Natalia Levy, PhD

I am a Licensed Psychologist with more than three decades of experience, working with children, adolescents, and adults. The center of my practice is children whose behavior has become more than their families can manage on their own (defiance, explosive outbursts, aggression, and refusal) and the parents working to turn it around, a great deal of it in the context of neurodivergence: ADHD, autism, and developmental differences. I see patients in person in Boca Raton and by telehealth across Florida, New York, and 40+ PSYPACT states.

Families usually find me at a hard moment, having tried everything they know and often feeling judged by everyone around them. What I offer is different: a warm, collaborative relationship and a plan that is genuinely evidence-based. For disruptive and defiant behavior, the most powerful intervention is frequently not therapy for the child alone but structured, skilled work with the parents, and I rely heavily on Parent Management Training, the most strongly evidence-based approach for oppositional behavior. My commitment has never changed: helping the people I treat build real insight into what is happening, develop concrete skills for responding to it, and create meaningful, lasting change.

This work very often sits alongside neurodivergence. Oppositional and disruptive behavior frequently rests on ADHD, autism, or developmental differences, and treating the behavior without understanding what is underneath it tends to fail. Much of my career has been spent in exactly this territory: I know how to tell a skills deficit from genuine defiance, and how to adapt behavioral intervention to the specific child in front of me rather than applying a generic template.

I served as Clinical Director of the Fay J. Lindner Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities, overseeing every aspect of a specialized Article 28 clinic while continuing to treat patients directly, and before that I spent fifteen years as Supervisor of the Community/Home-Based Program at Brookville Center for Children's Services, directing early intervention, preschool, and school-age services delivered in families' homes, where a child's behavior actually lives. I earned my PhD in School Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I remain a proud Tar Heel. School psychology is a discipline built around how children function within their families, classrooms, and the systems around them, and the lens behind everything I do.

What It Is Like to Work With Me

Warm and practical. I am not here to judge your parenting; I am here to hand you tools that work and coach you while you use them. Together we look at the specific moments in your week where things fall apart, understand what is actually happening in them, and change what happens next. Progress is measured in your real life: fewer battles, shorter meltdowns, and more of the child you know is in there. And while children and their parents are the core of my practice, three decades of clinical work have made me a broad and flexible clinician: I also work with adults, often around anxiety, depression, ADHD, and life transitions, with the same thoughtful, effective, and compassionate care I bring to every patient.