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As 2021 comes to an end, we wanted to share with you stories on connections to one another, new programs and trainings for 2022, and a few recognitions. In this issue of the BTC Newsletter, you will find:
  • A tribute to Ann Linehan, recently retired Deputy Director of the Office of Head Start
  • Information on new programs in 2022, including the Family-to-Family Real Talk webinar series, the National Substance Use Disorder Summit on January 26, and the BTC National Forum on March 29-31 Save the Dates!
  • New research on Listening to Parent Voices
  • Links to a 2-part interview about Dr. T. Berry Brazelton in Early Learning Nation
  • Registration information for new Touchpoints trainings and other professional development opportunities in 2022
  • And more!

All of us at BTC are more grateful than ever of your support of the Brazelton Touchpoints Center and for all you do for children, families, and communities in the midst of these tumultuous times. Despite the turmoil, we hope that you and your loved ones find opportunities for comfort, peace, and joy during this holiday season and the new year!

With gratitude,
Joshua Sparrow, MD
Executive Director
Brazelton Touchpoints Center
Calling All Library Professionals!
The Brazelton Touchpoints Center (BTC) is excited to announce a new Touchpoints training for library professionals! Touchpoints in Libraries catalyzes the potential of libraries to engage families in supporting their children’s healthy development. The training builds library professionals’ understanding of child development from birth to 6 years old, and skills for making culturally responsive, strengths-based connections with families.

Throughout 2021, BTC has delivered Touchpoints in Libraries virtually to library professionals from 71 libraries in California, and across Massachusetts, and has partnered with the Brooklyn Public Library system, serving its 2.6 million residents.   

Touchpoints in Libraries is currently enrolling participants in a training beginning on Tuesday, January 11, 2022. Participants will learn how to:
  • View children’s development as a non-linear process that affects the family system
  • Identify opportunities to support families in daily library interactions
  • Use strengths-based and culturally responsive strategies to connect with families
  • Create a shared language among staff about engaging families and caregivers
Honoring a Lifetime of Service
photo of Ann Linehan and Dr. T Berry Brazelton
BTC’s Executive Director, Joshua Sparrow, MD, recently interviewed Ann Linehan, following her retirement as Deputy Director of the Office of Head Start. Here, he reflects on their conversation about Ann’s lifetime of service and the meaning of Brazelton Touchpoints in her work.

“Don’t overthink it. It will reveal itself,” Ann Linehan, Deputy Director of the Office of Head Start since 2011, told me in a recent conversation about her retirement—the next chapter in a life committed to children and families.

I’ve had the privilege of getting to know Ann over many years, watching her in action, leading the Office of Head Start. Head Start is a multibillion-dollar Federal program serving more than one million children and families living with poverty all over these United States, territories, and sovereign Tribal nations. In senior management positions for the past 25 years, Ann has helped chart its course through the shifting tides of Republican and Democratic administrations, always inspiring its workforce of thousands—to stretch and reach and search, and to hold on to hope.

We both spent the first chapters of our working lives in Boston Strong, learning from strong, brave, beautiful children facing all kinds of challenges. And we both grew up in balkanized Boston, Ann in an Irish Catholic family in Brighton, and me in a soulless suburb where those who’d arrived a century or so sooner fled as the newly assimilating invaded. When she’s back home, the beautiful Boston accent comes back.

National Substance Use Disorder Summit
BTC is hosting its first National Substance Use Disorder (SUD) Summit: Innovating Partnerships with Families in Recovery on Wednesday, January 26, 2022. The Summit will focus on whole families and communities in recovery, bringing communities and programs from across the United States together to share and learn from their innovative partnerships with families in recovery.
 
The one-day virtual Summit begins with the screening of a short documentary featuring the voices of mothers living with SUD, followed by three nationwide conversations on
  • the power of peer-to-peer supports in ensuring equitable and inclusive recovery interventions that center family voice and power;
  • strengthening comprehensive systems approaches through a shared vision and common language to connect sustainable supports, services, and resources that families in recovery need; and
  • transdisciplinary collaboration to build therapeutic relationships based on safety, trust, and hope that promote parents’ motivation for recovery, as well as resilient responses to the relapses and recurrences that characterize this chronic disease’s course.

Registration Fees:
  • Early Bird Fee (through December 31, 2021): $75
  • Regular Fee: $85

Thank you to our Summit sponsor!
To learn more about sponsorship, contact Michael Accardi.
“Value Disorganization and Vulnerability as an Opportunity”
Dr. T. Berry Brazelton’s legacy lives on in a multiplicity of fields of practice, and in communities across the globe. In this witty and enlightening interview, BTC’s Executive Director, Joshua Sparrow, MD, recounts Dr. Brazelton’s revolutionary research and advocacy for babies, children, and families everywhere. Published in two parts by Early Learning Nation.
Brazelton Touchpoints for Mental Health Clinicians is an intensive, online training that integrates the Brazelton Touchpoints approach into mental health clinical theory and practice. The training enhances diverse clinical orientations and techniques with evidence-based, developmental-relational practice that can be incorporated into treatment, and accounts for trauma and resilience in child development and family functioning. 

This Touchpoints training is specifically designed for mental health clinicians, including psychologists, psychiatrists, clinical social workers, licensed mental health clinicians, and infant and early childhood mental health specialists.

This online course includes six 4-hour live modules from February 7 to 28, 2022, and is followed by six one-hour reflective practice sessions that provide coaching and mentoring. This course is approved for 20.35 Continuing Education Credits for selected disciplines.
Listening to Parent Voices
A new research study supported by the Perigee Fund and The Ford Family Foundation finds that two-thirds of parents and providers would like to continue some early childhood services remotely, even as in-person services resume almost two years into the Covid-19 pandemic.

