Save the Date: 7th Annual Empowering Professionals Conference

10/19/2012

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Digging Deeper to Strengthen Practice

Pre-registration is required for this one-day conference featuring a Keynote Presentation by Mr. Michael Trout, founder of the Infant-Parent Institute. Mr. Trout has devoted his career to understanding the relationship between early social experiences and how our lives form.

During his keynote presentation entitled, Behavior: The Language of Infants, Toddlers, and Young Children, Mr. Trout will reveal a certainty that advances in neurobiological and neurodevelopmental research have made plain:

Babies and young children speak more articulately with what they do than with what they say.

This presentation will encourage early interventionists to consider how we understand young children using watchful, empathic eyes, eyes capable of translating what we see into a mentalized idea of the child's inner workings, eyes that appreciate the expressiveness of behavior. We can't begin to make sense of behavior when our primary intent is to modify it. And we can't begin to make sense of behavior unless we imagine that there is a whole person-with a long and rich history of experiences before he could speak, and even before he was born-who is engaged in the behavior. This address will suggest that mentalization of the infant or young child should be a prerequisite to development of an intervention plan, and that encouraging this capacity for mentalization in the parents often constitutes an important family intervention, in and of itself.

There will be a choice of afternoon breakout sessions.

For additional information please visit the Training Page or call 800-509-3867.