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What to Know About Your Child’s Stay

Accommodations and Items to Bring

Your child will have a private bedroom and bathroom. To make your child’s stay as comfortable as possible, we recommend bringing the following items:

  • Two to three changes of everyday clothes: socks, underwear, pullover shirts, pants, sleepwear, and athletic shoes without laces are recommended. Please do not bring any clothes with drawstrings; any drawstrings will be removed. We recommend elastic waistbands, pants without pockets, and sweatshirts without hoods. Belts are not permitted on the unit. Clothing will be initialed on the tags of clothes.

    • We provide laundry services to ensure your child has clean clothing.

  • Toiletries: toothpaste, toothbrush, shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, and hairbrush

    • We provide all of these items if you do not bring these from home.

  • A favorite stuffed animal, pillow, and/or blanket

      • Please refrain from bringing in any sentimental items; we would hate for them to be lost or damaged.

Some items cannot be kept in your child’s room; whenever this is the case, we will keep these items in a secure personal cubby within the nurse’s station, and they will be available whenever your child needs them.

Please leave the following items at home:

  • Money

  • Cell phones

  • Handheld video games

  • MP3 players/iPods

  • Board games

  • Jewelry

  • Balls

  • Candy and gum

  • Soda

  • Outside food

  • Toy

Schoolwork

When your child is staying on our inpatient unit, treatment is our biggest priority: each day is highly structured, and we want children to be focused on participating in our therapeutic offerings.

Time for schoolwork is not built in to the daily schedule; we provide back-to-school forms to help you work with your child’s school to excuse them for the days and the work missed. If you feel it is imperative they stay up-to-date on their schoolwork, please use visiting time for the completion of schoolwork.

Crisis Intervention

Any kind of violence, real or pretend, including verbal threats, is not accepted on the unit. We do not allow aggression, self-injurious behaviors, or inappropriate sexual behavior. In the event that any of these behaviors occurs, staff intervention may be necessary.

We have several ‘calming boxes’ on the unit that children can use when they are feeling agitated, angry, or sad; these calming boxes contain items like stress balls, PlayDoh, Legos, coloring books, and puzzles. In addition, we have a sensory room on the unit that children can use when they need to calm down. It is a quiet, interactive, safe space that is designed to help children relax.

Our staff are highly trained in verbal de-escalation. Physical de-escalation strategies will only be used when absolutely necessary.