Parenting a child with complex needs can feel isolating, confusing, and overwhelming, especially when typical approaches don’t seem to work. These groups are designed to offer steady, ongoing support for caregivers who are navigating big behaviors, attachment challenges, and the day-to-day realities that come with them.

Each group combines practical guidance with real connection. You’ll learn how to better understand your child’s behavior, explore new ways to respond in the moment, and stay connected to others who understand what this experience is actually like. This is not therapy. It is a place for honest conversation, shared learning, and support that continues over time.

Groups are small and designed to build trust, consistency, and meaningful relationships among participants. Over time, they become a steady source of support as families continue to navigate change, setbacks, and progress.

Current groups include:

Parents Navigating Child Welfare & Reunification

Foster families

Families caring for a Loved One’s Child

Parents through adoption

Parenting Into & Through the Complexities of Adulthood

Attachment, trauma, and developmental differences can create situations that feel overwhelming for both families and professionals. Tif offers individualized consultation to assess what’s happening, clarify what the child needs, and develop a realistic, coordinated plan.

This work supports teams in moving forward with greater clarity and alignment, reducing escalation and helping create conditions where children can experience greater safety, connection, and stability in everyday life.

Tif has worked with individual families as well as a wide range of organizations, including adoption and foster agencies, child welfare systems, juvenile justice programs, schools, tribal communities, wraparound services, faith-based organizations, and recreational programs. This breadth of experience allows her to support coordinated, practical approaches across the different environments surrounding a child.

Unlike many standardized assessments, these relational tools focus not only on the child, but also on the caregiver-child relationship and the ways connection, safety, and support can be strengthened over time.

After seeing the impact these assessments had on her own family, Tif made it a priority to help other families access these specialized, difficult-to-find resources earlier in their journey.

These assessments help build a deeper understanding of:

• how early experiences have shaped a child’s brain development, regulation, behavior, and relationships
• patterns within the caregiver-child relationship that may support or interfere with connection and safety
• a child’s unique sensory, developmental, and relational needs
• caregiver attachment patterns and the ways they influence stress, connection, and caregiving responses

Together, this process creates a clearer and more complete understanding of the child and their environment, helping families and professionals make more informed decisions and build more connected, coordinated support across home, school, and care teams.

Additional services are available on a limited basis, depending on timing and fit. If you’re looking for support in one of the areas below, please reach out to learn more.

Speaking & Facilitation

Tif is a speaker and facilitator who brings both lived experience and professional insight to the complex realities of children who have experienced early adversity. Through story, practical examples, and interactive learning, she helps caregivers and professionals better understand behavior, shift perspective, and build more effective ways of responding in everyday settings.

Speaking engagements and trainings are tailored to the audience and may be offered for parent groups, organizations, schools, or professional teams.

Intensive In-Home Stabilization and Ongoing Support

In situations where behavior has become acute and a child is at risk of hospitalization, residential placement, or further disruption, in-home stabilization may be an option.

Tif’s intensives are supported in consultation with Karen Doyle Buckwalter LCSW RPT-S, a nationally recognized attachment and trauma expert, and supported by professionals trained in Tif’s relational and neurobiologically informed approach.

This work focuses on bringing coordinated, high-level support into the home, helping caregivers and care teams better understand the child’s needs and respond in ways that reduce escalation, strengthen connection, and support greater long-term stability in all caregiving environments.

Childcare Training

Many families raising children with complex needs struggle to find childcare that meets the unique needs and challenging behaviors in ways that support safety and connection. This training is designed to help childcare providers, respite caregivers, and support staff better understand behavior shaped by early adversity and respond more effectively in everyday moments. This work is especially crucial in the first three years of life.

Grounded in attachment, neuroscience, and practical relationship-based care, trainings focus on regulation, connection, de-escalation, and creating supportive rhythms that help children feel safer and more successful across environments.

Caregiver & Professional Retreats

These neurobiologically respectful, hope-centered gatherings bring the caregivers, mentors, extended family, and professionals around children together to learn, grow, and play in a supportive environment. Through shared experiences and practical insight, participants deepen their understanding and reconnect with the work of supporting children in ways that foster safety, connection, and growth.