Our Services
We offer a range of services to help you understand and support your child:
Child, Adolescent, and Family Therapy
The types of sessions we have will depend on how old your child is and the reason you’re reaching out for some support.
Sometimes, this means working with a child or teenager to help them learn how to manage difficult emotions or get unstuck from unhelpful ways of thinking.
Sometimes this means helping parents understand what is going on for their child or develop new tools for parenting. Whatever our goals are, we offer parents and families a non-judgemental place to work on these goals together.
Therapy with children needs to match your child’s age and development. Growing brains and bodies can’t sit in a chair for 50-minutes and chat about what thoughts and feelings they’re having.
As parents or carers, you may need to have a very active role in your child’s sessions – to let us know how things have been going between sessions, to remember what we talk about in sessions, and to help coach your child in practising some of the stuff we work on together.
The first couple of sessions might go slowly whilst your child is getting to know us. There may be lots of playing or drawing, but this can often be the best way for young children to communicate.
Play Therapy can offer a wonderful setting for your child to connect, work through challenges and develop new skills. Play Therapy sessions with a certified Play Therapist will be focused on:
- First and foremost, relationship-building with your child
- Supporting and celebrating their play preferences with sensitivity to any sensory processing differences or preferences your child may have
- Modeling and teaching your child skills, which are meaningful to their interests and goals, through responsive and child-led play
- Coaching your child in valuable self-advocacy skills to support them across settings feel heard, understood and supported
This service is focused on working with your child on their goals through play in sessions in the clinic, at home or in the community.
Our team are all trained in a range of evidence-based approaches. These include:
- Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT)
- Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE)
- Collaborative and Proactive Solutions
- EMDR
- Circle of Security
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- Trauma-Focused CBT (TF-CBT)
- Family-Based Treatment for Eating Disorders (FBT)
- Enhanced Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy for Eating Disorders (CBT-E)
- Child Inclusive Mediation & Counselling
- Dialectical Behaviour Therapy with Adolescents
- Play Therapy
The first step is speaking to our friendly reception team. You can reach them by phone (02 4629 7133) or email (intake@thekindredpractice.com.au).
For a bit more information about the process of booking an appointment, click here.
Neurodivergent-Affirmative Services
The Kindred Practice is a neurodiversity-affirmative service and we recognise the many ways in which human brains can differ from each other. We understand how these differences shape how we process information and relate to ourselves, other people, and world around us. These differences are not ‘disorders’ and do not require treatment or fixing. In an environment with the right understanding and supports, these brains style differences are much less likely to appear as a disability or difficulty.
Neurodiversity-affirmative practice means that we offer interventions and supports based on current research on neurodiversity. We do not provide interventions that assume neurodivergent-kids are disordered or need fixing. We do not offer ABA, social skills training, or set goals that require neurodivergent kids to cover up or hide their authentic selves. We focus on helping children identify their own goals, develop their self-advocacy skills, to understand why the neurotypical world can be a challenging and inflexible place, and to understand their own brain style. We use affirming language and prioritise the lived experience of neurodivergent people (rather than ‘expert’ knowledge based on out-of-date and flawed research). We prioritise safety, connection, and collaboration in our sessions.
Inclusion support for your child in their education or care setting can be a valuable service if your child is experiencing challenges at childcare, in their classrooms or at school.
This service is focused on supporting your child in their educational setting through meaningful inclusion while working towards their personal goals.
This could look like…
- Therapist visits to your child’s childcare, classroom or school setting
- Support with meetings, IEP goals, inclusion plans and report writing
- Collaborating with you, your child, their education team and wider support network; Sharing knowledge and building the capacity of your child’s support network
- Advocating for your child’s needs and preferences and supporting your child to begin to develop valuable self-advocacy skills
- Developing, trialing and implementing support strategies
- General support in identifying and articulating your child’s potential needs, sensory processing differences, and what inclusion through a neurodiversity-affirming lens might look like for them.
Supervision and Training
Our team are actively involved in training and supporting future psychologists and offer supervision and placement opportunities.
Assessments
If your child is having ongoing difficulty with learning, paying attention, holding onto new information, or completing everyday tasks, an assessment might provide some answers. We offer a variety of assessments which can identify your child’s strengths as well as areas where some extra help might be needed.
