| Description |
Infant mental health is a social justice issue. Research and practice in early childhood development and infant mental health have in recent decades demonstrated resoundingly the critical importance of risk and resiliency factors in influencing child outcomes. Despite broad awareness of the dangers of adverse early experience and the potent impact of timely intervention, there continues to be vast unmet needs across the socioeconomic spectrum of young children and their families, with particularly unacceptable gaps in access and quality of mental health and early childhood learning services for poor children, many of whom are African American, Latino, or Native American or represent other non-dominant racial and ethnic communities. In many cases, the infant mental health field is disproportionately Caucasian, while many of the most vulnerable young children are children of color. In order to create a just and equitable society for the infants and toddlers with whom we work, the field must intentionally address some of the racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and other inequities embedded in our society. The Diversity-Informed Infant Mental Health Tenets are a set of ten guiding principles that raise awareness of inequities and injustices embedded in our society by empowering individual practitioners, agencies and systems of care to identify and address the social justice issues intricately intertwined with all infant mental health work.
This workshop introduces participants to the Tenets via lecture and discussion. Each Tenet is considered in light of its salience with respect to a range of spheres of work: clinical practice, teaching/training, research/writing, and policy/advocacy. Presenters will demonstrate in-vivo application of the Tenets to participant-provided practice dilemmas, leading to group discussion reflecting on the Tenets and thinking together about applicability and implementation of the Tenets. Participants will emerge from this training with a deeper understanding of the social justice issues interwoven into their sphere of practice, a new tool set for identifying and addressing obstacles to achieving social justice via their work, and strategies for bringing these tools into their daily practice and professional communities.
|