What participants have told us...

“This training was very intensive... full of useful knowledge that can be implemented in various degrees.”

“The mental health of infants is new to most in the field of early learning and care and the general populace. However, through the determination and dedication of so many, such as yourselves, it is happening. This was an awesome series.”

Chaya Kulkarni, Director, Infant Mental Health Promotion

Nora Spinks
Chief Executive Officer, Vanier Institute of the Family

Families are the cornerstone of society and the engine of our economies. Diverse, complex and dynamic, they are vital to the well-being of individuals, communities and workplaces around the world. With such an important role, it is essential that people who study, serve and support families understand contemporary families, family life, and family experiences, expectations and aspirations. However, there is no single story to discover or tell when it comes to families, as they are increasingly diverse, and are continually adapting and reacting to ever-evolving social, economic, environmental and cultural forces. Furthermore, while statistics and data are key to strengthening research and policy development, it’s equally important to hear the stories behind the statistics by reaching out to families directly. Nora will discuss how balancing evidence-based experience with experience-based evidence can help us better understand families while we anticipate, plan and prepare for the future.

Dr. Amelia Bachleda
Outreach and Education Specialist , Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington

Brains are built, and children’s earliest experiences lay the foundation for a lifetime of learning. Together we will discuss some of the latest research on early childhood brain development, including brain-imaging research highlighting early patterns of activation and learning. We will also discuss how early experiences shape the developing architecture of a child’s brain and how interactions and early relationships support this period of rapid growth. 

MONDAY Session

Dr. Charles Zeanah
Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, and Vice Chair for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Tulane University School of Medicine

 PLEASE NOTE! The date of this session has changed from April 16 to April 23

Dr. Gilles Julien
Fondation du Dr Gilles Julien, Founder

Dr. Ruth Lanius
Harris-Woodman Chair in Psyche and Soma, Department of Psychiatry London Health Sciences Centre

This lecture will begin by describing different responses to stress, including fight and flight, tonic immobility, and unresponsive immobility and their associated physiology. The importance of recognizing different responses to stress will be described through specific infant and adult case examples. Moreover, the impact of early adverse life experiences on mental and physical health will be discussed. Finally, an approach to screening for early adverse experiences and providing trauma-informed care in medicine will be outlined.

Dr. Michael Trout
Director, The Infant-Parent Institute

War, and the fear of war, intrudes into the everyday lives of prenates and children, and their families, all over the world. Children are killing themselves at unprecedented rates. Science has changed, causing us to discover the inconvenient truth of epigenetics, ruining formerly cozy notions about genes being responsible for how things turn out. We’ve begun, finally, to take notice of the incredible range of affective, developmental and behavioral responses in children to such things as early neglect and multiple foster placements, or to their parents’ incessant fighting (even before they’re born), and we’ve had to face the astonishingly complex ways the developing minds of children try to make coherent that which feels so incoherent to them. We’ve finally begun to feel rightly embarrassed by how attracted we are to the use of diagnostic acronyms to label children, without being similarly attracted to wonderment about how a particular child’s mind processes the world he lives in.  While we continue to drug children earlier and earlier in their lives, we’ve also begun wondering if we should be so satisfied with pharmacology as our primary response to the pain of children.

Our task in this session is to explore what we know about how things get passed down from one generation to another, and how trauma sticks. Even more importantly, we will wonder how it is that young children develop ideas about themselves and their place in the world—as a result of these experiences—that sometimes seem irrational, yet are clung to as if the child’s very survival is at stake. I’ll describe a storytelling model that may help us consider how narratives—both coherent ones and garbled ones—emerge in all of us, and to suggest how narratives can be disrupted in favor of optimal development. We’ll try to imagine a world in which children feel seen and heard and known, rather than diagnosed and abandoned.   

Dr. Barbara Stroud
UC Davis Extension Faculty, Academy of ZERO TO THREE Fellows, California Association for Infant Mental Health Inaugural President

Dr. Normand Carrey
Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Dalhousie University Faculty of Medicine

Dr. Mary Dozier
Professor Unidel Amy Elizabeth du Pont Chair in Child Development, University of Delaware

This talk will overview Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC), a home visiting program that has been developed for parents of infants who have experienced adversity. When infants experience adversity, such as maltreatment or foster care, they often have difficulties developing secure attachments or adequate behavioral and biological regulatory capabilities.  ABC helps parents learn to interact with their infants in ways that support the development of trusting relationships and strong self-regulatory capabilities. The talk will provide an overview of the intervention, and describe the evidence supporting the efficacy of the intervention.

Dr. Jennifer Zwicker
Director of Health Policy, School of Public Policy and Assistant Professor, Faculty of Kinesiology, University of Calgary