About Eric Schleifer, PhD
A psychologist for the messy years between high school and grown, and for the parents in it with them.
Licensed psychologist. More than 20 years with teens, college students, young adults, and their parents. Fully virtual, and a parent himself.
It's not the kid. It's the box.
Nearly every kid who has come to me over the last 20-plus years didn't come because something was wrong with them. They came because school, one way or another, wore them down. Too much work. A definition of success so narrow that a C isn't average anymore. A system built as if every kid learns the same way, when no two of them do.
Somewhere along the way we stopped building on what kids can do and started cataloguing what they can't, and the kids who don't fit get a diagnosis instead of a better fit. I've spent my career pushing the other way.
The part nobody prepares them for
We spend eighteen years getting kids ready for college: the grades, the applications, the résumé. And we spend almost none of it getting them ready for the part that's actually hard. Advocating for themselves. Handling a bad week without falling apart. Asking for help without feeling like it means something's wrong with them. Living independently when no one is watching.
So they get to the leap, the thing that's supposed to be the best years of their lives, and a lot of them quietly come undone. The anxiety. The low motivation. The "I've got it handled" when they clearly don't. The kid who moves home and can't seem to get going again.
The behavior is almost never the real problem.
Here's what I've learned in more than 20 years of this work: the behavior is almost never the real problem. Underneath the shutdown, the avoidance, the bad semester, there's usually a young person who never got taught how to sit with a hard feeling, so they tuck it away until it erupts, or until they just go numb.
My whole job is helping them face what they've been avoiding, at a pace that doesn't pretend they should already be fine. And I do it without treating any of them like there's something wrong with them, because there isn't. It has become far too common to diagnose the kids who don't fit the box, instead of asking whether the box was ever built for them.
Change isn't about fixing something broken. It's about getting more comfortable being yourself.
We're all in the muck together, trying to figure it out.
My clients tell me I bring laughter, zero judgment, and a lot of flexibility to even the hardest conversations.
I stay, even when you move.
One of the most important things I do is stay. Because I practice virtually and I'm authorized through PSYPACT, I can work with clients across the participating states. A student can start with me at home, keep going once they're away at school, and stay with me over breaks. No losing your therapist at the exact moment life gets complicated. That continuity is often the whole difference.
I work with parents, too.
I also work with parents directly, through Parent Guidance, because sometimes the person who needs support isn't the kid. It's you. Parenting is hard, even for a child psychologist, and I would know. I've said the wrong thing, lost my cool, and had to go back and repair it like everyone else.
Sometimes you don't need your child in therapy. You need someone honest to think it through with. Parent Guidance is for parents of kids of any age, from toddlers to twenty-somethings.
The professional version
- Licensed psychologist, New Jersey, license 35SI00479900
- PSYPACT: authorized to provide telehealth in participating states
- PhD, Adelphi University, 2005
- More than 20 years working with teens, college students, young adults, and families
- Fully virtual practice
- Writes about parenting, behavior, and the emotional side of growing up on the blog
- [Professional affiliations, additional training]
You're not broken. Let's just talk.
If this sounds like you, or like someone you love, I offer a free 15-minute consultation. No pressure, no hard sell, and no need to have the perfect explanation ready. I'll always give it to you straight.