My Story

​I’m late diagnosed AuDhD, and self diagnosed PDA (Autistic + ADHD with a PDA profile). I’m the parent to two neurodivergent teens, ages 17 and 20.  Before having kids, I taught high school and college for 7 years, and earned a masters degree in English.  

About five years before my oldest was born, when I started thinking about having children of my own, I switched my professional focus from teaching upper grades to early childhood education.  Much of my early ECE experience centered around Magda Gerber’s RIE philosophy, one that focuses on treating young children with respect and dignity. I completed the RIE Foundations 80 hour course in 2001, along with 24 ECE credits, and worked in child care centers and as a nanny before having my own kids, when I shifting to being a stay at home mom (by far the hardest job I have ever had!).  During that time, I maintained a steady focus on building collaborative skills within our family. I completed the P.E.T. instructor training course in 2016, when my kids were 9 and 11.

After discovering I am AuDhD in 2021, I realized the field of neurodivergent parenting has been my focus all along, specifically PDA. For the past three years, I’ve worked as a special education teacher, the past two at a private neuroaffirming therapeutic school, with a focus on working with autistic children who have a PDA profile, before transitioning to parent coaching specific to PDA this past fall.  I’m currently EEC certified Lead Teacher: preschool and EEC teacher: infant/toddler.  I also continue to work 1:1 with PDA’ers in a school setting as a consultant.  

Though my work as a teacher clarified a lot for me about working with PDA’ers (in a nutshell, "hey, this approach works beautifully for other people's kids, too, what do you know?!"), I found it was the challenges of parenting over the years that helped me develop and clarify the collaborative skills specific to PDA.  Collaborative approaches (such as Gordon’s PET, Rosenberg’s NVC, Gerber’s RIE, and Ross Greene’s CPS) have been my own personal hyperfocus for 20+ years.  

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About Coaching Sessions

On an even more personal level, I completely understand how hard it can be to navigate parenting when none of the traditional approaches to parenting work.  So that is where I focus in coaching, on helping you as a parent to honor both yourself and your own needs and autonomy, right along with your child’s, through building concrete collaborative skills, while also on understanding and staying mindful of the root of PDA’er anxiety: the cyclical relationship between anxiety and demands.  Pushing for compliance only increases anxiety and resistance, which then increases demand avoidance, leading to more pushing, which leads to more anxiety, and so on.  Our joint focus in coaching often largely becomes, “if not traditional discipline, then what? How do we approach this conflict/ problem/ situation collaboratively?”, and also on understanding the specifics of PDA, and why shifting our mindset and learning collaborative skills can have such positive impacts on family dynamics.  This process can be deeply affirming and reassuring for parents, as we move away from common behaviorism/ manipulative methods of raising kids, and move towards a focus on relationship and connection. 

When working with children who struggle with demand avoidance and anxiety, I see an ideal goal as interrupting that cycle further upstream by honoring autonomy, recognizing and reducing demands, and centering on building parental collaborative and co-regulatory strategies and skills. I find this approach is helpful in reducing demand avoidance PDA’ers, because it interrupts that cycle of pushing and resistance and replaces it with a conscious kind of support that is rooted in radical acceptance of the whole child, and a way for the child to then move forward in setting and meeting their own goals.  

I think of each coaching session as having three parts:

—we start by discussing current challenges

—understanding and responding to behavior through a PDA specific lens

—developing concrete collaborative skills and “how to” approaches when facing challenges, and building on specific collaborative parenting skills by drawing from different collaborative systems of communication (P.E.T., NVC, CPS, RIE) as a foundation to build on.  

I offer initial 1 hour consultations at a 50% off rate ($45) on Google Meet, and we can chat a bit about what you’re struggling with right now, how I can help, and what resources we might draw on so you can preview the process and kind of “see the big picture”.  Ideally, both parents attend these sessions, but I also work with individual parents.  

I also encourage you to read through some of my blog posts, as this is the theory, but in my blog I try to illustrate what it looks like in practice.  Check it out and see if any of it resonates with you.  

I am not able to bill through insurance, as I am a consultant/coach, not a therapist, but I try to keep my rates accessible for most families.  My rates are:

Intro session (1h): $45

1 session: $90

5 sessions: $400

10 sessions: $750

Parent coaching happens on Google Meet, so it isn’t limited by geography.  

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Respite Care

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During our coaching sessions, if you'd like to explore the idea of adding in low-demand respite services, we can talk through what that might look like for your child(ren).  I enjoy working with siblings, and helping with sibling conflict and collaboration.  Preference is given to families who book regular weekly respite sessions.  This service is only available only for families I coach.  I charge $45/hour for 1 child, $60/hour for siblings, with a four hour minimum plus any drive time that is over a half hour each way. I live in Wayland, Massachusetts.