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Our team of child and family specialists is made up of neuropsychologists, psychologists, psychotherapists and coaches that are all highly trained in the diagnosis and treatment of AD/HD in children and adolescents.
We are happy to collaborate with other professionals that may already be involved in the treatment of your child. We can provide testing, treatment, school consultations, and referrals to other specialists, as needed.
Testing/ Assessment
Parent/family ADHD-focused services
Treating the Child or Adolescent with ADHD
Co-occurring Concerns
Other services
Testing/ Assessment
Our team is highly trained in testing students for ADHD, learning disorders and related psychological issues. Many children with ADHD are overlooked when tested by psychologists that are not as expert in ADHD as our team members. Center Director Kathleen Nadeau is a nationally recognized authority on ADHD and has carefully trained our team of psychologists to recognize the subtleties of ADHD. Girls with ADHD, boys with inattentive type ADHD and gifted students with ADHD are those most at risk for missed diagnosis.
Our team is also expert at exploring a broad range of learning challenges and learning disabilities as well as the psychological problems that often accompany ADHD including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, eating disorders and behavior disorders.
Often, children that do not meet the full DSM IV criteria for ADHD still suffer significantly from the disorder and deserve diagnosis and treatment. The DSM V is currently in process and many changes in the diagnostic criteria are anticipated. Parents should not allow their child go undiagnosed and untreated because he or she does not meet diagnostic criteria that are now understood to be inappropriate for many children.
School consultations
We are available to meet with parents and teachers together to discuss test results and to make very specific recommendations about ways to improve a child’s academic performance. Often, informal meetings with the teacher are highly effective, at times even more effective than formal team meetings to develop IEPs (Individual Educational Plans). Our approach encourages collaboration between the Chesapeake Center, parents and teachers to discuss a child’s challenges and progress and to problem-solve to create the supports that a child needs to succeed.
Parent/family ADHD-focused services
Parent counseling
Parents are a critical part of helping children and adolescents with ADHD succeed. We work with parents to help them develop a deep understanding of how their child is affected by ADHD as well as by any accompanying learning differences or emotional issues. Our next step is to help parents create an ADHD-friendly family environment that will provide their child with adequate structure and support while they learn new strategies to manage their daily life and their academics.
We are very knowledgeable about how to help parents with ADHD become more skilled in parenting their child or adolescent with ADHD – helping them to better manage their own challenges and serve as a role model for their child. We focus on ADHD in the family so that everyone can understand their own needs as well as those of each other.
Parent Behavior Management Training
We also work with parents to teach them parenting techniques designed to reduce parent/child conflict and to develop daily routines that will minimize the negative impact of ADHD.
Parent groups
Often, new parenting skills are best learned in a group environment, where parents can support each other, share with each other and learn from each other. Our parent groups are structured small groups designed to help parents learn and practice ADHD-specific parenting skills.
Cognitive-behavioral training groups for parents
Dr. Judith Glasser will soon publish a book for children on CBT explaining on a child’s level how the way that they think has a powerful influence on how they feel and behave. Dr. Glasser offers short-term groups to parents teaching them
Family therapy
AD/HD impacts not only an individual child, but also that child's family; and often, when a child has AD/HD, other family members such as a parent or sibling also has AD/HD. When one or more family members have AD/HD it can lead to increased conflict and stress for every member of the family. Our family-focused treatment approach is designed to not only help the child and other family members affected by AD/HD, but also to work with non-AD/HD family members to increase understanding of AD/HD and decrease the family conflict that is commonly associated with AD/HD.
Family therapy can be very helpful to support parents in functioning as a coordinated team, working together to reduce family conflicts and engage in constructive problem-solving to deal with ADHD challenges.
Treating the Child or Adolescent with ADHD
Individual Therapy
Our treatment approach is tailored to the needs of each individual child. Older children and teens may be seen in individual therapy to help them better understand and accept their challenges related to learning or attention issues and to improve self-concept.
Our treatment approach focuses on both the psychological issues a child may struggle with (sadness, anxiety, low self-esteem, peer or sibling problems, family conflicts) but also help the child understand his ADHD
Social Skills Groups
One of the many challenges faced by children with AD/HD is in the social realm – children with AD/HD often have social skill deficits that contribute to difficulties in relationships with peers and adults. Inattention and impulsivity interfere with a child’s ability to accurately identify, imitate, and model appropriate social behavior. For this reason when there is enough interest we can provide social skills development groups so that children and teens with AD/HD can interact with enough in a structured environment meant to teach appropriate social behaviors.
Executive Functioning Skills Groups for Adolescents
Executive functioning skills (planning, self-monitoring, follow-through, initiation of action, short-term working memory) are critical skills for success in life. Many believe that EF skills are even more critical than IQ for future success. Our EF Skills Groups for teens are short-term, structured, targeted groups to teach teens how their EF skills are impacted by ADHD and strategies to improve them. Our EF skills group can be used very effectively in conjunction with ADHD coaching for extra support and structure as a teen practices these critical skills.
Co-occurring Concerns
Because AD/HD rarely exists in isolation, our psychotherapists and diagnosticians routinely assess and address a broad range of conditions often associated with AD/HD, including but not limited to:
Other services
Coaching
AD/HD Coaching is a structured, supportive, practical approach that can help individuals with AD/HD develop daily life management skills, improve time management, and learn ways to set reasonable goals and then follow-through on the steps to reach those goals.
During the very challenging teen years, a coach can offer frequent communication to help keep a student on track and relieve some of the responsibility for the family. Specific focus areas are selected and a clear, practical strategy is developed to succeed despite obstacle. Each coaching partnership is uniquely created for the individual’s specific strengths and challenges. In all coaching partnerships, the overarching goal is to make life and school better and more manageable.
Professional Organizing
Children and teens with ADHD (adults too) are very sensitive to their environment and are often more strongly impacted by it than are children without ADHD. Although they may have great difficult creating an orderly, calm environment, they certainly tend to prefer it and are better able to focus and concentrate when they are in a calm, orderly non-distracting environment.
Our trained professional organizers can work with your child or teen, or better yet the whole family, to create an uncluttered, organized living space. Then, the organizer or a coach can help your child develop the habits to better maintain organization once it is established.
Cogmed Working Memory Training
Cogmed is a very challenging, intensive 5-week working memory training program. During Cogmed training, the trainee is literally building new neural connections.
The Cogmed trainee comes in for an initial interview during which questionnaires are completed regarding current functioning of memory and attention. The Cogmed training takes place at home, 45 minutes per day, five days per week, for five weeks. During the five week training period, the trainee will be contacted each week by phone. The coaching session is a time to report progress, and to problem solve any difficulties. Children going through Cogmed training need an in-person Cogmed assistant (usually a parent, teacher, tutor, or other appropriate adult) to monitor and supervise each training session. Following the training the trainee comes in for a follow-up interview. At this session, you’ll be asked to complete questionnaires once again, to help measure your progress. Three months following training, we will send you another set of questionnaires to fill out and return to us. We find that improvement in areas of memory and attention often continues to increase following the training period. These questionnaires give us an opportunity to measure and document your progress.
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