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Hillside Way Family Support

Welcome!

We’re dedicated to supporting caregivers of children with special needs.

  • Do you have the desire to empower yourself to achieve yours and your family’s unique goals?

  • Are you ready to focus on improving your overall quality of life?

At Hillside Way Family Support, we partner with families of children living with special needs to achieve empowerment through invaluable support and resources.

We look forward to hearing how we can help.

Get in Touch

How We Help

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    Education

    Advocacy / Individual Education Plan (IEP) development & review

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    Community

    Therapy & activity recommendations / Benefits and entitlements advice

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    Family

    Coaching / Family dynamics / Self-advocacy / Asking for help

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Our Story

My name is Stephanie Camiel, a Certified Life Coach and Certified Special Needs Educational Advocate with a Masters in Counseling. I have three grown children, one of whom has significant ID and ASD. His accomplishments have inspired me to support other families facing similar circumstances.

Due to my own life experiences, I have first-hand knowledge of how to successfully advocate for a special needs child. I also understand the fears of the unknown - when your child is first diagnosed or at any new step in their development. Having navigated this personally, I appreciate the complex and emotional journey.

This journey can pose challenges. Not only must you investigate and comprehend all of the services available, but also manage your day-to-day home life and the rest of the strains upon your family dynamic.

With compassion and craft, we will work together to execute the logistical aspects of raising a child with special needs while uncovering your inner strength to overcome feelings of uncertainty and ambiguous grief.

Let’s discover the power of self-advocacy and self-care together, and ensure your goals for you and your family are achieved.

Welcome to Holland

By Emily Perl Kingsley

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability – to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It’s like this…

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.” “Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”

But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay. The important thing is they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guidebooks. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you never would have met. It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around…and you begin to notice Holland has windmills…and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy…and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say, “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away…because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss.

But…if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to go to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things…about Holland.

Schedule a 30-minute consultation, at no cost to you.

Reach out to share your story and ask any questions. We’re happy to help and look forward to getting started with you!

You can also email us directly at stephanie@hillsideway.com or call at (617) 297-7272.