For counseling clients, an initial intake assessment is conducted to understand a clients needs, strengths, and supports as well as to collaborate regarding goals. The initial assessment may involve one or two appointments, or an extended initial session. Following this, recommendations for treatment will be discussed.
Counseling for children and adolescents is tailored to the developmental level of the client. Approaches often include play based or art therapy approaches with the goal of developing resilience and coping skills.
Parent counseling is sometimes recommended as an adjunct service to working with children and teens. I am trained to work with parents surrounding parenting of infants, young children, school aged children and adolescents.
Empathy, collaboration, and creating an environment of safety and calm are important components to my counseling approach. I seek to understand a clients needs and work to identify strengths and develop coping skills.
For concerns regarding attention, hyperactivity and distractibility, and no other problems are suspected (such as a learning disability, or social/emotional/behavioral problem) a brief diagnostic assessment to determine the presence of ADHD might be conducted. This assessment includes a developmental history, student observation, rating scales, and brief individual testing.
In situations where there are narrowly focused concerns in academic areas of reading, writing, and or math, academic testing alone, can help to determine the scope of difficulties. Such an assessment can be useful in determining the area or areas of difficulty in order to determine next steps for assistance.
This level of assessment can provide insights into a student's functioning in a broad array of areas such as learning, social emotional functioning, social skills, behavior, work habits, academics and other processing areas.
A school-neuropsychological assessment is the most comprehensive level of assessment provided. This evaluation includes extended cognitive and processing testing and is recommended for more complex cases, or when prior evaluations have failed to assist a parent or school teams with understanding a child's learning and/or social/emotional challenges. This assessment is very thorough and results in evidenced based recommendations.
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