I (Lori) once had a father come in for testing for his 5-year-old son. The father noticed sensory differences with his son (e.g., overreaction to noises, sensitivity to touch, clothing), so he had taken him to an occupational therapist for testing and treatment. After a few months, he was making some progress, but his kindergarten teacher was still very concerned about his behavior. His father was then referred to me, a psychologist, for more testing to look into ADHD. When I first met with the father, he expressed the typical ADHD concerns: his son had difficulty paying attention, was very distractible, disrupted the learning of other children, and was constantly moving and talking. He was completing little work at school due to his lack of focus.

However, there were also other concerns which were characteristics of autism. For instance, he had never really made friends with anyone and was often fighting with other children at recess. He liked to spend a lot of time at home lining up...

You know when you first have a baby, and everyone says things like, "The days are long but the years go by fast!" and other irritating, um, insightful comments like that? In some ways, parenting during this pandemic feels very similar. On one hand, my (Katie's) kids have already eaten all of the snacks and done every single thing on the to-do list by 8:47 a.m., leaving me to wonder how we are ever going to make it through the day! On the other hand, it's already well into April... excuse me, what? How is time able to go so fast and yet so slow at the same time? For all of us, things are just crazy right now.

Check in time 

So... we want to check in with you! Tell us, how are you doing? Let me just say that you are all on our minds these days. Truly, we just want to know how we can serve you best. As we Skyped for our team meeting last week, our originally planned blog post topics seemed a little bit trivial when we started thinking about everything going on in the world. So we shifte...

April is autism awareness month, and we want to do our part in increasing awareness and *acceptance*, as well as answer all of your autism-related questions. Our team at The Childhood Collective has a huge heart for autistic children and their families! All of us have spent our careers specializing in diagnostic evaluations and therapy for these children, and have seen many changes occur over the past decade. We hope to offer you some professional insights and share a bit about our own experiences. Let's start with the basics: what is autism? 

What is Autism?

Autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder that impacts a child’s ability to communicate and socially interact with others. Children with autism also show repetitive behaviors and special, focused interests.

The current diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder is made when a child shows differences in communicating and interacting with others and either (currently or in the past) has shown challenges in ALL of...

Weekly check in time! How is everyone doing? This week has brought countless changes, and for most of us, a little (or a lot!) of added stress as we adjust to this new “normal.” We are right there with you, and we are figuring it out with our own families too! As schools move forward with plans to implement remote learning, we are getting daily questions from parents, such as:

• How do I support my child with ADHD when they are not motivated to work at home?
• What is the best way to balance my adult responsibilities (working from home, taking care of other children, managing all of this stress) along with making sure my child doesn’t fall behind academically?
• How will my child’s needs be met if they are on a 504 plan or an IEP?

 While we have no expertise in pandemic management, we do know a lot about child development, the parent-child relationship, and special education needs and resources. In trying to think about how we can support you during this time, we decided to bring tog...

It seems that in the past few weeks, we went from feeling like the COVID-19 virus was no big deal to much of our country shutting down indefinitely. We are all living in a state of uncertainty about the future, and we all know that uncertainty breeds anxiety.

After doing a series of blog posts related to anxiety, we thought it was appropriate to do a post this week on how Mallory, Katie, and I are managing these rapid changes in our own lives. On the blog today, we are each taking turns talking about how our families have been affected, how we are managing our own anxiety, and how we are talking to our kids about the virus.

Lori’s Family

This past week was our spring break. Fortunately, we had planned to have a low-key spring break anyway, as we have a Disneyland trip planned for early May. However, my parents were scheduled to come out over their spring break (my mom is a high school math teacher), and they had to cancel their trip. This was hard news to tell my kids, but they took...

Navigating the school system with an exceptional child can be stressful. As a parent, you’re looking to get your child the help they need, while being thrust into a new world of acronyms, policies, and procedures that can feel downright mysterious.

Back when I was still a practicing child psychologist, I lost count of the number of families who, in complete sincerity, asked me where to move in the entire Phoenix-metro area in order to go to the school that would best support their exceptional child. Countless families were prepared to go to the lengths of a significant life event (moving!) in order to make the school process even just a little bit easier!

Understanding Individualized Education Programs (IEP) and 504 Plans, their similarities, and their differences is a great place to start in your advocacy journey. While there is a lot to know about these two documents (seriously, I took a semester-long course in graduate school focused almost solely IEPs and 504 Plans), I’ve narrowe...

Seeing your child anxious can be one of the hardest things as a parent. It is hard because none of us like to see our children in pain, and we often don’t know the best way to respond or help. In our last blog post, we discussed ways to teach your child to talk back to anxiety. If you didn’t have a chance to read the blog, check it out here.

Now, we are going to be diving deeper into arguably one of the best ways to help your child minimize anxiety, which is something we call exposure. Exposure simply means taking steps to intentionally do the things your child fears. Remember what we learned in the last blog — Anxiety grows bigger through avoidance. Thus, the primary way for your child to learn that their fears don’t come true is by putting themselves in the feared situation, so they can learn through experience. No more avoidance! And in that process, sometimes your child’s fears do actually come true. However, what children often learn is that it wasn’t as bad as they thought, and ...

Years ago, I worked with a little boy who was terrified to separate from his mother. Even in their home, his mother could not go into another room (not even the bathroom!) to be by herself. Her son was extremely fearful, and she was beyond exhausted by it. After the first session with me, the little boy refused to come back to see me. He didn’t like me, and I had offended him in some way. The mother asked for referrals to another therapist, but I told her to try and give it a shot a little longer. I explained that sometimes children avoid going to therapy because it causes them anxiety to come and talk about their anxiety. The mother agreed, and we continued.

The second meeting, we named his worry and talked about what his worries were telling him. After several questions, he began telling me that his worries told him that while he was in the office with me, his mother would leave and never come back. We then used a worry thermometer to identify how worried he was that this would happ...

Raise your hand if you have ever asked your child to do something (e.g., finish their math homework, put away their laundry, or pick up toys in the backyard), only to be frustrated when the final result isn’t what you expected? As a momma to two little ones, this can be so irritating to me! It can be discouraging when we have an expectation and it isn’t met. The truth is, we often develop our expectations from a “future picture” in our mind. And when it doesn’t work out the way we planned, we are disappointed. Have you ever…

• Been on a tropical vacation, expecting it to be sunny, and then had stormy weather instead?
• Started on a loop-trail hike, and realized that the trail was much longer than you expected, but you have to keep going in order to get to the end?
• Baked two dozen cookie monster cupcakes, only to have them turn out like this?!?!

If you have ever been disappointed because the outcome didn’t match your expectation, or thrilled because it was even better than you i...

At the beginning of the school year, my 5-year-old daughter seemed to have an endless amount of worries every night before bed. She had just started kindergarten, and it was her 3^rd new school over the past couple of years. Every new situation that came up during the week, she expressed concerns. Separation from me all day was a concern. Uncertainty in general was a concern. After a period of a few months, the worries eased, the separation anxiety lessened, and nighttime fears seemed to go away.

Then, over the holidays, we had a solid few weeks of almost constant worries about 1^st grade. What would it be like? Would she know anyone? Who would her teacher be? What would the work be like? The list seemed to go on and on. And then, after we arrived home from traveling and caught up on some rest, the worries slowly disappeared.

In the midst of all of my daughter’s anxiety though, I felt a burden. Naturally, I began to worry about my daughter’s worry! If any of you parents out there have ...