We Specialize In
Parent
Education
Transforming Challenging Behavior
Child
Development
Understanding the Highly Sensitive Child
Education
Consulting
Supporting Student Needs
Dana Keiser, PhD
“Childhood is a sacred developmental period that must be protected and nurtured in our fast-paced, distracted society.”
- Dr. Dana Keiser
Dr. Dana Keiser has been supporting children, families, teachers, and administrators for over twenty years as an education consultant and child development specialist. Her practice draws from professional experience in both New York City and Chicago as an educator and researcher.
Dr. Keiser completed dual master’s degrees in early childhood education and special education from Bank Street College of Education and received her doctorate in child development from the Erikson Institute.
She believes that play, enriching environments, and relationships are the pillars of a healthy childhood. Her work helps families understand ways to bolster those pillars and create more balanced family structures.
Dr. Keiser has two wonderfully complex children of her own and finds parenting to be profound, challenging, and transformative.
This informs her understanding that parenthood requires practice, creativity, humility, self-reflection, patience, self-care, boundaries, and generosity.
She also believes that emotional support from friends, family, and professionals when needed is important in the quest for harmony in the household.
Parent Education
Transforming Challenging Behavior
Raising children is not easy, but positive discipline strategies can lead to more harmony in the home.
We help parents transform challenging behavior by facilitating an understanding of positive discipline and emotion coaching that can heal stressed relationships through positive connection.
We also work with parents to simplify and alter home environments for open ended play, and to transform daily schedules in order to better support child development.
Reflecting on and transforming our adult expectations and behavior in support of our children can have a significant impact on their success. Learning to identify and accept our own feelings so that we can tolerate our children’s feelings and provide guidance can ultimately help them better understand and regulate their emotions and behavior.
We Can Also Help:
Identify and manage developmental milestones (e.g. terrible twos, early childhood and egocentrism, first grade stomach aches)
Develop a playful approach to anxiety
Prepare for parenthood
Find the right match between child and school
Establish healthy relationships with technology
Negotiate sibling relationships
Synthesize popular parenting literature to help you find your own approach
- Child Development
Understanding & Supporting The Highly Sensitive Child
Small behavioral shifts can play a monumental role in creating a healthier & happier life.
Dana Keiser draws from the research of Dr. Elaine Aron in her understanding of the power of temperament on child behavior, and the healing role that relationships and home environments can play for the highly sensitive child (HSC).
While all children thrive in supportive environments, highly sensitive children in particular are highly attuned. They're deep processors and easily become over-stimulated which can lead to challenging behavior.
Highly sensitive children tend to have an increased reaction to emotional and sensory stimuli while struggling to regulate emotions, but they often have special talents, profound empathy, and sophisticated mastery of verbal language too. Challenging behaviors that arise due to sensitivity are often misunderstood and misdiagnosed.
By maximizing quiet time in the home, slowing schedules, using positive discipline strategies, and truly listening to highly sensitive children, we can uncover their profound talents, deep feelings and empathy, and learn to embrace their sensitivity as a superpower.
We work with parents to develop a perspective about the role of temperament in their child's challenges and then look for ways to improve environments and routines in order to create a more peaceful home life. We also help parents identify the influence their own temperamental traits have on relationships with their children.
As a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) herself, Dana has an intimate understanding of how overwhelming life can be for highly sensitive children.
Education Consulting
Supporting Student Needs
working with teachers and schools to understand student needs can lead to a better life both at home & at school.
Dana Keiser works with teachers and school administrators to adapt curriculum that supports student needs, and is available for classroom observations, teacher coaching, and staff development focused on Highly Sensitive Children.
She also helps with positive discipline as a teaching strategy, attachment/separation during school entry, and broadening pedagogical scope including lessons from Reggio Emilia, Rudolph Steiner, John Dewey, and Maria Montessori.
