Behavioral Issues Specialty
Your child is wonderful, but has some hard-to-manage behavior
Are you having challenges with your child’s behavior? Are they having tantrums when things don’t go their way or when you ask them to do something? Are they not listening? Perhaps they hit family members or are consistently mean to a sibling?
Maybe you cannot get through important daily routines like getting out of the house in the morning; getting them to do homework; cleaning up after themselves, or settling down at bedtime.
Maybe your child is so unruly that you are not able to take them to public places.
Perhaps your child has be diagnosed with ADHD or ODD and you have trouble getting them to follow through on any of their routines. They do not listen to you and they can be unpredictable. You worry about them being reckless with their bodies – that they may get hurt or hurt others.
You have tried asking them nicely, repeating yourself over and over, taking things away from them, and yelling and none of these have helped.
When an issue comes up, you don’t know the best way to handle it. You take shots in the dark and nothing seems to work. You feel upset and out of control when this happens and you try to come up with a solution in the middle of a chaotic situation. You end up not being consistent in your reactions to your child’s behavior.
You and your parenting partner do not agree on how to handle tricky situations with your child(ren). You both agree that something needs to be done, but one of you has become overly strict, and the other has become overly lenient.
You not sure when to step in and when to step back in your parenting. You would like to go from your child being in control of your household to your regaining control of your family.
You would like to go from yelling and parenting by the seat of your pants to having a plan to calmly manage problematic behavior.
You would like to lower the level of negative emotion in your interactions with your child and also in your household as a whole.
You would like to reduce problematic behavior so that you can enjoy your child’s wonderful qualities and have fun together as a family. You would like strategies and interventions to take into account the other children in the household so they can all move forward in their development.
You would like to strengthen your parenting team so that you work in tandem towards your family goals
If you and your parenting partner have concerns about your child’s behavior, have tried strategies that do not work, and are not happy with how things are at home, you are in the right place!
Uncertainty about how to manage your child’s behavior does not have to be the norm.
It may seem unlikely or even impossible now, but you can understand what your child needs and provide it for them. I can help you get there.
Therapy will help you do these things:
✦ Learn about what your child needs to be successful.
✦ Create age-appropriate rules, routines, and expectations so that your household runs smoothly and learn how to enforce them.
✦ Teach your child the skills they need to become confident and resilient.
✦ Coordinate with your parenting partner to provide consistency and to ease the overall burden of parenting in your household.
✦ Model staying calm and keep the level of negative emotion low in your home.
Family Therapy can help you solve your parenting concerns
An understanding of which everyday tasks your child should be able to accomplish at their age, along with why these are important for their self-esteem. Strategies to manage the everyday routines that you and your child are having trouble moving through. Specific ways to set limits and boundaries both in your home and when you are out. Interventions to decrease problematic behavior.
Family therapy will give you the skills you need to help your child thrive and will give you confidence in your parenting
Go from this:
Repeating yourself many times before your child listens
Switching strategies when one doesn’t work, but ending up with nothing that works
One parent addressing the issue one way (strict), while the other parent does the opposite (lenient)
Doing everything for your child when they refuse to do it for themselves.
End up arguing with or yelling at your child
Feeling resentful of your parenting partner for being too harsh/lenient with your child.
Having concerns about how one child’s behavior affects your other children.
Spending so much time in conflict with your child that you cannot enjoy your their wonderful qualities.
To this:
Your child listens and complies fairly regularly
Having consistent routines, rules, and consequences that are easy to enforce.
Keeping calm when things do not go well, knowing that you have a plan for how to handle it.
Your child developing age-appropriate home-life skills, and feeling proud of themselves.
Your child feeling more willing to accept new challenges.
Parents working together as a team to move children through daily routines and obligations. A calmer, more peaceful climate at home.
Feeling more confident in your abilities to not only manage your child’s behavior, but to help them thrive.
Enjoying family outings.
Who is therapy with me for?
Therapy with me is a good fit for you if:
Both parents want to actively participate in learning new parenting strategies for their child. A single parent needs help understanding and managing their child’s behavior. The child about whom you are most concerned is between 4 and 12 years old. An amicably divorced parent wants help understanding and managing their child’s behavior in their own home. Parents are willing to try new strategies at home. Parents are interested in learning strategies backed up by the latest scientific evidence.
Therapy with me is NOT a good fit for you if:
Only one parent will attend sessions. Either parent is not willing to learn about and try new strategies at home. The child’s parents have been through a contentious divorce.
Questions and Objections
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Yes! Family therapy is a powerful and often quick way to see change in your household. The strategies and methods used have been shown to be successful in reaching parents’ short term goals of having more peace, calm, and better behavior in their households, and also in developing healthy resiliency in their children for the long term.
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In the decades I have been doing this work with families, I have been very pleased with how willing both parents have been to participate in this important work. The Dads (sorry, but they are usually the ones left out of this process!) that I have worked with have universally been invested: in their parenting, in their children, in coordinating with their parenting partner, and in making necessary changes in their parenting. It’s been a pleasure and a delight to witness fathers’ knowledge about and investment in their children.
This work is much more powerful when both parenting partners add their perspective, personalities, and skills to the therapeutic process. Sharing the burden of parenting a child with challenges gives great comfort to both parents.
We are concerned you will tell us our child needs to take medicine.
I am not a physician and cannot prescribe medicine. The work we do together will center on learning new techniques and strategies to help you manage your child’s behavior and to have your parenting skills better fit their particular needs.
There will be cases in which my professional judgement dictates that I inform you about the potential benefits of medicine for your child. Early in my career I made sure we exhausted all options before exploring the possibility of medicine for my child clients. However, after seeing how well their child responded to medicine, many parents expressed regrets that they had waited so long to try medicine, and felt that their child had lost important time.
I will suggest an evaluation for medication when I note that a child may not be able to achieve their parents’ goals for them without it. That said, parents are free to decide for themselves what treatment options they choose to pursue.
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In a perfect world, happiness would be a reasonable goal. But in our world, life will present everyone with challenges. My goal for your child will be resilience – the ability to manage themselves in good times and in adversity. To me, resilience is the closest you can get to happiness and is a powerful quality to foster in a child.
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Getting started is easy! Just contact me to schedule a free initial consultation call. During that call, we will decide if I am the right therapist for your family. If I am, we will schedule our first session. If I am not the right therapist for you, I will point you in the direction of someone who can help.