Counseling Services

We offer these services to both adoptive and non-adoptive families: Family Assessment, Developmental Guidance, Parent-Child Counseling, Coaching, Warmline, and Home Visits.

Family Assessment

• Family relationships, child behavior, and parenting concerns
• Adoptive Families: adjustment to new family; developmental delays; attachment problems; needs of children coming from other countries, orphanages, or foster care.

Parent-Child Counseling and Therapy

• Infant Mental Health: children from birth to three are seen with their parents.
• School-age children are seen with their parents for evaluation.
• For issues involving family relationships, developmental delay, child behavior and parenting, attachment and separation, or special family situations.
  

Parent-Child Psychotherapy

When things are not going well and people feel the need for therapy or counseling, most children under seven are seen with their parents. Parent-infant therapy emphasizes the parent-child relationship as the client. At the heart of treatment is supporting adults and children in their efforts to connect and understand one another, listen to one another, and prevent the visitation of one generation of problems from overwhelming the lives of the present family.

Parent-Child Therapy can help parents explore the impact of the past and work through conflicts that prevent them from parenting their children adequately. Understanding their own upbringing experiences can strengthen the parent-child relationship. Children are helped to look at their own pasts (brief though they may be) and play out or otherwise process their behavior and emotions.

Therapeutic format. The importance of having parent and child together is for the therapist to observe emotions and be able to hear and interpret both sides: parent and child. The therapist acts as a real object to both parent and child, considering conflicts within the parents and between parents and child. Psychodynamic theories and precepts—including the therapeutic alliance, transference, how past experiences affect present parenting behavior, conscious and unconscious, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma—are part of the arsenal the therapist uses to facilitate the child’s adjustment.

Warmline and Home Visits. We welcome questions about child behavior, emotions, and parenting issues, and we offer telephone consultation and home visits when appropriate. Contact us.

Elaine Frank, MSW * Denise Rowe, BA

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