Child & Family

When children play, they reveal what they are struggling with and trying to master. In play therapy, a therapist with specialization in child development and behavior will engage in play with your child, and learn through participation and observation about what these struggles might be.  learning about what they’re struggling with. Treatment involves both parental consultation, where these observations and strategies for improvement are shared with parents, and strategic play therapy, where children are given space to work through difficulty.

Therapy for adolescents involves careful consideration of the adolescent’s social-emotional development and presenting concerns. Teens face new challenges of responsibility in school, social pressure, and maturing self-awareness. In our work with teens, we remain conscious of the kinds of challenges that teens face with their growing independence.

While therapy with children and adolescents often involves consultation with parents, family therapy approaches the family directly as an interconnected system. Family therapy often involves a consideration about whether a family member’s symptoms or distress is a reflection of the way the family is functioning as a whole. In this kind of treatment, family members get together at the same time and a therapist helps the family discuss what’s happening and understand the way they are interacting with one another with more clarity.

When parents seek therapy, it is often because they know they are struggling with some aspect of managing care for their child or children and are bravely seeking support for those challenges. In an environment of safety and support, we will listen to your concerns and help you navigate the challenges by seeing what’s possible to adjust or understand with more depth. While there’s no manual for how to be a good parent, we are excited to support you with careful understanding and recommendations that help you feel unstuck.

In the course of treating you or your loved one, we might form the opinion that the integration of psychiatric intervention or medications would help improve the current situation. When this is the case, we will share our observations and rationale with you and let you and your family make the decision about whether to explore medication as a part of treatment. If you express interest, we have psychiatrists to refer you to who we trust to understand, diagnose, and treat conditions that benefit from medication.

In the course of treating children and adolescents, we might start to form certain curiosities about the brain and mind of the person we’re working with. Without putting you under a microscope, we will look for indications that you or your loved one might have differences with respect to learning, attention, or social-emotional functioning. Neuropsychological testing allows us to understand these differences with great complexity, revealing an understanding of you or your loved one’s mind and brain that can open the door to deeper acceptance and strategies for greater success in school, relationships, and beyond. We provide referrals and help you along this process.

We provide school-based services when we think that your child would benefit from interventions that take place at school. Whether this is conducting therapy in the middle of a school day because school is the place where your child exhibits the most distress or symptoms, or making observations about how your child is interacting with their peers or teachers. We are also happy to support the integration of therapy with us into your child’s school, whether that’s speaking with your child’s school about the results of neuropsychological testing or our observations about their stressors and challenges. In school-based services, we aim to extend the therapeutic space to include your child’s school environment.