My name is Joy Gentry and I am the principal Parenting Coach and founder of Reclaiming the Joy of Parenting. I want to express my sincere gratitude to you for taking the time to learn more about parent coaching. It is my hope that you are inspired by this new concept and willing to take the next step towards fulfilling your parenting goals. Please allow me to take this opportunity to tell you a little about myself and how I was drawn into the nascent field of Parent Coaching.
In the Midwest, I grew up as the middle child in a family of seven children. As a teenager, I babysat, taught swim lessons and worked as a nanny every weekend. My senior year in high school, I was selected as a Rotary Exchange Student and was granted the opportunity to live and study in Europe. For college, I relocated to Boston to pursue my B.A. in education at Boston College, where I majored in Early Childhood Education with an Emphasis on Children with Special Needs. As I pursued my undergraduate studies at Boston College, I began working in professional childcare settings and also as a private nanny, which magnified my formal classroom instruction. My full time student teaching was completed at an American International School in Germany, affording me the rich opportunity to work with families from over two dozen countries.
After ten years of working as an Early Childhood Teacher with infants, toddlers, preschoolers and school-age children, I decided to pursue my Masters. While working on my Master's in Management at Lesley University, I worked as a Director in Early Childhood settings gaining a decade of additional experience working with parents of young children from diverse cultural backgrounds. My graduate studies took me to South America, where I completed my thesis and worked as an Early Childhood Management Consultant. Upon completion of my Masters of Science in Management, I began working as an Executive Director in Early Childhood programs.
As an Executive Director, I gained valuable experience designing environments and developing programs that were responsive to the developmental needs of children and supported the unique needs of parents. In the capacity of director, I mentored and fostered the development of parents and educational professionals for over 15 years. In recent years, I made a career segue into the public school arena. After obtaining my Assistant Principal and Principal certification from Massachusetts Department of Education, I gained experience as a public school administrator and worked directly with middle school students.
After over two decades working with parents and their children, I was blessed with the adoption of my now three year old son. As a single parent, with virtually no relatives nearby, I have experienced many challenges that necessitated problem solving and finding strategies I could implement on my own. I have found a joy in parenting that far surpassed my dreams. I continue to develop my own repertoire of parenting skills as new developmental stages emerge and I frequently draw on my professional experience, education and research. I credit the support system of many friends and family that provided me with encouragement and a fresh perspective during challenging times. Parenting my son has been the most rewarding and joyful experience of my life and has inspired me to reach out and support other parents.
I have been privileged to work with diverse families from different cultures and I strive to be culturally sensitive and attuned to the dynamic and unique needs of each family. My passion for mentoring, coaching and fostering parents and teachers to be the very best they can be has continued to grow. I feel that raising happy and healthy children is one of our greatest accomplishments in life and I am dedicated to helping families realize their own parenting dreams.
