If you are reading this, you might be feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, or heartbroken watching your child struggle with their behavior. When a child acts out at school, fights at home, or gets labeled as “rebellious” or “difficult,” it is easy to feel like you are walking on eggshells in your own home. Parenting a child through these challenges is emotionally draining, especially when standard discipline or sticker charts stop working. Before we talk about solutions, I want to offer you a perspective that might bring some immediate relief: your child isn’t trying to give you a hard time—they are having a hard time. Here is a look at our philosophy for working with children in therapy, and how we can partner with your family to find lasting healing.
At Leadem Counseling, we believe that the emotional demands placed on our children in the socially challenging and academically competitive school environments can result in behavioral problems and generate obstacles to developing important life skills. We also believe that all behavior has a meaningful explanation.
We have discovered after working with many challenging children that a child’s problematic behavior is as much a problem for them as it is for you and that they find it to be as much a mystery as you do. So, stop asking WHY and stop punishing in the name of discipline because your child is also a victim of their behavior.
We believe all problematic behavior serves a function that is often rooted in the child’s stressful relationship with peers, siblings, teachers, and parents. We will help you and your child identify HOW© (Honesty, Openness, Willingness) the unwanted behaviors have taken hold and help you develop strategies for replacing the needs that are not being met.
We are committed to understanding the multifaceted function of the behaviors that you are attempting to intervene on. Most of us would prefer to identify a simple cause/effect relationship that would explain why our children are struggling academically or socially. When educators look for “simple explanations” many will end up engaging in useless “bashing” in an effort to blame someone for the “problem.”
We believe that we must all work together to build a plan that fully examines the nature of each of these relationships. Our practice will promote teamwork to find interventions that will help your child or adolescent change from the inside out rather than relying on token rewards that they will not find later in life.
We believe that each participant of the child’s life must examine the role they play, for we are either a part of the solution or a part of the problem. Our practice is committed to supporting students, parents, and educators in their efforts to reduce the negative impact of the unavoidable stressors our children face in our schools and communities.
Let us know how we can help.