed person and a clear frame, the threshold is low. Not a group thing you have to justify yourself in front of. If the two of you do not click, you switch; the matching is a suggestion, not a verdict. And you agree on confidentiality explicitly with each other before you start, and it runs both ways.
What reaches the child also arises between the two of you. As a pair you pull together, instead of one of you rowing alone against old patterns while that one-sided change creates conflict between you. If you are a single parent, you can take part solo; your Accountability Buddy matters all the more then.
That is exactly what the program is built for: it is meant to weld you together in this task. Each of you learns on your own, at your own pace; you talk the insights through at home, and the workbook gives you concrete partner prompts for it. Out of two parenting styles a shared one grows, without one of you having to convince the other.
Impact & proof
At the start and at the end you answer the same questions about concrete everyday situations. An honest catch: once you've learned to look more closely, you often judge yourself more strictly at the end than at the start. The bar has grown with you. That's why, at the end, you also re-assess your starting point. So you see the real change, not just a shifted self-image. To be honest: this is a self-assessment, not a lab value. What really counts, you notice elsewhere anyway, in the evenings that no longer escalate, and in a child who comes to you with their feelings.
The program is led by experienced, systemically trained coaches together with child and adolescent psychologists and family therapists. The content draws on established approaches from attachment and developmental psychology. Learning by watching video is one of the best-researched formats in parent education: meta-analyses show that parents change their behaviour measurably with it. All of it translated into practical, everyday craft.
Menting et al. 2013: meta-analysis of 50 studies →
Spencer et al. 2020: meta-analysis of 28 online parenting programs →
Founding Member
The first twelve founding couples of the first cohort. You secure your place at the founding price of €2,800 instead of €3,800. A status given out only once and never offered again. Those who join are among the very first twelve couples.
From Cohort 02 on, the regular price is €3,800 per couple. As a Founding Member you pay €2,800, in two steps: a €500 deposit now to secure your place, and €2,300 only at the program start in early 2027. This split is only for the twelve founding couples. Worth keeping in mind when you compare: the price covers two people. That is €1,400 per person for a six-week training, including your own workbook.
Yes. At the program start you can pay the €2,300 in one go or in five monthly instalments of €460, that is €230 per person per month. Instalments run from February to June 2027, interest-free and with no surcharge. You choose at checkout, so you don't have to decide now.
Your risk is capped, and it is in writing: the €500 deposit is fully refundable at any time until the start, the rest is only due at the start, after the start there is a full refund within 14 days with no reason needed, and should Cohort 01 not come together, you get everything back. It is all in the agreement, which you can read before you pay. Why now: the founding price and one of the twelve places exist only once, and the twelve founding couples set production in motion. Cohort 01 goes ahead once the twelve deposits are in by 31 August 2026.
Price & value
Yes, for alumni, and it is a fixed part of the pricing. Once you have completed the program you can refer other couples. Both the referrer and the referred couple receive €250 credited directly back to their account.
Write to me anyway: juliane@theparentingmba.com. Each cohort we fund additional places for families who otherwise couldn't take part. The number is limited, and we allocate by need. Money should not be what stops you.
The best way to judge the price is by what is different at home afterwards. After the six weeks you share one parenting style instead of running two competing ones, you have if-then plans for your most frequent conflict situations that you have already practised, and you know from experience that a hard moment can end differently in your family. Add what you save: the next shelf of parenting books, and the years of trying the same things over and over on your own. The substance behind it: around 12 hours of real coaching sessions, around 3 hours of video lessons on child psychology, parenting and personal development, a personal coaching session with the coach of your choice, one workbook per participant, the Accountability Buddy and the self-assessment, for two people across six weeks, so €1,400 each. And if you are on parental leave with one income missing: the rest can be paid in five monthly instalments of €460, which is €230 per person per month. If even that does not fit, talk to us and we will find a split that does.
Yes, and at no extra cost. After the €500 deposit you can pay the remaining €2,300 in five monthly instalments of €460, from February to June 2027. Split across two people that is €230 a month, interest-free. Just say the word and we will set it up. If a different split works better for you, for instance while you are on parental leave, write to juliane@theparentingmba.com and we will find a rate that works.
Practical
The program runs without fixed appointments: you decide when you learn. The six weeks give structure, not a straitjacket. If a week falls through, sick child, business trip, general chaos, you agree with your Accountability Buddy to take two weeks for that one week; then the two of you finish a week later, together. Your access to the platform stays with you permanently anyway, long after the six weeks.
Yes. Companies can reserve places for their people, a benefit that lands at home, not just on the careers page. Write to juliane@theparentingmba.com, and we'll sort out the rest with the company.
You fill in the questionnaire without a name. Only when you secure your place do we need your name and email. Your answers then sit with us and are used for two things only: to see whether the program fits your situation, and to match you with a learning partner. We do not sell anything on and we do not pass your data to third parties. Which service providers run the site technically is listed in the privacy policy. Payment runs through Stripe, which means we never see your card details. If you want something deleted, write to me and it is gone.
A cohort is a shared run of the program. The first starts in early 2027; before that, the twelve founding couples secure their places. The questionnaire gets you in first.