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 I decided to go into educational consulting
because I am a parent, just like you, who loves her child, and I saw him going nowhere fast. It started innocently with
acting out at school and gradually progressed to constant phone calls from the principal’s office, changes in friends, slipping
grades/lack of interest in school, withdrawal from the family, moodiness, blowups,
secretiveness and finally desperation that I was losing my child to forces that I could not
control. I loved my child. We were a good family. We had good values. Why wasn’t
that enough!
I didn’t know if the problem was just normal adolescence or something more serious.
Would doing nothing, end up being more expensive than getting the help that my
child needed? After trying to ignore it, I realized that it wasn’t going to go away. I felt alone,
ashamed and frightened. I knew we needed help, I just didn’t know where or what that help was going to be.
Now that I am a professional educational
consultant, thinking outside the box for each student and searching for a
program that is the right fit for each family, has resulted in my visiting
hundreds of facilities, mostly in the United States, but also in Canada, Mexico
and Europe. The variety of options for families includes:
- Pre-adolescent programs
- “Emotional growth” schools
- Structured /therapeutic boarding schools
- Wilderness/ranch programs
- Residential treatment centers
- Psychiatric hospitals
- Substance Abuse treatment facilities
- Transitional living programs
- Options for 18+ year old students
- Therapeutic in home coaching programs
My mantra has become that there is no shame in
having a child who struggles; the shame is when nothing is done about it.
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