Personalized coaching for parents living their hardest days.

When and Where It Started

I had difficulties learning as a kid, and nobody around me understood why. That struggle is where I first learned how to solve problems that seem unsolvable, and that skill is what my career has been built on.

My Challenges Turned into Gifts

I had challenges with learning that made learning the way school expected feel impossible. I didn't read fluently until I was 13. Despite these challenges, I was blessed with a mind wired for complex, big-picture thinking and a high emotional intelligence that let me connect with people and perform at a level no one expected.

That mix confused everyone, including me. I was insecure and misunderstood. Most of the help I got didn't work, so I taught myself, building my own systems when nothing standard fit. That's where I honed the ability to find out-of-the-box solutions nobody else had, and it's why I do this work today, for the kids and parents who need what I needed back then.

The Turnaround

That drive took me from remedial classes to graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa at Michigan State University. The deeper pull, though, was toward children struggling the way I had, and the parents standing beside them, feeling just as lost as my own parents once did.

Starting a Career of Service

I spent my early career as an ABA consultant working with some of the hardest-to-reach autistic children, kids who had been told they might never speak. I started getting better results than other therapists by making the method more interactive and less repetitive. That success gave me an idea for a program combining behavioral techniques with a relationship-based approach.

Around the same time, I worked closely with The Friendship Circle, serving as one of their first Sunday Circle activities directors: giving input on their building's design, training staff and volunteers in play therapy and behavior management, and leading trips for large groups of special needs kids and volunteers to places like Cedar Point, as well as leading social groups and camps.

I went on to earn my master's in Speech-Language Pathology from Wayne State University. Shortly after getting licensed as an SLP, I met Dr. Rick Solomon, a developmental pediatrician who had independently developed a similar model. His program, The PLAY Project, is now one of the most widely used relationship-based autism programs in the world.

I collaborated with him to add behavioral and language-focused techniques to it, and spent years as one of the program's primary trainers, training parents and professionals around the world. I've spent the decades since as a licensed SLP helping children say their first words, coaching parents and professionals, and solving the same kind of problems I'd been solving about myself since I was a kid.

That clinical experience, combined with a lifetime of out-of-the-box problem solving, made me an expert at teaching parents.

What 30 Years Has Taught Me

The hardest part usually isn't the behavior itself. It's the exhaustion of feeling like nothing works, the loneliness of not connecting with your own child, and the grief of mourning the future you once imagined. It isn't a sign you're failing. It's a sign of how much you love your child.

Being of Service

I've become the person other professionals and parents call when nothing else works: an out-of-control child, a teenager who's vanished into isolation, a chaotic household, a co-parenting split with no consistency, emotions too loud to think through, or having tried everything already. I've likely sat across from your version of it.

How I Customize My Work

I don't believe in one-size-fits-all advice. I build a plan customized to each child and family, the same out-of-the-box thinking that got me through as a kid who couldn't read.

I've spent a lifetime solving problems that weren't supposed to have a solution. I'm ready to help you solve yours.