Infant Mental Health and Infant-Caregiver Relationships: Ways Social Workers Can Support Development in Infancy and Early Childhood

9:30am to 12:00pm ET

LIVE WEBINAR

Presenter: Silvia Juarez-Marazzo, LCSW, NCPsyA

NASW-NYS Members: $25

NASW Other Chapter Member (Including NYC): $50

Non-Members: $62.5

NASW-NYS Student and Transitional Members: FREE

This workshop is approved for 2.5 continuing education credit hours for licensed social workers, licensed mental health counselors, licensed marriage and family therapists and licensed psychologists

NASW-NYS certificates will now be distributed through Gutenberg Certs. Please ensure that you register and/or join on Zoom with the name you would like to appear on your certificate.

Workshop Description
Decades of research in the science of infant mental health has shown that a trusted caregiver is critical to organize the child's feelings and help in making sense of the moment-to-moment interaction with the world of people and of things. If the child is an infant or a toddler, the trusted caregiver is lifesaving. A stable child-parent/caregiver relationship provides the child with the most powerful buffer against adversity, organizing the child's brain architecture and providing the foundation for healthy development, relational wellness, and physical health for years to come. This workshop will describe foundational knowledge of infant and caregiver relationships through different experiential exercises that will provide effective strategies for interactions with the young child. Further, this workshop will offer knowledge in the context of infant and toddler development, as these developmental stages are uniquely different. 
Draft outline of the course:
•    Introduction to the reasons why this information will be helpful
•    Looking at the world through the eyes of the young child
•    The definition of Infant Mental Health
•    Relational Wellness
•    The three core developmental tasks of babyhood
•    Attachment as a co-regulatory system
•    The Dyad, The Moment, and Dyadic Functioning
•    Stress and Development
•    What science has taught us? 
•    Serve and Return 
•    The power of early relationships: lifelong impact of infancy and early childhood
•    Scaffolding the therapeutic process with relationally based tools (and creating them!)
•    Questions and Answers
 

Learning Objectives

After the completion of this webinar, participants will be able to:

1. Explain how early relationships organize the young child's brain's architecture 
2. Define Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health
3. Identify the scientific core elements that hold early relationships at the center of lifelong healthy development overall and relational wellness
4. Describe how to create an original relationally based strategy that promotes parent child mutuality of interaction

This workshop is approved for 2.5 continuing education credit hours.

NASW-NYS is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers (Provider ID #0014), licensed mental health counselors (Provider ID #MHC-0053), licensed marriage and family therapists (Provider ID #MFT-0037) and licensed psychologists (Provider ID #PSY-0088).

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Presenter:

Silvia Juarez-Marazzo, LCSW, NCPsyA, is an educator, psychoanalyst, and social worker. Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Silvia fell in love with young children and their inner world when she began to work as an educator for young children with unique emotional needs in the slums and peasant communities of Buenos Aires forty years ago. Her work as an educator, psychotherapist, and social worker has been grounded in the core belief that there is no such thing as a child: there is a child and his caregiver(s), and their community   She has devoted her professional life to understand, strengthen and support the child-parent/caregiver early relationships. She is Core Faculty for the Relational Health Fellowship at UMASS Chan (formerly IPMHC at UMASS), led by Dr. Ed Tronick, since 2016. Silvia was faculty at the department SCSU MSW Program from 2000 to 2019. Silvia became the Clinical Director of Chances for Children-NY in 2018 and was promoted to Co-Executive Director Clinical in 2021. In 2019, Silvia joined the faculty of the Early Childhood Education/Art Education programs at Brooklyn College. Silvia is the author and illustrator of internationally recognized picture books for immigrant children and their families. Silvia was the Connecticut Infant Mental Health 2014 Jane C. Award recipient for Excellence and Exemplary Service to Infants, Young Children, and their Families.