About Me

I am a practicing Licensed Clinical Social Worker specializing in providing mental health counseling to children and parents. After graduating from Columbia University School of Social Work in 1985 I remained in New York to work with the Deaf community, adults with acquired hearing loss and newly diagnosed hearing- impaired children and their parents. In 1989, I returned to Los Angeles as a psychiatric social worker for the Los Angeles Unified School District working with students and parents in the school district’s mental health clinics, providing counseling services to deaf and hard-of-hearing students, and to students with emotional and behavioral challenges. In addition, I worked extensively in crisis intervention.

Mental Health and Parenting

My experience has repeatedly taught me that the majority of children referred for mental health counseling did not suffer from psychiatric problems, but rather had out-of-control behaviors that were often inadvertently reinforced by well-meaning parents, teachers and mental health professionals. I therefore began to work extensively with parents and families to give the parents the tools that they needed to repair their families. I routinely observed how rapidly children responded to parental leadership and structure, when it was done effectively, logically, and lovingly.

This has greatly influenced my Guide, Protect, Love Approach to Parenting program, which I ran for my last twelve years at LAUSD. As parents shared their first-hand experience of the effectiveness and the success of this approach, the program grew enormously. I presented hundreds of workshops at different schools throughout the District and at District offices for parents of children of all ages, K-12. For parents interested in more support, following the orientation lectures, I ran weekly parenting support groups to enable parents to work on individual goals. I provided support to families who learned techniques to prevent the development of behavior problems or to fix challenges that at one time seemed insurmountable. In 2016, I retired from LAUSD to concentrate on my private practice and to offer this much-needed support to parents and families.

Mental Health and Autism Communication

I am the mother of two children, and one of my children has nonspeaking autism. I have personally faced all the challenges that every parent of a special needs child faces—the endless therapies, the theories that don’t seem to work, the fatigue and confusion. My son was educated in the usual channels. When he was a young boy he began learning to communicate by pointing to letters on a letter board and to type to communicate and he transitioned to be fully included in general education in middle school. (He tells his story in his book, Ido in Autismland: Climbing Out of Autism’s Silent Prison by Ido Kedar). Using these tools to communicate, he graduated high school near the top of his class and continues to write, attend college classes and to advocate on behalf of people with autism. Over the years, I have spent thousands of hours with him—and with other autistic people—typing and communicating. Because of his renown, I have received many requests from parents asking me to work with their children on communication. In 2016 I began to include this vital service as part of my practice.

Teaching locked in people to communicate their thoughts combines all parts of my professional background: my understanding of communication from my work with hearing impaired people, my mental health background specializing in children, my expertise in autism and my unique ability to provide emotional support and guidance to their parents. Children with autism who are learning to communicate are often filled with feelings about their disability. Providing emotional support to them, and their parents, is key to their ultimate success.