Connections Child and Adolescent Group Program

For children with social and emotional vulnerabilities, groups provide a nurturing setting for developing social and emotional competencies, exploring feelings about themselves and others, and promoting psychological growth.  Although research has demonstrated the role of “social-emotional intelligence” as an important factor in successful child development, children have few systematic opportunities to acquire these skills.

Our groups are especially helpful for children who have not intuitively learned the “rules for social success”, whether as a result of general social isolation, or as a consequence of other psychological difficulties that impair social functioning.  These conditions may include mood and anxiety disorders, attention difficulties, and neurointegrative disorders such as nonverbal learning disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Group psychotherapy may be especially important for children who have been affected by teasing, bullying, exclusion, or other forms of social aggression.

Particularly during adolescence, when youth increasingly turn to peers for support, our groups provide a carefully supervised therapeutic alternative to potentially harmful social influences from popular culture (e.g. media influences, social networking sites, etc).

We use the label “social-emotional development groups” to underscore our focus on the social and emotional foundations of relationship skills.  Our groups share features with other group approaches, commonly called social skills groups, friendship groups, activity groups, pragmatic language groups, or children’s psychotherapy groups.

Individual and family psychotherapy services are also available, for adults, children, and adolescents.