Pre‐Conference

Key Note Speaker

Julie Ribaudo, Clinical Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work, University of Michigan.

When the Bough Breaks ­ Helping Infants and Toddlers in Foster Care

Children who have been maltreated in infancy and early childhood build their understanding of themselves and their relationships through the lens of inconsistent, frightening caregiving. Those earliest experiences often create difficulties in attachment, which affects emotional regulation and response to caregivers. This workshop will address the early attachment patterns and how, using a relational model based on Selma Fraiberg’s early work, the neuroscience of emotion and mirror neurons, we can begin to help infants, young children and their caregivers build or rebuild a sense of how safety & calm and the ability to use caregivers as a secure base.