Hi, I’m Sandra.

I’m a parenting coach for neurodivergent moms who is parenting three vastly different neurodivergent teenagers and young adults.

I understand the deep desires and challenges associated with feeling safe, heard, and connected in a world that doesn’t “get” us or our children. 

Let me share my story…

A decade into motherhood I found myself in the principal’s office at my youngest child’s preschool.  He wasn’t learning.   Was it willfulness, they asked?  Or, was it something else like a learning difference that we weren’t aware of … yet.    

That tearful  meeting connected us with parenting experts, and we soon had a handful of neurodiverse diagnoses and a list of places for therapy to make the wrong things right again.

I wanted to argue there was nothing wrong, but I knew things weren’t quite “right” either.

It was so important to me that these professionals who worked with my son knew he was a person instead of an insurance code or a therapy protocol.

The most important gift in my neurodivergent education didn’t come from my education, training, or work in the helping profession.  It came when a really in-tune professional  shared that  neurodivergent people like me, my spouse and children,  have differently wired brains, and so we respond differently to the world around us  This simple but profound concept changed the way I looked at myself, my marriage  and my children and gave me more hope than anything I heard in five  years of working with professionals. 

My educational background includes a Masters degree in Professional Counseling from Georgia State University  (1998) with an emphasis on and experience with children and teenagers. Previously, I earned a  Masters degree in Journalism from the University of Georgia (1992) with an emphasis on qualitative research methods.  While residing in Georgia, my professional work concentrated on working with teenagers in residential settings.  This included work in a therapeutic boarding school/wilderness program and a residential group home setting. 

I became a full-time Texan in 1999. Here, I worked as a mental health professional with the STARRY program (Services to At-Risk and Runaway Youth).  Through this job, I gained valuable experience with crisis counseling, group counseling and  individual therapy with an emphasis on goal setting and problem solving.  In my capacity at STARRY, I taught parent education classes and offered group  psycho-educational instruction for children and teens.  

I formally left the helping profession to raise my children, but I was always drawn to other struggling moms who quietly lived with our undiagnosed and struggling children.  We quietly connected in school parking lots and traded phone calls and emails offering support to each other when we felt like failures to our overwhelmed children.  After my oldest graduated from high school, I opened my business to formally offer services to moms like me who still struggle in the shadows and silence.