Services

Counseling

Like working with a coach on a sports team, working collaboratively with a counselor can help build skills, tweak ineffective patterns, and achieve personal goals. Counseling services can be used to support a wide variety of challenges – from struggling with a life transition (such as divorce, grief/loss, moving to a new home/school), anxiety, making friends, coping with stress, reducing perfectionism, to controlling anger and more. However, counseling services and strategies can vary greatly from provider to provider. It’s important to find someone who is the right fit for your individual needs, strengths, concerns, and desired outcomes. Our counseling services are rooted in cognitive behavioral and solution-focused psychology practices. Therefore, the emphasis is on working together to recognize how our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors all interact and affect us. By changing some of our thought patterns, we can change how we feel and behave. By changing our behaviors, we can affect how we think and feel, and so on. Contact us today to see if counseling services may fit your needs.

Assessments

Assessments can seem intimidating for some. But assessments that are well done help emphasize a person’s unique strengths and opportunities for growth in a supportive, easy to understand way. This information can help families make fully informed choices about:

  • A child’s growth over time
  • Developmental areas that may benefit from additional support/intervention (such as particular academic interventions, speech/language therapy, or occupational therapy)
  • Educational models and services that best match the child’s strengths, needs, and learning styles
  • Eligibility for additional school-based or community-based services or accommodations through college

For children who may need additional support, research has consistently shown that early intervention leads to better overall outcomes. Unfortunately, families often face long wait times for assessment appointments, long delays in the receipt of the results, and then more waiting lists for receiving intervention services. Therefore, we offer quick turn around times for scheduling assessments and sharing the results to help speed up the process and support children in need with getting faster access to critical services.

However, our assessments are not one size fits all. Choosing what assessment is most appropriate for your child varies significantly based on parents’ concerns and goals as well as your child’s age. Below are general descriptions of the broad types of assessments we offer, but know that each assessment is individually designed.

Developmental Assessments

Developmental assessments are typically used to understand a child’s global development. While more commonly used with younger children, these assessments are also used with children who may have global developmental delays or medical diagnoses that impact multiple areas of development (such as Down syndrome or traumatic brain injury). This process involves using observations, structured interactive tasks, interviews, and parent and caregiver questionnaires to gain information about the following skills:

  • Communication Skills (Understanding what others are communicating and expressing what they want)
  • Fine Motor Skills (Using their fingers and hands to manipulate objects)
  • Gross Motor Skills (Using large muscle groups to walk, run, etc.)
  • Social Emotional Skills (Regulating their emotions, interacting with others, etc.)
  • Learning Skills (Recognizing patterns, solving problems, learning colors, etc.)
  • Sensory Processing Skills (Understanding information the body receives from the senses)
  • Self-Help/Independent Functioning Skills (Dressing, feeding, toileting, etc.)

Educational Assessments

As children start to look towards kindergarten and beyond, families may have questions about their child’s readiness for school. Some private schools also require entrance exams to verify that a child is ready to engage in their curriculum standards. As such, school entrance or school readiness assessments typically involve tasks to evaluate a child’s learning skills, attention to tasks, social-emotional skills, behavioral regulation skills, and pre-academic skills (such as numbers, colors, size comparisons, etc.).

Once a child has participated in academic instruction, families and educators may start to notice that a child is having more difficulty acquiring reading, math, or writing skills which may be related to a learning disability (such as dyslexia, dysgraphia, or dyscalculia). Educational assessments can help provide insight as to why a student may be struggling, where to best focus intervention efforts, accommodations that may provide support, and eligibility for additional professional services.

After children have received interventions or perhaps when a significant transition is approaching, a re-evaluation of their academic skills is warranted to create a clear picture of current strengths and challenges before updating the support plan. For example, before students transition to college, many testing companies and colleges require updated information for students to be eligible for accommodations.

As each situation is unique, educational testing plans can be modified to meet your individual needs. While some only need information on a child’s reading, writing, and math skills, others need information on the cognitive and/or behavioral skills that are affecting learning and the demonstration of skills on a consistent basis.

Emotional/Behavioral Assessments

The ability to regulate our behaviors and emotions is a complex and yet critical constellation of skills regardless of age. When learning these regulation skills takes more time or is more challenging, it can make it difficult to succeed in school, build and maintain relationships, and keep a feeling of well-being. These challenges are common with many disorders, including but not limited to:

  • AD/HD (Inattentive, Hyperactive, and Combined Types)
  • Anxiety Disorders (Generalized Anxiety, Social Anxiety, OCD, selective mutism, etc.)
  • Autism
  • Depression/Mood Disorders
  • Trauma-Related Disorders

Emotional and behavioral assessments can help identify disorders in order to make the most informed support plans. These assessments typically include interviews, observations, structured activities, and standardized questionnaires about a variety of behavioral patterns and emotions. Cognitive, academic, and independent functioning measures are also often included to draw a complete picture of how a person might be thriving or struggling across environments.

Gifted Assessments

Every child (and adult) has skills that are strengths and skills that are more challenging/still in development. People are traditionally considered to be gifted when their unique strengths are significantly above the standard skill levels for their age. Strength areas vary from child to child; for example a child may exhibit their strengths in music, academics, problem solving, languages, scientific inquiry, and/or math. Given these unique skills, some children benefit from changes to their instructional model to help them flourish. While not an exhaustive list, if you notice your child exhibiting many of the following traits, you may want to consider a gifted assessment:

  • Ability to comprehend material well above their grade level
  • Great curiosity and interest in exploring a topic in depth
  • Creative problem solving
  • Expressive imagination
  • Need for constant stimulation
  • Ability to learn and apply new information quickly
  • Ability to understand more abstract, complex problems (such as social justice)
  • Mature sense of humor
  • Increased emotional sensitivity

Gifted assessments can widely vary based on your child’s individual profile and your assessment goals. A basic evaluation of cognitive skills for local school-based service eligibility can be completed in a matter of hours and have same day or next day results. A more comprehensive gifted evaluation may consider cognitive skills along with social-emotional and behavioral skills that may help with identifying twice exceptional students and creating more robust support plans.