About

I'm Jaime — a Certified Connected Parenting™ Coach, a highly experienced French teacher with over 22 years in the classroom, and a mother to three entirely different human beings who keep me learning right alongside them.

For 19 of those years, I taught Core French at The York School in Toronto, mostly in the middle years (grades 6–9) — an age I've come to love precisely because of how hard it is, where everything is shifting: bodies changing, brains rewiring, kids stepping out of childhood. Learning French requires courage — you cannot learn a new language without being willing to sound silly, to get it wrong, to try again. So courage and compassion became the two words I built my classroom around, long before they became the words behind "Coeur."

Alongside teaching, I've spent 25 years as a yoga and fitness instructor — which is where I first learned, in my own body, what it means to regulate a nervous system before you try to reason with it.

My Special Education training taught me that a struggling child isn’t a “difficult” child. Struggle is a signal. Before assuming defiance, I ask what’s underneath it: a learning exceptionality, or something emotional?

When I'm not working, you'll usually find me with my own three children, or back on Prince Edward Island for the summer, where the pace slows down and the ocean and the beach do a lot of the parenting for me.

Coeur Coaching is where I bring everything I've learned from the classroom, the gym, and motherhood, all under one name.

Philosophy

A few things I hold onto in every session, whether it's a parenting conversation or a French lesson:

Courage before comfort

Growth asks us to risk getting it wrong — a hard truth for a parent trying a new approach, and just as true for a 10-year-old attempting their first sentence in a new language.

Compassion as the starting point, not the reward

For the child, for the parent, and — something I remind clients of often — for themselves.

Learning takes place within relationships.

Over 22 years in the classroom taught me: a child does not learn from someone they don't feel safe with, and a child does not change their behaviour for someone they don't feel connected to. Every strategy, worksheet, or consequence I ever tried worked only as well as the relationship underneath it.

That's the same principle Connected Parenting™ is built on — the idea, backed by neuroscience, that connection has to come before correction. A dysregulated child cannot hear you. A dysregulated parent cannot reach them. So the work, whether I'm coaching a family or teaching an adolescent French, always starts in the same place: regulate first, relate second, then — and only then — try to teach or guide.

Coeur is French for "heart," and it's also where the word "courage" comes from.

Parenting — like teaching, like showing up for ourselves, day after day — takes courage. It takes a willingness to look at the parts of ourselves we don't love, to keep learning and healing, and to show up with an open heart even when it's hard.

A growth mindset over a fixed one

So much of learning isn't adding something new — it's unlearning the limiting beliefs we already hold about ourselves. "I can't do French." and "I'm just not a patient parent." are the same sentence wearing different clothes. Both are limiting.

Regulate prior to teaching

Whether it's a breathing tool for an anxious child or a grounding practice for an overwhelmed parent, regulating the nervous system isn't a side detail — it's where the real work starts.