Today we’d like to introduce you to Nina Essel.
Hi Nina, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My path to Balanced Kids has really been a combination of my professional experience and my own experience as a parent. I’m a licensed clinical social worker and educator, and I spent more than a decade working in schools supporting children, families, and teachers. Over the years, I kept seeing the same pattern: when a child was struggling behaviorally, the adults around them often wanted to know, “How do we stop this behavior?” But the more important question was usually, “What is this behavior communicating, and what does this child need in order to do well?”
That perspective became the foundation for Balanced Kids.
I started Balanced Kids to give families and educators practical, relationship-centered tools for understanding behavior and responding in ways that actually help children build skills. What began primarily as parent coaching has grown into a broader training and consulting practice. Today, I work one-on-one with families and partner with schools and youth-serving organizations to provide professional development, consultation, and implementation support.
My work sits at the intersection of mental health, education, and parenting, which is exactly where I feel most at home. I’m especially passionate about helping adults move away from seeing challenging behavior as something to simply control and toward understanding behavior as communication. When we change the way adults understand and respond to kids, we can change the entire environment around them—and that is really what continues to drive the work I do today.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It definitely hasn’t always been a smooth road. Building a business while also working, raising three kids, and managing all of the responsibilities that come with family life has required a lot of flexibility. There have been plenty of moments when I’ve had to figure things out as I went—everything from learning the business side of running a practice to deciding where to focus my time and energy as Balanced Kids has grown.
One of the biggest challenges has been learning to trust the evolution of the business. I started with a strong focus on parent coaching, but over time, the professional development and consulting side grew significantly. Schools and organizations began reaching out for training, coaching, and support with challenging behavior, trauma-informed practices, and school-wide systems. Allowing the business to shift and expand meant letting go of the idea that I had to follow one specific path.
There is also a constant balancing act when your work is deeply personal to you. I care a lot about the families, educators, and organizations I work with, and learning how to maintain boundaries while still providing meaningful, responsive support has been an ongoing process.
But the challenges have also helped clarify what I want Balanced Kids to be. I’ve learned to focus less on doing everything and more on doing the work where I can have the greatest impact—helping the adults who support children feel more confident, capable, and connected.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Balanced Kids is a parent coaching, training, and consulting practice focused on helping adults better understand children’s behavior and respond in ways that build connection, skills, and long-term change.
At the heart of everything I do is the belief that behavior is communication. Instead of simply asking, “How do we stop this behavior?” I help parents, educators, and professionals look underneath it—at what a child may be communicating, what skills they may be missing, and what support they need in order to be successful.
I work one-on-one with families through parent coaching and also partner with schools and youth-serving organizations through professional development, consultation, and on-the-ground coaching. My areas of focus include challenging behavior, classroom management, trauma-informed practice, emotional regulation, neurodiversity, school avoidance, de-escalation, and building supportive school-wide behavior systems.
What sets Balanced Kids apart is that my work brings together both the clinical and educational worlds. As a licensed clinical social worker with a background in special and general education and more than a decade of experience working in schools, I understand both child development and mental health as well as the realities of classrooms, families, and school systems. I’m very focused on making sure the strategies I teach are not just theoretically sound, but practical enough to actually use in real life.
I’m especially proud that Balanced Kids has grown largely through relationships, referrals, and word of mouth. Families recommend me to other families, and schools and organizations invite me back because the work feels relevant and usable. To me, that is the best reflection of the brand I’ve worked to build.
Ultimately, I want people to know that Balanced Kids is not about “fixing” kids. It is about helping the adults around them understand them better, respond more effectively, and create environments where both children and adults can thrive.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
I don’t think of myself as a huge risk-taker by nature, but starting and growing Balanced Kids has definitely required me to become more comfortable with uncertainty.
One of the biggest risks was stepping outside of a traditional career path and building something of my own. Working in schools gave me structure, predictability, and a very clearly defined role. Running a business is the opposite in many ways. You have to be willing to put yourself out there, try things that may not work, make decisions without always knowing the outcome, and trust that you can adjust along the way.
As the business has grown, I’ve also had to take risks around saying yes to opportunities before I felt completely “ready.” Expanding from primarily parent coaching into professional development and consulting meant trusting that my experience and perspective had value on a larger scale. Some of the opportunities that have helped Balanced Kids grow the most came from being willing to step into a room, teach something I cared deeply about, and see where it led.
At the same time, I don’t believe risk has to mean being reckless. I tend to think of it as calculated discomfort. I ask myself whether an opportunity aligns with my values, whether it moves the business in the direction I want it to go, and whether the potential growth is worth the uncertainty. If the answer is yes, I’ve learned that feeling a little nervous is not necessarily a reason to say no.
For me, growth has often happened just outside of what felt comfortable. I’ve become much more willing to trust myself, take the opportunity, and figure out the next step as I go.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://balancedkidsnj.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/balancedkids/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/balancedkidsnj
