At Assembly, we help you, the parent or caregiver, lead positive change in your child’s life. Our approach is simple: when parents are supported to make small, meaningful adjustments at home, children thrive. We take a holistic and functional approach, looking beneath behaviours to understand the emotional and cognitive processes that may make school, friendships, or home life difficult. Based on your child’s unique strengths and challenges, our clinicians recommend practical strategies and activities for you to use at home, guiding you as your child develops new skills.

Assembly was developed by a multidisciplinary team of clinical psychologists, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, and psychiatrists. Our programmes are clinically informed and evidence-based, drawing on approaches such as CBT, DBT, Play Therapy, and Parent–Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), all supervised by a Consultant Clinical Psychologist with over 30 years of NHS experience.

We don’t typically work directly with your child, instead, we work with you to make lasting changes at home. Many of the activities involve your child, but you’ll be leading them. This model is ideal for children who aren’t ready for therapy or have already completed it. While therapy might last an hour a week, your influence as a parent is daily and ongoing — and that’s where real progress happens.

You’ll start by completing the Assembly Profiling Tool, a holistic questionnaire that helps us understand your child’s development and needs. From there, our clinicians design a personalised programme of practical, skill-building modules that fit into everyday family life. As you apply these at home, your child gradually builds confidence, self-regulation, and independence, and you’ll see calmer, more connected days together.

Our current programmes include:
The Emotional Regulation Programme (six modules over 12 weeks) helps you support your child’s big emotions with in-the-moment strategies and longer-term emotional skills.
The Self-Esteem Programme helps you build a strength-based, inclusive home environment that boosts your child’s confidence, resilience, and sense of identity.

Parents are the most important agents of change in a child’s life. You know your child best and spend the most time with them, so when you learn and use evidence-based strategies at home, children tend to improve faster and the results last longer (Carruthers et al., 2023; Pickles et al., 2016).

That’s why Assembly works through parents rather than directly with the child, we work with you to make constructive changes at home. The idea is simple: when parents adjust their approach and responses, children naturally adapt and progress over time (Thirlwall et al., 2013; Creswell et al., 2017).

A parent-led approach isn’t a “second-best” option, it’s an evidence-based model used across many areas of child development. Research shows that when parents are trained and supported by clinicians, children make sustained gains in emotional regulation, social communication, and behaviour (Daley et al., 2018; Schreibman et al., 2015). These improvements last because they happen through the most consistent and influential relationship a child has, their relationship with you.

Even if your child isn’t ready to engage in therapy, you are not alone. Assembly gives you the tools, knowledge, and confidence to create a nurturing environment where your child can thrive. By empowering parents to take the lead, we break out of unhelpful patterns and create lasting, positive change for the whole family.

Our Emotional Regulation Programme is designed to help you support your child through intense emotions and build a calmer, more understanding home environment. It provides both immediate strategies and long-term exercises to manage emotional outbursts. In the moment when your child is experiencing acute dysregulation (for example, a meltdown or tantrum), you will learn techniques to help them de-escalate and feel understood. Over the longer term, you’ll practice skill-building activities with your child to improve their ability to recognize and handle their emotions constructively.

The programme consists of six modules (with roughly 12 weeks of guided support from an Assembly clinician). New modules are made available each week, but you can complete them at your own pace. Each module introduces new activities for you and your child, targeting themes such as: identifying and naming emotions, understanding your child’s sensory triggers and communication style, and co-regulation (learning how you can calm down together). As you progress, you’ll be equipped to replace reactive or accommodating responses with more supportive ones, so that over time your child becomes better at self-regulation and the frequency/intensity of emotional outbursts is reduced. The end goal is to empower your child with emotional tools and reduce stress for the whole family.