Meerkat Counselling

As Meerkat, we provide assessment of your child face-to-face or online in the Netherlands, and if your child needs one-to-one support, we create a programme and offer you and your child counselling services.

Meerkat aims to contribute to the social, academic, cognitive and personal development of individuals; It aims to provide psycho-educational counselling to families through individual and group studies. It aims to provide awareness through one-to-one studies, presentations and workshops for various problems that families may experience.

Meerkat selects and applies child-specific and appropriate methods to improve the quality of life of children, young people and their families, especially to improve children’s social, communication and language skills, and develops the implementation skills of families. Social skills are the skills we use every day to interact and communicate with others. They include verbal and non-verbal communication such as speech, gesture, facial expression and body language. A person has strong social skills if they have the knowledge of how to behave in social situations. Especially children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder or in the risk group have difficulties in social skills.

Sedef Elif Akdan

ABA Therapist, Family Counselor

About Us

After completing my bachelor’s degree in psychology at Istanbul University, I had the opportunity to work with children and adults with the trainings and supervision I received from experts in the field. Then, I completed the Family Education and Counselling Master’s Programme at Dokuz Eylül University with the thesis ‘Investigation of Marital Adjustment, Coping Strategies and Social Support Perceptions of Parents of Children with Autism’.

After my master’s degree, I realized how important it is for the parents of children and young people with various differences to have limited support in the processes they go through, and how it affects them, their parental relationships, their other children, if any, and their children’s education; in fact, their whole lives, and I decided to turn to this field. For this reason, I started working at Tohum Autism Foundation, one of the representatives of the Applied Behavior Analysis-based education model in Turkey. I have worked in various foundations with the education model based on the principles of Applied Behavior Analysis and in İZOGEM, which I have been co-founder since 2020. During my work, I had the opportunity to receive supervision in all areas of Applied Behavior Analysis in order to maintain and expand the quality of education at international standards thanks to our cooperation with BBA Academy education director Prof. Dr. Binyamin Birkan. I took part in the preparation, execution and follow-up of individualized education programs; follow-up of mainstreaming education; skill acquisition and behavior reduction using scientifically based practices; on-the-job educator training and evaluation; planning and conducting family trainings. At the same time, I served as the training consultant of the Antalya Empathy ABA program in cooperation with BBA Academy.

I have worked on preparing, conducting and following individualised education programmes; following mainstreaming education; skill acquisition and behaviour reduction using scientifically based practices; on-the-job educator training and evaluation; planning and conducting family trainings. At the same time, I also served as the training consultant of the Antalya Empathy ABA program in cooperation with BBA Academy.

I participated in various national special education congresses and international panels and workshops as a speaker and took part in many projects, seminars and workshops. As of December 2023, I decided to establish Meerkat Counselling and share my professional experience with families in the Netherlands in Turkish and English to support and help children, young people and families growing up with developmental differences.