Philosophy

At Sandhill Center, we believe that healthy relationships early in life, that are based on trust and mutual caring, help form the foundation for a child’s future success.  The connections that we establish early in life create the template for how we make decisions, build relationships with others, and interact with the wider world.  This is why fostering healthy connections early on is so essential to a child’s present and future well-being. 

For children who have difficulty developing a healthy early attachment relationship with parents or caregivers, life may be problematic and painful. A lack of adequate attachment to a parent or caregiver, or a disruption in the attachment process may occur for several reasons.  Barriers to attachment include the following:  

• Challenging pre-birth and birth factors.
• Learning disabilities
• Physical handicaps
• The inconsistent conduct or lack of availability of primary caregivers
• Severe mental or physical trauma

If a child incurs any of these early-life experiences, he or she may develop a perception of the world where adults are seen as unpredictable, unreliable, and often a threat to their own survival. 

Children with attachment difficulties have developed neither trust in adult care, nor trust in adult guidance.  Subsequently, these children have severe difficulty internalizing their parents’ values and behavioral expectations, which is expressed when they interact with those around them.  Children with attachment disorders may display issues with control, distance themselves from others, and use tactics such as manipulation and emotional withdrawal in order that they meet their own needs. 

At Sandhill Center, we have developed a cutting-edge, all-encompassing residential treatment program to care for children coping with attachment disorders.  Unlike other programs, at Sandhill Center, we recognize that children with attachment issues often do not benefit from outpatient or formal therapy sessions.  As such, we feature a milieu approach to treatment, where our clinical staff is fully integrated into the daily living environment. 

The milieu approach to treatment allows children’s issues to be addressed the moment they arise.  Our highly qualified staff uses the milieu method to provide a powerful, experiential therapeutic process, directed at transforming behaviorally problematic situations into corrective emotional experiences. This integrated therapy methodology effectively precludes children from skirting their emotional and behavioral issues, and makes it difficult for them to manipulate or combat the therapeutic process.  The integration of a 24-hour a day. seven days a week milieu allows children to address emotional and behavioral issues with our staff on an “as-needed”  basis, rather than during just an hour or two of therapy a week, as is the case with many residential and out-care treatment programs. 

At Sandhill Center, we recognize that healthy family relationships act as the bedrock for normal child development.  As such, to buttress the therapeutic milieu, and steward effective transitions back into the home environment, Sandhill Center provides family therapy, supplemented with rigorous parental training sessions over the course of the entire treatment program.