Helping You Deal with Family Challenges
Comprehensive Services for Parents, Stepparents and Single Parents in NYC
Parents frequently face significant challenges when raising children. You can love your kids and work hard to maintain open lines of communication, only to encounter increased frustrations as your children grow and evolve. Despite your dedicated efforts to attend to the needs of your children, you may experience your own emotional stress. An experienced therapist can listen, understand the challenges you are facing and help you take constructive steps toward making positive changes.
Specific Concerns for Divorced Parents and Stepparents
Children born into a family unit usually have a clearer understanding about the roles and boundaries of family members. In contrast, stepchildren may find themselves in family environments where no significant bonds have yet been established with the stepparent. Attention and loving care is necessary to create and nurture strong bonds. Over time, families develop their routines and a familiar rhythm that can become a source of comfort and security to children. In the beginning stages of step-parenting relationships, you may find children rebelling or experiencing loss because of diminished contact with their biological parent. When faced with your stepchild’s insecurity or other negative emotions, how you respond to the child can affect your progress in developing a meaningful bond. For children impacted by divorce and remarriage, the additional numbers of parents and grandparents with whom the child interacts, can result in substantial differences and inconsistencies in rules and disciplinary consequences from one household to the next. This situation can leave children feeling confused, insecure and vulnerable.
Single Parenting
Anyone who has gone through divorce or separation can tell you that raising children without the day-to-day help of the other parent can be difficult. Prior to ending the marriage or relationship, the mother and father divided certain parenting responsibilities, creating balance and stability for their child. The single parent must now cope with new challenges and compensate for the missing parent. Creating a new co-parenting relationship between separated parents comes with its own unique set of issues.
Therapy Services for Parents
Different stages of a child’s development present unique challenges. I can help you to support your child during these phases while maintaining a healthy and loving bond.
- The toddler stage—I can help you identify and appropriately respond to the behavioral changes your child manifests as he or she strives for autonomy during the toddler stage. Therapy provides specific tools for responding when your child starts to say “no” to everything you ask. We can also address ways to encourage your child’s autonomy and independence without fostering ongoing disciplinary problems.
- The teenage years—When your children have one foot in adolescence and the other in adulthood, they often begin rebelling against authority and vying to establish their own independence. I can help you learn how to respond in a way that works to re-establish a respectful relationship and restore a positive and loving bond.
I work with parents to encourage an atmosphere of open and coordinated communication, so that their children get all the benefits of loving care, consistency and reliability.
Experience | Commitment | Personalized Care| Compassion
Professional Therapy and Counseling in New York City
Individual Therapy · Marriage Counseling and Couples Therapy
Schedule an Appointmnet
Please call 212-265-6338 or contact me online to arrange a consultation.