Child and Family

My Approach

My work with families, children and adolescents can often involve a mixture of individual and joint family work, depending on the needs for parent coaching, communication skills improvement, or simply the need for a child or adolescent to have a private space to explore feelings, thoughts, behaviors, school or peer stressors, or work on a specific trauma that has occurred.

Children

I use talk or non-talk approaches to reach children in therapy.

Art therapy is used to help a child access their experience. For example, I may have a child draw a classmate or teachers’ face as well as their own to help them get access to their interior thoughts and feelings and explore corrective experiences.

Role play is used to learn and practice new social skills and as a means to discover what is troubling a child.

Play therapy is useful to tell stories that a child is unable to put into words. This can be a helpful diagnostic and treatment tool.

I use movement modalities. For example, I have a physioball in my offices, much like an exercise ball, that can be used by a child to explore hyperactivity, anger issues, orientation to counter trauma effects and to discover empowerment through movement.

Adolescents

Joint family sessions help parents and children learn effective communication skills.

I engage closely with parents, when needed, to help form behavior contracts.

With adolescents, I often use non-verbal approaches, like art and play therapy.

Adolescents and young adults are helped to navigate peer pressures surrounding dating, sex, drugs and other at-risk areas of growing up in our culture.

I work with mindfulness to reduce hyperactivity. For example, I have children relax themselves with a few deep breathes, place their focus on the basket in my office, and then shoot a small basketball. Frequently, this mindfulness results in a successful shot, thus, giving a child the reward of efficacy. This mindfulness experience is transferable to the everyday life of home and school.

 

• I can be contacted by cell phone when additional support is needed. The first fifteen minutes are free of charge.

• I work with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity, Mixed Receptive-Expressive Language, and Asperger’s disorders and with the challenges of frustration intolerance.

• I also address issues of anger management, truancy, poor grades, substance abuse, social anxiety, depression, grief and loss, trauma, bipolar, oppositional defiance and other conduct issues.