Behavior has a reason. I look closely enough to find it.
Twenty-eight years of pediatric clinical practice, twelve of them in private work with children and their families. Fine, detailed attention to your child and research-based tools for your family, held with discretion.
It often begins quietly. Long before the teacher calls.
Your five-year-old has a stomachache most mornings. She will not join the other children at the birthday party. She comes apart over the wrong cup, the wrong socks, the wrong order of things. You have been told she is fine. Something in you knows she is not comfortable — in her body, in her day, in her own skin.
Or it is louder now. Your seven-year-old's teacher has called, more than once. There are words being used — attention, regulation, evaluation — and a referral form on the kitchen counter. You can see the five-year-old he was inside the boy he is now, and you can see where this is going.
Or your thirteen-year-old has gone quiet. Headaches, stomachaches, a closed door. She is uncomfortable, and she no longer lets anyone close enough to see where.
Most of these children have been seen by their pediatric provider. But a routine visit is built for fifteen or twenty minutes. It has no room to listen to all you have noticed about your child over the years, to watch how they hold their body as they talk about school, to learn where they sit among their siblings, or to sort the original need from the behaviors layered on top of it. That is the time I give your child.
Behavior is what you see. I look at what is underneath it.
A child who does not feel good in their body cannot behave well in it. I look first for any medical issue that could be underneath what you are seeing, and when I find one, we talk it through and take it to your child's primary care provider. I listen carefully to what you have been noticing for years: the things you could not quite name, and the things that never seemed relevant at a doctor's visit. Then I watch your child closely: how they hold their body, how their nervous system responds as we talk about school and home, where they sit among their siblings, and which behaviors are the original need and which have been layered on top.
From there, the work is practical. Research-based tools for your child's nervous system and body, and for yours, because a regulated parent changes what an already struggling child can manage. Specific changes, used systematically, adjusted visit by visit. This is family work.
I learned this on the floor. More than once. In more than one season.
There were moments with my boys — toddler years, early school years — when I could feel myself beginning to spiral. When the noise or the conflict or the sheer relentlessness of it was pulling me somewhere I did not want to go.
I learned to put myself in timeout. Literally. I would excuse myself, go to the bathroom, sit on the floor, and do what I now teach: feel my body, clear it, come back.
Sometimes I did not make it in time. Sometimes I became what my boys and I came to call Scary Mama — a name I gave it myself, so they knew I recognized its impact. Some of the most important moments in our relationship happened on that floor. The tears, the holding, the coming back to each other.
This is not a framework I developed and now stand above. It is something I live. The same tools I give you are the ones I still reach for, in my own life and in my clinical practice.
Your child is struggling now. We begin with what will help them feel better.
Close attention to your child as they are today. Practical changes, chosen for this child and this family, that help them feel more comfortable in their body and in their day. As your child settles, the household settles with them.
Two ways in. Both entirely individual.
A Private Engagement is six weeks of close, online work with your family. An Immersive Engagement brings me to you — three to five days on location with your child and family, followed by a month of close online support. Neither is a program your family moves through. Every visit begins with what is working, what is not, and what your child and your family are ready for next.
In both, I am available to you by text and email between visits, and every engagement is held with discretion.
This is practical, non-pharmaceutical work: research-based tools, used systematically, with close attention to how your child responds. It is not counseling. That is what the investment reflects.
I work with two to three families at a time. The depth of this work requires it.
Children don't need you to be perfect. Just present.
— Dr. Frances Malone, PNP, PhD