Karen A. Fleiss, PsyD

I have always been enchanted by children and their ability to simply “be” in the world, just as they are. I find them to be extraordinarily resilient, even under the most serious of circumstances.

I wanted to further understand child development, parental roles, nature versus nurture, and the influence of the school environment on a child’s growth. More broadly, I wanted to know more about how childhood disorders emerge. For these reasons, I decided to leave my first career in a corporate job to pursue child clinical psychology, a profession I found to be satisfying and fulfilling.

I am the clinical director of NYU Langone’s Child Study Center—Long Island, where my team and I provide families with parent–child interaction therapy, school consultation, individual and family therapy, social skills training groups, medications for a wide variety of clinical disorders, and neuropsychological testing.

For the past 17 years, I have also been the director of the Child Study Center’s Summer Program for Kids, an evidence-based day camp for children 7 to 11 years old who have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and behavior disorders.

I was also the site coordinator of a landmark multisite clinical trial—the Multimodal Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (MTA) study—designed to determine the most effective treatments for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Treatment must include the parents if we are to best help the child. If a child is struggling in school, the teacher’s input and involvement are also important to successful treatment. The key is regular discussions among all professionals caring for the child, allowing us to monitor progress and symptoms from various angles.