Listening to Parent Voices offers an opportunity to hear directly from families about their experience with home visiting and infant mental health programs as they shifted to technology-based services in the early days of the pandemic, and about their ideas for how those services can be improved.

To gain these insights, researchers from Portland State University, the University of Connecticut, and Georgetown University partnered with seven different early childhood programs across the country. The researchers conducted 100 interviews with families and providers to find out what worked and what didn’t during the pandemic switch to services like telehealth, and to identify lessons that can be carried forward to make programs more equitable and effective.

Upcoming Trainings and Workshops
Registration is open for BTC trainings in 2022! Invest in your own professional learning, or the professional development of your staff in the new year. Our interactive workshops include a certificate of attendance and live Spanish translation! If you can’t attend a live session, register to receive access to the recording.
Supporting Everyone's Mental Health and Well-Being Workshop Series, beginning on Thursday, January 13, 2022
Learn strategies for your work and personal life that honor everyone's experience, build resilience and coping skills, and nurture self- care. Three 90-minute workshops.

Navigating Challenging Conversations Workshop Series, beginning on Wednesday, February 2, 2022
Come explore how racism, culture, and bias may affect when and how we experience conversations as challenging. Learn strategies to build trust with families and promote collaborative conversations about topics that make us uncomfortable. Three 90-minute workshops.

Newborn Behavioral Observations System (NBO) Training Program, beginning on Tuesday, February 8, 2022
Learn how the NBO—an infant-focused, family-centered relationship-building tool—sensitizes parents to their baby’s competencies, challenges, and individuality and can help foster the development of a positive parent-child relationship from the very beginning. Three 5-hour interactive webinars following by two mentoring sessions with course faculty.

The Development Is a Journey Conversation Roadmap: A Tool for Talking with Families 3-hour workshop on Thursday, February 24, 2022
Explore a new tool that helps family-facing professionalsincluding primary care pediatric providers, home visitors, and early childhood educatorshave collaborative and productive conversations with families about their childs development. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the California Training Institute are all sharing the Conversation Roadmap as a resource for developmental screening and surveillance.
New Programs Coming in 2022
BTC’s FREE Family-to-Family Real Talk Series builds community among parents by opening up safe spaces for honest conversations about challenges and opportunities that matter to their families today.

Family-to-Family Real Talk will feature four distinct conversation series driven by and for Black, LGBTQ+, and Latinx parents and families, and parents and families with children facing developmental challenges.

Parenting While Black, begins February 2022
LGBTQ+ Parenting, begins April 2022
Latinx Parenting, begins September 2022
Parenting While Rising to Child Developmental Challenges, begins September 2022

Registration opens soon — stay tuned!



Thank you to our Family-to-Family Real Talk sponsors!
To learn more about sponsorship opportunities, contact Michael Accardi.
Save the Dates!
BTC National Forum, March 29-31, 2022
Families and Communities Raising Our Children Our Own Ways: Cultural, Ethnic, and Racial Identities and Child Flourishing  
 
Please save the dates for BTCs 2022 virtual National Forum! This year’s focus will be on honoring and promoting positive cultural, ethnic, and racial identity in children. Workshops will explore such topics as how to work through children’s behaviors that challenge us and supporting father involvement. The forum will also provide an opportunity to engage in collaborative peer networking.
 
The forum will include morning plenary sessions and afternoon workshops. Register for individual days or the full experience. Registration will open in January 2022. Look for your email invitation!
BTC Fellow Named a CASEL Weissberg Scholar
Christina Mondi-Rago, PhD, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at BTC and a Clinical Fellow in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, has been named a CASEL Weissberg Scholar for Innovators in Social, Emotional, and Academic Learning. Dr. Mondi-Rago earned her PhD in Developmental and Clinical Psychology from the University of Minnesota. Her research at BTC focuses on the assessment and promotion of socio-emotional learning and mental health starting in early childhood, with an emphasis on populations affected by poverty and trauma. She is particularly interested in the role that early care and education programs can play in promoting lifelong well-being.

The new, two-year scholars program aims “to inspire the next generation of innovators who will strengthen the vision of social and emotional learning (SEL)” and will “provide educational and professional development and create a collaborative community of early career scholars who are eager to make a difference with SEL.”

Your Support Makes a Huge Difference!
More families and professionals than ever are turning to BTC for the supports they need now. So far this year, BTC has offered 76 webinars, workshops, trainings, and more. 

Your support helps us provide a community gathering space that breaks through the isolation of these uncertain times:
  • “This was SO refreshing. I really needed this. I feel like I'm drowning sometimes.”
  • “Feeling really reaffirmed that SO many people from all over are feeling similarly.” 

Your support helps us offer solutions for today’s challenges:
  • “I appreciate learning this critical information in order to be the most informed educator possible.”
  • “The resources and strategies provided will guide me in conversations with families.”

Your support enables us to partner with professionals to promote healing and renewal for children and families, and for themselves:
  • “Really helpful to reflect on our impact and how our judgment, perspective, and life experience can shape our interactions.”
  • “I learned the skills to put myself in the parents’ perspective.”

As the pandemic still surges, families and providers remain hungry for soul-nourishing approaches, diverse perspectives, and most importantly: each other. Your support makes that possible.
Do you have questions about this newsletter or BTC news and activities? Contact Ashley Gaddis.
Brazelton Touchpoints Center
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