Carol Smaldino is a certified social worker who has been in private practice for over 25 years. Before her Masters degree, she worked for the Bureau of Child Welfare with unmarried mothers for 3 years. She also worked at Roosevelt Hospital for a year and a summer as part of both the Child and Youth Project (mostly with non-English speaking Hispanic families) and the Emergency Room as a summer social worker.
After attending the Wurzweiler School of Social Work, connected with Yeshiva University, she worked for five years in a residential treatment center with very disturbed children, adolescents, families, and—as she came to realize— a truly “batty” administration. After a few years of doing therapy and supervision for a mental health clinic, she went out into the world of private practice.
Carol is known for her creativity, honesty, humor and deep sensitivity to her patients and to those who seek her help. She is known also for her ability and willingness to challenge them in their growth, and her willingness to challenge herself in the process. Carol has told almost everyone she knows that her patients are among her favorite people because they for the most part are or become open to their own (and her own) intense and unembellished honesty.
Carol published four clinical papers after which she came to a decision to begin writing for a wider audience. Her writing style had always bordered on the earthy and dramatic and in addition she identified at least as much with patients as she did with clinicians. Carol’s intention was always to broaden her work and to speak with professionals and nonprofessionals alike.
Carol went on to write a book on the emotional aspects of child and parent development in order to help others feel less lonely than she had been in her own early phases of being a mother. Entitled In the Midst of Parenting: A Look at the Real Dramas and Dilemmas (Brooklyn Girl Books, 2000), her book can be viewed at www.growingreal.com, and ordered directly through Carol, who can be reached from her contact page. On that site there is a fuller description of the book, with chapter titles and in the book’s introduction there is a full explanation of Carol’s motives for the book and her own experiences of early parenthood.
Carol feels a deep appreciation for the supportive role of her family, even in their (and her) challenges and intensity of moods, phases, and styles. Her children, in terms of temperament, humor, creativity, passions and irreverence - have gone way outside the box. In testing her patience and stretching her own thinking and capacity to tolerate her own individuality with flaws and all, Paul and Emma have often been her best teachers. She has learned to stand up to them when their thinking styles rush ahead of hers. And as for Lino - the husband who came to America for her- he is the special one with whom she has experienced many of the peaks and valleys of marriage. She can admit her gratitude to him for his appreciation of her thinking and writing styles, much better now that she is more open to appreciate her own.
Carol’s hobbies include water aerobics, Pilates, tennis and travel- both internal and external. She never forgets that, as she puts it: “Appetite is a privilege” so her lifestyle includes an appreciation of wonderful food and wine- food going from pizza to chocolate. As such she recommends all dieting include a love of food and a lack of severe deprivation. Lastly she is grateful to the Italian language, country and people for the availability of generosity of spirit, conversation, beauty and appetites.
Carol is presently working on a manuscript entitled “Visions of Clarity of a Dancing Mind”. |