We also offer more specific functional assessments of literacy and/or numeracy skills for children who are continuing to struggle at school and there is a query about a possible specific learning disorder such as dyslexia, dyscalculia, or dysgraphia. To be formally identified with a learning disorder, children generally need to have received at least six months of additional support. We provide comprehensive reports that will give your child’s school the information they need to best support your child’s learning.
We provide assessments that will describe your child’s thinking and reasoning skills, including their specific profile of strengths and weaknesses. We use the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children – Fifth Edition (WISC-V) to understand your child’s verbal, non-verbal, visual, and processing skills. These assessments can help identify children with developmental differences (such as intellectual development disorders) as well as gifted children.
The first step is speaking to our friendly reception team. You can reach them by phone (02 4629 7133) or email (intake@thekindredpractice.com.au).
For a bit more information about the process of booking an assessment, click here.
Parent Support
Parents can often feel nervous about this and worry that they’ll be blamed or judged. Parenting is a tough gig, and we never want to make it harder. Instead, we want to recognise that parents are the most important people in their children’s lives. We want to make sure parents have the right support, including the best information and tools to take care of their kids.
We know that by the time families reach out for support, they’ve already been under a lot of stress. Supporting our young clients also means making sure that their grown-ups have the right support. This might mean checking in with you at your child’s appointment or it could mean separate sessions just for you.
Each child plays differently and has different preferences of how they prefer to connect with others. We can support you in identifying these preferences and help you get down on the floor, and playing with your child. Sensory processing differences can also contribute to how children prefer to engage with toys, their environment, and others. We will provide you with the basics of sensory systems and processing differences as they relate to your child to help you begin to understand your child’s play and their preferences.
This service aims to support you in achieving your connection goals with your child. Coaching sessions can be held in the clinic, at home or in the wider community.
How it works
We know the process of getting support can be confusing (especially for families already juggling a lot). We’ve tried to summarise the main steps below to make it a bit clearer.
Child, Adolescent, and Family Therapy
If you're getting in touch for ongoing sessions for your child, these are the steps below:
Get in touch
Contact our friendly reception team who will get some information about why you are reaching out for help and answer any of your questions.
Waitlist
Given the huge demand for our services, we do have a waitlist at the moment. We try not to close our books, as this just makes it harder for families to access support. We’ll add your child to our waitlist and get in touch as soon as an appointment is available.
Booking
We offer every family a specific spot in their psychologist’s diary at the same day and time. This makes it easier to families to fit appointments into their busy schedules and makes sure our psychologists always have space to see the clients they are working with. If we offer you a spot and it doesn’t work with your schedule, you stay at the top of the waitlist for the next spot that becomes available.
First appointment
Depending on your child’s age, we might ask to meet with you (and other parents/carers) first without your child present (usually for primary-school kids) or to meet everyone altogether (usually for high-school kids). This is a chance for us to learn about why you are reaching out for support and start working on a plan to help.
Regular sessions
The number and frequency of the sessions will depend on what the goals are we’re working on but can usually be discussed with your psychologist at the first appointment. If you’ve using Medicare or NDIS funds for sessions, we’ll help you figure that stuff out as well.
Finishing Up
This sometimes happens after only a few sessions or it might happen after a whole year of working together. We’ll make sure you’ve gotten everything you needed from us and talk about what happens if you need any help in the future.
Assessments
If you’re getting in touch to arrange an assessment for your child, these are the steps below:
Get in touch
Contact our friendly reception team who will answer any questions and schedule a time for you to speak to one of our psychologists.
Quick phone call with one of our psychologists
We’ll schedule a 10-minute pre-assessment phone call to work out what type of assessment will be the best fit. Our reception team will then book everything in for you.
Parent-only appointment
We usually get started with an appointment with parents/carers (and not your child) so we can learn about more about your child’.
Child Appointments
The next step is to meet your child and get started with the assessment. This can be anywhere from one to three sessions. Please note: we only carry out testing for cognitive or educational assessments in the morning.
Report
We spend about 2-3 weeks preparing a comprehensive report based on the test results, any questionnaires you’ve completed, and any other sources of information.
Feedback Session
Once the report is finished, we have a feedback session with parents/carers (and your young person) to discuss the results (and any recommendations or next steps).
