About Dr. Sandra Munoz, Psy.D., LMHC

About Sandra Munoz, Psy.D., LMHC

I have spent 25 years learning how families heal. I learned the most from my own.

What you'll read here is the longer version of that story — the work, the credentials, the moments that shaped how I do this. But if you're short on time, the short version is this: I'm a clinician who became a builder, a builder who became an author, and an author who never stopped being a mother. Every chapter shapes the next.

The True Story Behind Fiddleswerth

Fiddleswerth was born long before he ever appeared in a book.

When my daughter was two years old, I invented a magical elf who lived on the moon. He left her notes. He sent her dreams. He brought small surprises into ordinary days. He was our private language for love — a small game between mother and child that I thought would last only a season.

It didn't last a season. It lasted a lifetime.

When my daughter was five, her father — my first husband — passed away. In a season of grief that nothing in my training had prepared me for as a mother, Fiddleswerth became something else. He became the bridge between what had been and what was. Together, my daughter and I would look up at the night sky. I would tell her stories about Fiddleswerth watching over her from the moon, and about her father becoming a special star above. We pointed at the brightest one. We whispered goodnight to the moon. Some nights, that was all we could do. Some nights, it was enough.

Those stories helped my daughter process grief in a way that felt safe, loving, and age-appropriate — and they taught me something I have carried into every piece of work I have done since: that imagination is not the opposite of healing. It is one of the oldest forms of it.

Over the years, Fiddleswerth stayed with us. He visited during holidays. He helped Santa keep track of who had been kind that year. He kept showing up — not because we needed him to, but because he had become part of who we were. My daughter is twenty-one now, and she still cherishes him.

It was my husband, Bruce, who eventually said the thing I had not let myself say: this belongs to more families than ours. He encouraged me to share Fiddleswerth — to take a private tradition and turn it into something that could bring comfort, confidence, and a little bit of magic to children everywhere.

That is what the Fiddleswerth® series became. The story that started in a private moment between a mother and her two-year-old, that became a lifeline at five, is now a series of books designed for any child who needs a small magical place to return to on the days they need it most.

That is also why everything I write now begins with the same belief: the right story, at the right moment, can change everything.

Professional Journey & Leadership

My career has been built in the spaces where families are most vulnerable.

For eight years, I worked directly with children battling cancer and their families. I sat with them from the day of diagnosis through treatment, celebrated the milestones when chemotherapy ended, and walked beside families through end-of-life journeys when there was nothing left to do but be there. Those years taught me what no textbook ever could — that family resilience is real, that it is fragile, and that the right support at the right moment changes what families are able to carry.

When I began noticing the same unmet needs in families with premature infants — the isolation, the medical complexity, the grief layered on top of love — I founded the TEACUP Preemie Program through The Children's Healing Institute. Since 2008, TEACUP has offered emotional support, education, and connection to families navigating Neonatal Intensive Care Units across the country. What started as a local initiative has grown into a nationwide network of community partnerships and an online support community for NICU families.

Today, I serve as CEO of The Children's Healing Institute — a role I stepped into within three months of joining the organization. My work now is at the systems level: shaping organizational strategy, building sustainable programs, and ensuring that the families we serve will still have us a decade from now. My team delivers the direct services. My job is to make sure they can keep doing it.

Across all of it — twenty-five years of work — one thing has held steady. Families do not need to be fixed. They need to be held while they find their way back to themselves. That is the work. That is what every program, every book, and every tool I've built is designed to do.

A Personal Commitment to Child Safety

My dedication to keeping children safe did not start in graduate school. It started with a phone call.

I was twenty-two years old when a close family friend lost their young son. He had drowned in their backyard pool — the kind of accident that is over before anyone realizes it has begun, the kind that should never happen and happens far too often.

I could not stop thinking about it. About the seconds. About how easily it could have been prevented. About the family that would never be the same.

That grief became motivation. I designed a child safety device called the Baby Pool Guard, intended to prevent the exact kind of drowning that had taken our friend's child. I received a U.S. patent for it at age twenty-three.

The patent has long since expired, and the device itself is not part of my work today. But the moment that led to it has shaped every decision I have made since. Long before I had a license or a doctorate, I knew what I was here to do: protect children, and walk alongside the families who love them.

From Clinician to Author

My transition into children's literature was not really a transition. It was the natural next step of work I had already been doing for two decades — finding the right tools to help children make sense of hard feelings, hard losses, and the hard parts of growing up.

What changed was the form. Instead of a one-on-one conversation, the tool became a story. Instead of a session, it became a book a child could return to again and again, finding something new each time.

Through the Fiddleswerth® series, I write stories that do more than entertain. Drawing on my background in mental health and child development, I weave magical adventures with quiet, deliberate lessons — about friendship, courage, kindness, self-belief, and the steady work of becoming who you are.

The clinical training stays in the background. It shapes the architecture of each story — which feelings get named, which ones get held, which ones get worked through. But the magic stays in the front. Children do not need a curriculum disguised as a book. They need a story they love, that quietly teaches them something they will need later.

My goal with every Fiddleswerth book is the same thing I have wanted for every family I have worked with in 25+ years: to make emotional learning feel safe, gentle, and possible — and to give children a small magical place to return to on the days they need it most.

Education & Credentials

Doctor of Psychology (Psy.D.)
Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC)
Creator of The Sandra Munoz Method™ — the four-pillar framework for parent transformation
Founder of the TEACUP Preemie Program (2008)
Author of the Fiddleswerth® children's book series
CEO of The Children's Healing Institute (Florida-based nonprofit, founded 1987)
25+ years building programs and resources for children and families
Former U.S. patent holder for the Baby Pool Guard, a child safety device
Featured on CBS News Miami, WPBF News, and in regional parenting media

What I Believe

After twenty-five years inside child and family wellbeing, almost everything I've learned has condensed into five sentences. They guide every program I build, every book I write, and every tool I put in a parent's hands.

Your child is not giving you a hard time. They are having one.
Behavior is communication. When you stop reading behavior as defiance and start reading it as language, your whole relationship with your child changes.
Repair is more powerful than perfection.
No parent regulates 100% of the time. The repair after a hard moment is what builds secure attachment — not the avoidance of hard moments.
Connection comes before correction. Always.
A child cannot hear a lesson when they cannot feel safe. Build the safety first. The lesson lands later.
Small shifts compound.
You do not need a new parenting philosophy. You need the next five minutes. The next breath before you walk in the room. The next sentence after you lose your temper. The next bedtime where you say the one true thing. The small moments are the work.
What you focus on grows.
In your child. In yourself. In the home you are building. Pay attention to what you want more of. The rest takes care of itself.

Contact

Connect with Sandra Munoz

Email: Hello@Sandra-Munoz.com