Mara’s son, Evan, was barely scraping by in school. His ADHD made schoolwork difficult, and his anxiety caused him to struggle with interactions with teachers and classmates. At home, he would run and hide when Mara tried to get him to do his homework. At school, he withdrew into himself and refused to participate in his classes. Then, Mara and Evan were introduced to BHN.
At BHN, Mara was introduced to BHN’s In-Home Behavioral Services program, which helps parents learn skills to manage their children’s behavioral issues. The program’s therapists work with parents to develop a plan to alter negative behaviors and provide them with the tools they need to implement the plan at home. For Mara, the therapists showed her how to develop a point system that rewarded Evan for positive behaviors. “They would come to my house and help me keep him focused, and model behavior for me to use with him,” Mara says. “And watching them helped me learn how to do it myself, which helped tremendously.”
In the year and a half that Mara and her son took part in the In-Home Behavioral Services program, Mara witnessed her son undergo a profound transformation. Recognizing the issues that Evan had with public school, Mara enrolled her son in online classes, which have better suited her son’s educational needs. Mara says that the point system she made with BHN’s therapists has had an extremely positive impact on her son’s education and willingness to do schoolwork.
“We’ve been to work through a lot of negative behaviors that he developed as a coping mechanism in public school,” Mara says. “And the program really helped me retrain his brain and focus on giving him more positive attention.”
In public school, Mara says Evan was shuffled along year-to-year and didn’t receive the personalized attention he needed to improve his academic abilities. He would receive grades that were the bare minimum he needed to go onto the next grade and never engaged in the class material. But with the help of the In-Home Behavioral Services program’s therapists, Mara learned how to encourage her son to complete his school work and achieve higher grades. Now, her son, who once fled at the mere mention of homework, sits down with Mara each night to do his work without protest.
Evan also participates in BHN’s Therapeutic Mentoring program, which pairs children with a mentor who takes them into the community and helps them work on important skills. Mara says her son’s mentor works with him on his social skills and she has already seen a huge difference in her son’s interactions with others— “It doesn’t seem like much day-to-day, but when you look back, and you look at him now, the changes are huge.”
Both Mara and her son have benefitted immensely from the assistance and support of several of BHN’s programs. BHN’s In-Home Behavioral Services and Therapeutic Mentoring programs have allowed Mara to better manage the challenging behaviors that came with Evan’s ADHD and anxiety, and have given her son a completely new outlook on his education that is vastly different from his behavior only a year ago.
“I would recommend BHN to anyone in a heartbeat,” Mara says. “They’ve made a huge difference in Evan’s life.”
