For families with a child, 10 to 13, whose behavior escalated across the school year — and who loses the daily structure supporting them the week school lets out.
Not therapy. In-home behavioral coaching from a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, delivered personally — alongside your existing therapist, psychiatrist, and physician, in your home and community, wherever that may be.
Six to nine weeks across the summer, built to maintain what your child gained this year, steady the household, and return them to the building in September on firmer ground than they left it. No directly comparable in-home, LCSW-led engagement is known to exist at this level — delivered personally, not by staff.
A private-pay engagement, by application only.
You have built something real: the evaluation, the therapist, the IEP, a school team that knows your child. It took years to assemble and it holds through the school year.
It is also built around roughly 180 school days.
During those days, your child is supported by a system of people. A case manager. Six or seven teachers. An aide. A counselor. The front office. The adults at lunch, in the hallway, on the bus. A dozen or more trained people, working in shifts, and not one of them carrying the whole day alone. When one is depleted, the bell rings and someone else takes over.
And even with all of that in place, the behaviors continued. That is the honest starting point — not a system that had solved it, but one that was working on it. Progress in motion, at full staffing.
Then the staffing is cut. In June, that system is replaced by one or two parents. Your child's therapist and outside providers continue, but the structure around them does not. Same child. Same needs. The same target behaviors. No shift change, no handoff, and no one trained to catch what is building at hour nine of fourteen.
A dozen adults were not enough to finish the work. A fraction of that number is now being asked to hold it. That is not a prediction — it is arithmetic, and the person absorbing the difference is you.
There is also a cost the child carries before anyone else feels it, and in middle school it is structural.
Much of middle school runs on eligibility. Sports, clubs, after-school programs, student council, field trips, dances, the class trip in eighth grade — in many schools, access to these is tied to conduct standing. Continued disruptive behaviors could hinder participation in some or all of it, and by the point they do, it is often no longer a decision the parent gets to make.
Those restrictions could also arrive together — no team, no club, no field trip, no trip — closing several of the social structures the building offers at around the same time, for the child who may need somewhere to belong inside it most.
That could cause challenges of its own. A child kept out of group activities gets fewer chances to practice the exact skills the conduct standard is measuring, and fewer reasons to try. Outside school it often follows the same pattern — a camp that doesn't offer a spot the following year, an invitation that stops coming. Each is a dated event, and each passes whether or not anything changed in time.
Behaviors still escalating in July could hinder eligibility in October. In our experience that is often the first thing a ten-to-thirteen-year-old is willing to work for — which matters, because the work goes better when the child wants something from it too.
So the question in June is not what went wrong. It is what replaces eleven weeks of support that the calendar removed — enough to maintain what your child gained, stabilize the household, and put them back in the building in September standing on firmer ground than they left it.
Weekly therapy. The psychiatrist. The evaluation on file. Each is built for the hour it occupies and valuable there — which is why all of it continues alongside this work. None of it was ever staffed for 7am, or for the fourteen hours between sessions.
The schedule. The counselor. The case manager, the aide, the teachers who catch things early — a dozen adults working in shifts, ending in a single week. And with them, the conduct standing that gets your child into everything else.
What continues was never built to carry a summer. What did carry it stops in June. This is what goes between them — and what hands your child back to the building in September.
A structured taper that moves from full intensity to independence, with honest checkpoints at Week 3 and Week 5, so you always know exactly where you stand. Built to hold the household through the months the school system is closed, and to hand your child back to the building in September steadier than they left it.
This engagement is built and delivered personally — by me, not a team, not delegated staff. At this level of trust, that isn't a preference. It's the point.
Licensed Clinical Social Worker. 36 years parenting across biological, blended, and kinship family structures — my eldest in their mid-thirties, my youngest 15, a twenty-year span that means I have lived, in real time, through nearly every developmental stage a family passes through, more than once, under different circumstances each time. I am, quite literally, the sandwich generation. I have navigated hostile co-parenting relationships. I have extensive lived experience raising a neurodivergent/ADHD child and a child with a mild intellectual disability. I have been a special needs child care provider. I led federally funded abuse prevention and parenting education programs.
I built this program because I have sat exactly where you're sitting — with a diagnosis in hand, a treatment plan followed to the letter, and a household that still wasn't stable. Clinical training taught me the frameworks. Living it, at every age and every stage, taught me what actually holds under pressure, in a real home, at 7am when the morning is escalating. That is the difference this brings.
Every week reflects a day count of in-home presence. The structure itself is the intervention — intensity where it's needed, tapering as new patterns take hold.
Sustainable change requires graduated independence, not abrupt withdrawal — which is why intensity tapers instead of stopping.
| Week | Structure | |
|---|---|---|
| W1 | Observation | |
| W2 | 5 days / week — full intensity | |
| W3 | 4 days / week | Checkpoint |
| W4 | 3 days / week | |
| W5 | 2 days / week or fewer | Checkpoint |
| W6–9 | Refinement |
For Premium and Retainer families whose Phase 1 stabilizes, Weeks 10–14/15 shift to Transition & Systems Handoff — low-frequency oversight and a written Family Playbook the household keeps indefinitely.
These are the numbers families weighing a summer of support are usually working from. They are included for context, so the figure below arrives with something to measure it against.
| Option | Typical cost | What happens to your child |
|---|---|---|
| Wilderness therapy, 8–10 weeks | $35,000–$60,000 | Removed from home. Household unchanged on return. |
| Residential treatment, 3 months | $30,000–$75,000 | Removed from home. Reentry largely unsupported. |
| Therapeutic boarding school, one year | $60,000–$120,000 | Removed from home for a year. |
| Therapeutic day school, one year | $40,000–$70,000 | A different school day. The household is untouched. |
| The Bridge Program — summer immersion plus a supported school year | $50,000 | Stays home. The household changes with them. |
A child sent away at eleven comes back in August to the same house, the same school, and the same triggers. That is why the gains rarely survive October. Nothing in this program depends on removing your child from their own life.
Starting at, plus travel & lodging
The summer. Stabilize the household.
June — August
Starting at, plus travel & lodging
The summer, plus the return to school.
June — October
Starting at, plus travel & lodging
The summer, and the year that follows it.
June — the following summer
You invest $50,000–$125,000. In exchange: a personally-delivered consultant in your home across the summer, an honest, dated answer on trajectory at Week 3 and Week 5, a household that functions when school returns, and no obligation to pay for weeks of work that won't happen if it isn't working.
If trajectory doesn't support continuing at either checkpoint, future billing stops automatically — you are never paying for weeks that won't be delivered.
No directly comparable service is known to exist.
Not a better option in a crowded category — none is known to exist. LCSW-credentialed, in-home family systems consulting for complex households, at this level, is not known to exist elsewhere. The scarcity is structural, not manufactured: in-home work at this intensity cannot scale to hundreds of families a year.
Not still wondering, and not waiting on another year. A defined engagement, measured weekly, with an honest answer at the end of it — and a household that starts the new school year having practiced the thing it needs to hold.
Applications for summer 2027 open in January. Engagements begin in June, staggered across the summer, and a small number of families are accepted each year.
If you are reading this before January, send a note and I will make sure you hear when applications open.
Apply for ConsiderationApplications are reviewed personally within 2–3 business days. If it's a fit, you'll receive a private link to schedule your consultation. Every application and engagement is held in strict confidence.