Family

Ilona works with adults, adolescents, and groups in a therapeutic setting to restore creativity, spontaneity, and intimacy to everyday life. Broad diagnoses and standardized assessments often don’t yield helpful information about how to move forward. Rather than labeling, we unravel the specific, individual thinking and processing patterns in both our emotional and educational lives, often including identification of the point at which our abilities or performance start to affect how we feel about ourselves and others.

Parent Education and Support

  • understand the psychological birth and development of your child

    • create a map of your emotional family tree

    • discover the six personality adaptations and how you and each of your family members responds to life emotionally

    • build skills that will help you to interpret your child’s non-verbal messages and behaviors

    • understand the stages of family development

    • support healthy attachment, separation, and individuation

  • learn the language of emotions and teach your children

  • support your child in becoming his/her/their authentic Self

  • understand the family system

    • parents are the architects of the family

    • change comes from a place of Okayness

    • the drama triangle vs. true intimacy and connection

    • needs are better met through cooperation than competition

  • family skills development: create a positive stroke environment, stop discounting and rescuing, and learn how to problem solve

Family Support

  • communicate openly and clearly and listen well

    • crossed, ulterior, and complementary transactions: the three ego states

    • the okay corral

    • personality adaptations and styles of communication

  • prepare for and navigate the path from adolescence to adulthood

    • the stages of family life

    • sharing power

    • the stroke economy: positive vs. negative stroking patterns

  • family rules: spoken and implied

    • autonomy and interdependence

    • expectations

    • consequences and tolerance

  • live within the context of values

Youth Advocacy

  • representing family interests to schools and institutions

  • advocating for children in school settings — IEPs, accommodations, etc.

Parents

Rearing children in today’s fast-paced, competitive, and often complicated environment can be overwhelming and confusing. Knowing when to push and when to let go, balancing freedom and protection, understanding the competition, and resisting the urge to participate in social game-playing — there is pressure from all directions.

The list of concerns and questions is seemingly endless: What kind of education is best for my child? How do I help my struggling child? Is the school doing the right thing for my child? What role do parents play? How involved or hands-off should we be? Is this behavior normal? Is my child being bullied? Why doesn’t she like to read? What is auditory processing disorder? Does my child really need medication? What are the alternatives? What is dyslexia? Does it matter if my child is not as fast in computation? How much computer time should my child have? Does watching TV impact her brain functioning? How do I get my child to sleep more? Why does my child refuse to eat breakfast? Does my child have too much homework? Should he take the SAT? What if she doesn’t get into any good colleges? Why doesn’t he like sports? How do I get my child to choose better friends?

“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.” — C.G. Jung

Although these questions must ultimately be left to each of us individually to ponder and then to bring to our immediate school community, circles of friends, business partners, family members, etc., OneYou provides parents with information, resources, and workshops that can offer insight and knowledge, as well as support. Our programs address a variety of concerns from the evolving parent-adolescent relationship to finding the right evaluation process for young people struggling in academia.

Helping parents and children create a successful education and life plan is a primary focus of OneYou. Children today spend approximately eight hours a day at school, excluding any additional time for athletics or extracurricular activities: eight hours more each week than twenty years ago. In addition, homework can range an additional two to four hours a day depending on grade, age, and varying school requirements. If a child needs additional help or struggles academically, even more time is required. When parents turn to find help, they are often met with a barrage of sites that all promise to motivate, educate, and remediate the child. It is a daunting task to embark on the search for answers in the pages and pages of information that is often indiscernible and misleading, pushing one or the other program, method, formula without sufficient explication or support.

A child’s academic development, social and emotional well-being begins before birth, and we, as parents, are continually reminded of the many things we need to be addressing, accomplishing, practicing, and preparing on behalf of our children. OneYou workshops answer questions about education myths, brain facts, reading and comprehension processes, how to create a healthy learning environment, and what we know about early child development and adolescence.