There is something quietly radical about bearing witness to the full spectrum of a human life: not only the grief and rupture, but the longing, joy, ambivalence, and reimagining that often accompany transitions. In our clinical work, we have had the rare privilege of walking alongside individuals at every stage of the lifespan. From preschoolers naming big feelings with astonishing fluency to elders grappling with mortality, regret, or reinvention, each encounter reminds us that development does not end at adulthood, and emotional life does not expire at retirement.
At the Parents and Children Project, we are committed to providing therapy that honors the whole human arc. We do not believe that care should be siloed by age or that therapeutic relevance diminishes over time. Quite the opposite. Some of the most generative, resilient, and intimate therapeutic work emerges not at the beginning, but in the middle or near the end.
Our Lifespan Therapy Approach: Rooted in Compassionate Mental Health History
Our work draws from decades of direct clinical experience, but it also stands on the shoulders of institutions that attempted, in their time, to humanize care. One such place was The Brattleboro Retreat, where both Laura Kelloway, LCSW, and I (Elizabeth Wilkins McKee, LCSW) trained and worked. Founded in 1834 by Anna Hunt Marsh, the Retreat was part of a small but significant movement toward what was then called “moral treatment,” a philosophy influenced by Quaker beliefs that insisted those with mental illness deserved compassion, structure, and dignity rather than punishment or containment.
At a time when “asylums” were characterized by confinement and coercion, the Retreat introduced remarkably progressive elements: access to art and nature, family-style meals, physical movement, and creative expression. It was the first psychiatric hospital in the country to offer a gymnasium and one of the earliest to publish a patient-run newspaper. Even the construction of its grounds, open, walkable, and integrated with the Vermont landscape, reflected a belief that environment mattered. Healing required more than safety. It required beauty, rhythm, and connection.
Although the mental health field has undergone profound transformation since then, the foundational impulse at the Retreat — to see the whole person, to cultivate a therapeutic community, and to reject the reduction of individuals to diagnoses — continues to shape our work today.
How Our Therapy Practice Evolved: From Adult Mental Health to Child and Family Therapy
Both Laura and I began our clinical work in the late 1990s, at a time when the dominant therapeutic training models emphasized adult pathology — the study of mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders that primarily manifest in adulthood. This was, to be clear, an excellent foundation. It taught us how to listen, how to wait, how to build rapport without rushing toward resolution. But our curiosity and affinity for complexity soon pulled us toward children, families, and systems work.
We quickly realized that working with children required more than translating adult frameworks into smaller words. It required developmentally attuned approaches, creative engagement, humor, flexibility, and an understanding of parallel process. The child is rarely the sole “identified patient.” The work lives in the family, in the classroom, and in the unspoken griefs and generational legacies that accompany them.
In our years at The Brattleboro Retreat, particularly in the Child and Family Outpatient Services, we learned how to sit with multigenerational trauma, how to navigate school systems that were both overstretched and under resourced, and how to support clinicians, educators, and caregivers in the face of relentless demands. The work was often messy. It was always meaningful.
Since those early years, our scope has widened. The infants we once supported through bonding work, early regulation challenges, or perinatal transitions are now grown. Some have children of their own. The parents we met in the rawness of postpartum are navigating adolescence again, this time from the other side. Others are entering new life stages, facing retirement, grief, or unexpected reinvention.
We have not only witnessed individual development. We have witnessed generational evolution. And while not every therapeutic relationship spans decades, the continuity of our practice has allowed us to hold the long view. It reminds us again and again that therapy is not merely about crisis response. It is about capacity building. It is about walking with people long enough that they begin to pass what they have learned to the next generation.
Therapy for Children, Teens, Adults, and Seniors: What “All Ages” Looks Like in Practice
When people ask whether we specialize in children or adults, our answer is both — and everything in between. We support:
- Four-year-olds struggling with separation at preschool
- Adolescents navigating identity, neurodivergence, and friendship ruptures
- Adults facing fertility challenges, parenting burnout, or midlife existential questioning
- Older adults living with chronic illness, caregiver fatigue, or end-of-life grief
Each life phase brings distinct psychological tasks. Each deserves an approach that is not only clinically sound but developmentally relevant. We are committed to meeting people where they are, whether that means engaging through play, using visual scaffolding for executive functioning, or creating space for spiritual reflection and legacy work in older adulthood.
What “Cradle to Grave” Therapy Really Means: Lifelong Mental Health Support
The phrase “cradle to grave” is often used in health care to indicate continuity. For us, it also signals reverence for beginnings and endings, and for the often disorienting in-between. It is easy to romanticize early childhood as the site of deepest vulnerability. In truth, that vulnerability revisits us throughout life: when a relationship ends, when a parent dies, when our body stops cooperating, or when the scaffolding we built our identity upon begins to shift.
Personally, my time working in hospice care profoundly shaped how I understand the therapeutic relationship. There is no hierarchy of pain. The loss of a future imagined can be as profound as the loss of a life. Sometimes the best thing we offer as clinicians is not advice or insight, but presence.
Therapy for All Identities
Just as we do not limit care to one developmental phase, we do not restrict it to one kind of identity. Therapy must be expansive enough to hold the richness of human variation. That includes:
- Neurodivergent individuals across the lifespan
- LGBTQIA+ clients navigating gender, orientation, family, and social location
- BIPOC individuals seeking culturally responsive care
- Parents, chosen family members, and those living outside normative family structures
- Anyone whose experience resists tidy categorization
We recognize that identity shapes how one experiences systems, relationships, and even therapy itself. Our work is informed by intersectionality, and we aim to create spaces where people are not asked to educate us before they are allowed to heal.
Family-Centered Therapy with Collaborative Care and Clinical Integrity
At The Parents and Children Project, we operate not as siloed providers but as collaborators. When therapeutically appropriate and with consent secured, we may support multiple members of the same family, offering coordinated care that reflects the relational realities of life. This work is done with clinical rigor, ethical clarity, and a respect for boundaries that allows for containment and growth.
Our long professional partnership means that Laura and I know each other’s clinical instincts, areas of expertise, and styles. We trust one another. That trust allows us to support family systems with coherence, continuity, and flexibility.
Why Therapy Matters at Every Life Stage — And How We Support You
Therapy is not a service for a season. It is a relationship that, when done well, evolves alongside the person it serves. It is relevant when you are five and feeling left out on the playground, and when you are fifty-five and reckoning with a life you did not expect. It is relevant when you are navigating a diagnosis, a divorce, a death, or simply a quiet dissatisfaction that refuses to be ignored.
Our work is grounded in experience, humility, and a clinical ethic that centers attunement over algorithms. We are honored to do this work and grateful for the clients who trust us with their stories.
We are here cradle to grave.
