How will an assessment help?

A comprehensive assessment offers a clear and compassionate understanding of your child’s strengths and challenges. It helps us see the full picture—how they think, feel, and interact with the world. With this information, we can work together to plan the best path forward, supporting their growth and helping them reach their potential.

• Clarify Diagnoses
  We can determine whether ADHD, autism, depression, or anxiety is affecting your child, so you can make informed decisions about treatment and support.

• Build Empathy and Understanding
  We’ll help you see your child’s struggles and differences more clearly, so you can respond more flexibly and compassionately.

• Highlight Strengths and Potential
  We’ll identify what your child does well—so you can nurture their confidence and build on their unique talents.

• Connect the Dots
  We’ll organize information from teachers, parents, and professionals to provide a clear, integrated picture of your child’s experience.

• Understand Their World
  We’ll explore how your child functions at home, in school, and in the community, so you can better understand their needs in each setting.

• Support Emotional Growth
  We’ll help identify the emotional struggles your child faces, so you can feel more confident in supporting them—and help them use their feelings to connect more deeply with others.

• Learn How They Cope
  We’ll explore how your child manages stress and big emotions, so you can help them find healthier ways to navigate challenges.

• See the Whole Child
  We’ll help you build a more detailed, specific understanding of your child’s personality and needs—so you can choose strategies, activities, and supports that truly fit them.

• Help Them Feel Seen and Valued
  When children feel truly seen and understood, it builds trust—both in their relationship with you and in themselves—and creates a foundation for meaningful growth and resilience.

Your Child’s Developmental Journey

With development, come many struggles. Developing requires doing lots of new things - oftentimes things we’ve never done before. When it goes well, people take risks to try new things and persist through the inevitable setbacks. Children’s development is no different. Parents understand this in a very deep way because they are with their child at each new developmental step and challenge. But what can a parent do when they see their child struggle mightily and still not move forward - or, worse, when the child seems to have lost faith in themselves and their future?

What Assessments Usually Give

This journey usually begins with questions as the parent tries to understand what is giving their child trouble. These questions may show up as questions about diagnoses:

• Does my child have a learning disability? 

• Do they have ADHD? 

• Are they autistic? 

• Is my child experiencing depression or anxiety? 

What Tide Pools Adds

And while these diagnostic categories are important - they don’t tell the whole story. Where other assessments focus on diagnosis, recommendations, and strengths, we look these and more.

• Seeing the Whole Picture
  Too often, narrowly focused diagnostic assessments lead to a cycle of more testing—each one searching for the next "answer." While this short-term problem-solution approach can feel reassuring, it often misses the bigger picture. We believe that understanding the full pattern of a child’s development—including emotional, relational, and cognitive factors—leads to more meaningful insights, reduces unnecessary testing, and, most importantly, prevents the loss of precious time.

• Understanding the Child as a Whole Person
  Many assessments emphasize labels or divide children into strengths and differences. But children are more than a set of scores or checklists. Our approach considers the broader context—how a child thinks, feels, relates, and grows—so that any recommendations are grounded in a deeper understanding of who they are and what they need.

• Empathy for the Child’s Inner World
  Most assessments provide little information about how a child sees the world or experiences relationships. We believe this matters deeply. Our process explores a child’s emotional life, personality, and relational patterns to better understand what drives them—what worries them, what gives them meaning, and what might help them thrive.

• Focusing on What Truly Drives Growth
  Traditional assessments often focus on surface-level behaviors. While coaching specific executive functioning skills identified as a concern in an assessment, for example, may help in the short term, we know that lasting change comes from deeper shifts—reducing anxiety or depression, nurturing self-confidence, building emotional resilience, and helping a child connect with what brings them alive. These core dynamics shape success in every part of life.

A quality assessment will look at all of these questions because a quality assessment will offer more than diagnosis - it will offer insight that will set the stage for new ways of thinking about a person and new opportunities for growth and flourishing.

An Example of Our Work

How does an assessment do this? Download the story of Xander to learn more…