Is your child’s achievement below his or her potential?

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Students may struggle in school for a variety of reasons, including:

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• Difficulty with time management, procrastination, and organization

• Low motivation

• Learning disability

• Barriers related to mental health

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Whatever the root cause is, we will work together to formulate and implement concrete strategies to help your child reach his or her full potential.

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Does your child experience overachiever stress?

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For overachievers, high standards are an important value. However, when overachievers feel they cannot bear to fall short of those standards, they often pay a price in their overall psychological wellness. Some overachievers are self-critical, ruminate on failures, and struggle with prioritization. This can result in chronic stress, and ultimately, lower academic performance.

For overachieving students, it is essential to learn to retain optimism in the face of unmet goals, and to value flexibility. Through counseling, overachievers can learn to embrace a growth mindset, to prioritize, and to appreciate their natural thought patterns without giving those thoughts the power to control their lives.

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Is your child struggling with symptoms of ADHD?

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According to the CDC , almost 13% of North Carolina parents report having a child who has been diagnosed with ADHD. Their children may struggle with disorganization, risk-taking and impulsivity, excessive daydreaming, and/or problematic behavior. For students experiencing ADHD symptoms, the school environment can be particularly challenging. Given the high number of people, complex social atmosphere, limited physical activity, and high demand for focused attention and compliance, it is no surprise that students who struggle with symptoms of ADHD often experience frustration, academic setbacks, conflict with parents and teachers, and self-esteem issues.

If your child experiences symptoms of ADHD, there are strategies which can improve their ability to adapt to their school and home environment. Whether you are looking for therapy in lieu of medication, or if your child uses medication and you would like to complement medical interventions with therapy, we can work together as a team to help your child succeed. Through counseling, your child can develop better impulse control, greater ability to focus on tasks, decreased stress and frustration, and improved time management and planning skills. Therapy for ADHD will entail individual sessions with the student, as well as occasional family sessions. In family sessions, parents will learn specific strategies to support their child in reaching their goals.

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The reality is that kids with ADHD often have many under-recognized and under-utilized strengths. World renowned artists, inventors, scientists, and athletes have been diagnosed ADHD. It doesn’t have to hold your child back. The goal of therapy will not simply be learning to overcome challenges, but also to foster your child’s unique strengths to fulfill his or her greatest potential. 

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Does your child experience test anxiety?

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A touch of anxiety during a test can improve performance, but we all have a threshold where anxiety begins to hinder performance. There are several possible causes of problematic test anxiety:

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• In some cases, students have not learned strategic study skills that will prepare them adequately for the test, and this under-preparation leads to anxiety.

• Sometimes, students are nervous about how well they will perform on a test so they avoid thinking about it. This avoidance prevents them from studying enough and from mentally preparing themselves for the test.

• Some students study for an adequate amount of time, but low levels of anxiety related to the test impairs the brain’s ability to retain information during their studying time.

• For some students, the experience of engaging in any activity which creates stress, such as preparing for a test, triggers other unrelated worries which distract from the test preparation.

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Test anxiety tends to become a vicious cycle because when it results in a negative experiences taking tests and consequently lower scores, the student becomes more anxious, and the pattern is reinforced. Breaking this cycle is possible through therapy, and overcoming test anxiety can provide students with a blueprint for how to better manage other forms of anxiety.

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