Today we’d like to introduce you to Evangeline Bauer.
Hi Evangeline, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself
Come Play, STL was created to give children and families a better, well-rounded approach to pediatric mental health by bringing together both behavioral health and medical services. We believe utilizing a multidisciplinary team of professionals is crucial in working towards the best possible outcome for the child and streamlining therapies for the parents. Come Play, STL opened its doors in 2017 with one Play Therapist, one Occupational Therapist, and one Psychological Evaluator. Since then, we have grown to a team of 14 members and are still expanding!
Come Play, STL is located in a beautiful space in South City St. Louis. Our clinic is designed to make children and their families feel comfortable in our space. Kids like it so much they often express wishing they could “come to Come Play every day!” The rock-climbing wall, treehouse, sand tray, and swings are some of our clients’ favorite therapeutic equipment and make coming to therapy fun. Because play is children’s primary form of communication, clinicians engage clients in games and activities as a way to learn about their feelings, thoughts, and concerns. By making therapy fun, clinicians are able to keep clients engaged and make progress on their goals.
As a team, we value meeting each child’s unique needs. We do this by consulting with caregivers, completing assessments prior to treatment, and tailoring therapy goals to each child. Parental involvement is an important part of our therapeutic process and we strive to provide parents with the tools and the confidence to help their children use newly learned skills at school, at home, and everywhere in between. As clients begin making progress on their goals, we adjust treatment to maintain those gains and plan for graduating from therapy. However, we believe “once a client, always a client.” We understand that there can be hiccups in developmental growth, and unforeseeable life changes may come along, causing a client to need a “check-up”. Therefore, we are here to serve clients in those moments whether a child needs to meet with one of our clinicians, or simply to respond to an email or a phone call.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle-free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
While we strongly believe offering both behavioral health and medical services in one place is beneficial for children and their families, there have been challenges in bringing these two disciplines together. Training for clinicians under medical models is different than training under behavioral health models and it has been a learning process for our team to provide the best care possible for our clients while collaborating across disciplines. From these differences, we have all become more well-rounded clinicians by sharing the lens through which each of our specialties views clients’ behaviors and needs. Therefore, as a clinic, we are attuned to each child’s emotional, psychological, and sensory needs by integrating our multiple perspectives.
Caring for our clients took on a whole new meaning over the past year and a half. Shifting to providing Telehealth therapy services for children during much of the Covid-19 pandemic was both challenging and rewarding. Sometimes our therapists were left wondering where clients had run off to after clients pushed the tablets they were using for therapy (and school and playdates and everything else) under beds or couches in the middle of a session. Re-engaging a four-year-old who decides it’s time to play hide and seek while communicating over screens can be difficult. Telehealth required us to flex our creativity muscles even more than usual. Without access to our office of toys, crafts, and equipment we made therapy bags for our clients full of supplies for sessions including bubbles, play-doh, stickers, and more. Even though we are back to in-clinic therapy sessions, being able to support our clients and their families throughout this time of uncertainty has been an incredible honor. We are so proud of them for continuing to learn new skills, practice adaptability, and share their experiences with us as we all have navigated a global pandemic.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
At Come Play, STL, we wholeheartedly believe in a multidisciplinary approach to therapy. This means we include therapists from multiple disciplines (Speech-Language, Occupational Therapy, Play Therapy, etc.) to be involved in the therapy and care of children with the overall happiness, progress, and benefit of each child in mind. Collaborating with other therapists, professionals, teachers, and family during the therapeutic process, ensures that each child’s needs come first. Professionals in other fields have different strengths, they may approach issues in different ways. As the saying goes, “it takes a village,” and this can certainly be the case when it comes to therapy. Every child is different and it is critical for all therapists to work with experts from other disciplines to create a well-rounded, comprehensive, and individualized treatment plan.
We have served children of all ages, ranging from infants to age 17. The children we have treated, and whom we are currently treating, come to us with a variety of challenges. Our experienced clinicians offer help for a variety of challenges, including Anxiety, Bipolar, Sensory Processing Disorder, Depression, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), struggles with attachment, a challenging transition in life, or various learning disabilities. Although we began as a primarily pediatric therapy center in order to serve families as a whole, we have now expanded our services to include adult Occupational Therapy, as well as, Couples and Parenting Therapy.
Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?
I have always known I wanted to work with kids. Even as young as two or three years old I remember wanting to help take care of other children. My parents tell stories of how I would never actually eat dinner when we went out to restaurants because I would be too busy watching all the other people. I have always been interested in observing others’ actions and interactions because I find people fascinating! In high school, I was frequently a confidant for friends and acquaintances who needed an empathic listening ear and compassionate response. Because of these experiences growing up, I pursued social work in college to study and as my future career. After becoming a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) and working in the field for some time, I saw a need for more of a team approach to helping children. Input from those outside the scope of social work, in addition to my own knowledge, is incredibly valuable in providing the best care possible. This realization motivated me to start Come Play, STL as a way to build a team equipped to address a child’s needs from both a behavioral health and medical perspective. As we began sharing about what we were doing on social media, people from other cities began commenting how they wish there was something like Come Play, STL in their city. It is my dream to expand Come Play to other cities and be able to offer our integrated approach to many other children and families.
Contact Info:
- Email: info@comeplaystl.com
- Website: https://www.comeplaystl.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/comeplaystl/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/comeplaystl
