Child & Family Psychology
Amy M. Smith Slep, Ph.D.
Professor, New York University
- Treating children's anxiety and behavior problems.
- Helping parents be confident.
- A small practice built for results.
If your child is struggling and home has started to feel harder than it should, you're in the right place.
I'm a professor at New York University, where I've spent more than three decades studying what actually changes children's behavior and lowers a family's stress. I now bring that research directly to a small number of families at a time: children from toddlerhood through age 12 who are dealing with anxiety or behavior challenges, and the parents raising them.
You won't get a generic protocol here, but you will get evidence-based treatment. You'll get a plan built on the best available evidence, matched to what's actually happening in your family, with progress measured along the way so we both know whether it's working.
Payment
Fees & Insurance
I am an out-of-network provider and do not bill insurance directly. Payment is due at the time of each session. If you have out-of-network mental health benefits, I will provide a superbill, an itemized receipt that you can submit to your insurance company for potential reimbursement. I'd encourage you to contact your insurance provider in advance to ask about your out-of-network benefits, deductible, and reimbursement process.
The initial consultation includes reviewing the information you provide online, plus an hour-long session. The fee for the initial consultation is $650. All other sessions are $450 for a 45-minute session. Most families reach their goals in 12–20 sessions.
Start here
If parenting feels overwhelming, I can help.
I run a very small practice, with limited openings.
You don't need to have it figured out before you reach out, and you don't need to arrive with the right words. Send me a brief note with your child's age and a sentence or two about what's going on, and I'll follow up personally.
Request a consultation
Review fees
Please do not include urgent or emergency information in your first message. If you need help now, call 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or Suffolk County DASH at 631-952-3333, both available 24 hours. For immediate danger, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room.
Please note: standard email is not a secure or HIPAA-compliant method of communication. Do not include your child's diagnosis, symptoms, or other protected health information in your initial message; a brief note with your child's age and general reason for reaching out is all that's needed.
We can help
Wherever you're starting from.
Parenting a child who is anxious, explosive, or immovable is exhausting in a way that's hard to explain to people who haven't lived it. Mornings and bedtimes become something you brace for. You find yourself managing the day around your child's reactions. You and your partner may not agree on what to do, and you may feel quietly judged: by family, by school, sometimes by yourself.
None of that means you are doing this wrong. It usually means something in the pattern hasn't been identified yet.
Maybe this is the first time you've reached out to anyone, and you're not sure what to expect. Or maybe you've already tried a parenting book, advice from your pediatrician, or a previous therapist, and what's stayed with you is the discouragement that nothing really changed.
I see a lot of families in that second group. When good-faith efforts haven't worked, it's rarely because the family didn't try hard enough. It's usually because the plan wasn't matched to what was actually driving the problem. That's why we start by understanding the specific pattern in your home.
How the practice can help
Practical help for the moments that feel hardest.
Every family I work with is dealing with something specific: a child who melts down over transitions, a kindergartener who can't separate at drop-off, a ten-year-old whose anxiety has started shaping the whole household's routines. We start with understanding your family's specific pattern, then build a plan around it.
You're the expert on your child, but the strategies that used to work have stopped working. We'll figure out what's maintaining the current pattern, and what to do differently.
From separation anxiety and school refusal to defiance and meltdowns, we will work together, using approaches scientifically proven to change these patterns.
Sibling fights, mealtime battles, bedtime standoffs: the friction and stress that wear a family down can be understood and changed. We will do that together.
The goal isn't just calmer weeks. It's a family that has its own tools once our work together is done.
About Dr. Slep
Research-grounded care, not guesswork.
I'm a Professor at New York University, where I co-founded and co-direct the Family Translational Research Group. For more than three decades my research has focused on the questions that bring families to my door: why children's anxiety and behavior problems take hold, what keeps them in place, and what actually shifts them.
That work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Defense, and it has shaped how these problems are defined and treated internationally, including the World Health Organization's ICD-11 criteria for child maltreatment.
Because of decades of research collaboration across the field, I have working relationships with developers of the major evidence-based treatments for child anxiety and behavior problems, which means your family's treatment isn't limited to any single program's playbook. It draws on the best current evidence across all of them.
And as a parent myself, I know these challenges from both sides of the room.
Approach
How we'll work together.
Three things make this practice different from most: we start with real assessment, the treatment comes from evidence rather than instinct, and we measure whether it's working.
We start before our first session. Before we meet, I'll ask you to complete a set of validated questionnaires online, the same standardized measures used in published research. That does two things. It means I arrive at our first conversation already understanding a great deal about your child and your family, so we spend that hour on you rather than on paperwork. And it gives us a clear baseline, so that later we can tell objectively how far things have moved as we progress.
A plan built on evidence, not instinct. Together we identify the specific pattern maintaining the problem in your home, and I build a plan around it, drawing on the treatments with the strongest research support for children's behavior problems and anxiety, including Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), Triple P, Parent Management Training, SPACE, and Independence Therapy.
I'm not certified in one program and obligated to sell it to you. Because I've worked alongside the researchers who developed these treatments, I can draw on whichever elements fit your child, rather than fitting your child to a program.
Progress you can actually see. Most therapy relies on clinical impression, a sense that things feel better. I re-administer the same standardized measures as we go, so we can both see whether things are genuinely improving, not just whether a given week went well.
If the data show we're not getting where we hoped, we change course quickly rather than continuing on instinct. This is also how we know when you're done: the goal is a family with its own tools, not an open-ended standing appointment (although you are always welcome to come back for a “booster”).
Direct access, start to finish. Because I work with only a few families at a time, you work with me throughout. No trainees, no hand-offs.
Research lens
Research Lens
My clinical approach isn't borrowed from someone else's program. It comes directly from over three decades of my own peer-reviewed research on parent-child conflict, family conflict prevention, and children's behavioral and emotional development.
Parenting challenges
Parent-child conflict
Evidence-based practice
Child resilience
Skill building
Stress reduction