The Central Role of Human Relationships in Infant Mental Health

Please join us to explore this important topic with Dr. Gilbert Foley, Consulting Clinical Psychologist at the New York Center for Child Development (NYCCD) in New York City and Clinical Co- Director of the New York City Early Childhood Mental Health Training and Technical Assistance Center.

Humans are hard wired to relate, first in order to survive and then to thrive. Because relationships are at the center of human endurance and flourishing, infant mental health is embedded in relationship, devoted to building secure caregiver-child relationships and using relationship as a therapeutic engine.

This presentation will take the participant on a descriptive journey of the infant’s first falling in-love experience, hatching and separate self-formation. Woven into this developmental tale is a discussion of attachment, caregiving attributes that nurture a secure attachment and tools infant mental health professionals such as yourselves can exercise to nurture a cradle of love, trust and faith between caregivers and infants that spawn a capacity for love, confident self-agency and the adult virtue of hope.

As an outcome of attending this session, participants will be able to:

1. Describe the key relational features between caregivers and infants as they progress through the journey of falling-in-love, hatching and forming a separate self
2. Define attachment and the categories of attachment
3. Identify the qualities of relational caregiving that are most likely to promote the formation of a secure attachment
4. Characterize 3 strategies through a cultural lens that infant mental health professionals can employ to nurture secure and positive caregiver infant relationships

This webinar is for all those working with young children and their families.

About the Presenter:

Gilbert M. Foley, Ed.D., IMH-E serves as Consulting Clinical Psychologist at the New York Center for Child Development (NYCCD) in New York City and Clinical Co- Director of the New York City Early Childhood Mental Health Training and Technical Assistance Center.  He is Endorsed as an Infant Mental Health/ Clinical Mentor, Level IV and is a founding board member of the New York State Association of Infant Mental Health and was a founding board member of the Pennsylvania Association of Infant Mental Health. He is a senior faculty member of the Profectum Academy and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Infant, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy.  Dr Foley is the co-author of the Cognitive Observation Guide, The Supportive Play Model, Mental Health in Early Intervention and is currently writing a second edition of Sensory Integration and Regulation in Young Children to be published by National Zero to Three. He has written over 40 scholarly articles and chapters and lectures widely nationally and internationally.