We focus on friendship
“So how do I do that?” was a question our director heard over and over again in her years of experience working with families of children and youth with social learning needs. Families seeking to help their kids and teens to connect with others had enrolled their children in individual therapy or groups, or attended parent support programs, but few had been able to access programs focused on social learning that helped them to learn how to coach their children themselves.
We support children, youth and young adults on their path to finding and keeping friends. Research tells us that having just one or two close friends has a significant impact on building positive self-esteem and independence as well as handling stress, depression and anxiety. Our team is passionate about helping our clients with the early and later social learning needed to form meaningful and fulfilling relationships with others.
We help kids and families thrive
Our clients and their families choose Connections SLP because they wish to focus not on general social skills, but on learning about their own social interactions to help them form relationships with peers in ways that are personally meaningful and strengths-based. Our younger clients are ready and interested in learning the building blocks to enjoy interactions with other kids with adult coaching. Our teens choose to participate in our programs voluntarily and are motivated to learn more about making and keeping friends. We know that when kids feel socially supported and successful, parents do too.
We partner with parents
We involve parents or other significant adults as social coaches in all of our programs, and are proud to offer our clients three programs: TalkAbility™, PlayGreat @ Connections SLP, and PEERS® for Adolescents. When children and teens have a social coach who is able to support them when the program ends, there is a much greater likelihood of new skills being maintained. Our staff have extensive experience as parent course facilitators. They are highly skilled at presenting new information in fun and interesting ways as well as supporting parents and their children or teens in building on current strengths, personalizing new strategies and applying new learning to their daily interactions and preferred activities.
We’re passionate about supporting social steps
Our enthusiastic and caring speech-language pathologists have extensive experience in understanding and coaching social learning by working with clients and families to help them focus on their individual goals. We rely on our years of experience in parent education, diagnostic assessment and individual and group social learning to create strong partnerships with our clients and their families as we help them achieve their goals. Our clients include, but are not limited to, children and youth on the autism spectrum, individuals with ADHD, learning disabilities and social anxiety. Our programs do not require participants to have a diagnosis to participate and we welcome all families who are seeking support for social learning.
