Pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton applauds new Infant-Parent Mental Health Program
Dr. T. Berry Brazelton paid a surprise visit to UMass Boston's new Infant-Parent Mental Health Post-Graduate Certificate Program on September 24. Program founder University Distinguished Professor Edward Tronick introduced him to Chancellor Motley, PhD.
By Nanette L. Cormier
They’ve watched his videos too many times to count and have practically memorized his books. In fact, his gentle intelligence and model interaction with infants and toddlers in Touchpoints: Birth to 3: Your Child's Emotional and Behavioral Development and Infants and Mothers have become tantamount to Bibles for their practice.
The “he” is beloved and esteemed pediatrician Dr. T. Berry Brazelton. The “they” are twenty-three clinicians who share a common commitment to creating brighter futures for children and families by cultivating the critical early relationships between parents and infants. These social workers, nurses, psychologists, educators, and others are also the first class of UMass Boston’s new Infant-Parent Mental Health Post-Graduate Certificate Program, a 10-month intensive interdisciplinary learning experience designed for licensed and/or credentialed professionals working with children birth to five and their families.
“It gives me great joy to know that the University of Massachusetts Boston, this city’s only public research university is sponsoring this critical training program which is dedicated to the task of training practitioners to effectively treat the disorders of infancy and early childhood within the milieu of relationship and family,” said Chancellor J. Keith Motley at the program’s convocation.
Extending research to touch families
The Infant-Parent Mental Health Program, Psychology Department and UMass Boston’s Division of Corporate, Continuing, and Distance Education, was established by a thirty-year colleague of Brazelton’s, Dr. Edward Tronick, University Distinguished Professor and Chief of the Child Development Unit at Children’s Hospital Boston. The director of the UMass Boston program is Dorothy Richardson, a clinical psychologist and director of the Rice Center for Children, and the associate director is Marilyn Davillier, a licensed social worker with a private practice in infant and child mental health.
Recognized internationally for his work on the neurobehavioral and social emotional development of infants and young children, parenting in the U.S. and other cultures, and infant-parent mental health, Tronick developed the Still-face paradigm, which has become a standard experimental paradigm for studying social emotional development in the fields of pediatrics, psychiatry, clinical and child psychology, and nursing. In his studies using the still-face he revolutionized our understanding of the emotional capacities and coping of infants and the effects of factors such as maternal anxiety and depression on infant social emotional development.
UMass Boston’s certificate program is based on the award-winning Napa Infant-Parent Mental Health Fellowship Program Tronick developed with Dr. Kristie Brandt. The curriculum includes preventive interventions and programs, direct interventions, interdisciplinary collaboration, research, consultation to providers and caregivers serving children, and, advancement of public policy related to infant-parent physical, social, emotional and mental health. It has engaged some of the most recognized luminaries in their fields as faculty for the program, including Daniel Siegel, Alicia Lieberman, Bruce Perry, Joy Osofsky, Barry Lester, Gerald Stechler and others.
Early relationships: groundwork for resilience or developmental "derailment"
The Infant Parent Mental Health Program, offers participants current clinical research and theoretical formulations in infant studies, including the ground breaking research of Dr. Tronick whose collaborative research Dr. Brazelton, who developed the first Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale in 1973, and others led to the development of the Touchpoints program of intervention. The first class of students includes professionals from nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy, social work, psychiatry who desire more sophisticated knowledge and training to work with the mental health disorders of infants, children and parents and the relational disorders of children and parents.
So when Dr. Brazelton joined these students as a surprise guest on the program’s first gathering, the group’s admiration was palpable. With his gentle, winning smile, at 91, the nation’s most respected pediatrician made his “rounds” listening as the health professionals who will become the nation’s leaders in the growing interdisciplinary field that trains professionals to develop relationship-oriented therapies on the child-parent relationship. He heard from clinicians from as far as Portugal, Argentina, and Canada and from UMass Boston’s backyard of Dorchester and Cambridge.
One of them was Nicole Stauffer, a clinical social worker from Washington County, Maine, a vast territory which encompasses Native American populations, extreme levels of poverty, and few social services. She hopes to bring her new knowledge to first time parents whom she serves and to fellow clinicians.
Another student shared that witnessing her mother’s postpartum depression after bearing twins, inspired her to devote her career to early intervention programs. “Nobody talked about my mother’s depression, and it led me to become an early caretaker.” The impact on the family that she experienced formulated her understanding of the need to address early childhood developmental issues within the milieu of relationships.
Jane Clarke, a clinical social worker from New Mexico has spent years trying to understand the “inner-world” of non-verbal children, especially those who were exposed to drugs pre-natally. She says the practice of “focusing on the child, not on the parent” is the “pink elephant in the room.” The real work, is in treating the relationship between parent and child and “that’s why I’m here.”
Another fellow, Silvia Juarez-Morasso is a child psychoanalyst who works with abused children at a pediatric center in Manhattan hopes to gain deeper insight into how to create healing relationships between children and families. She is joined by Elizabeth Heyne, a psychologist who plans to use her UMass Boston experience to establish a children’s clinic for neonatal intensive care babies in Dallas.
His pride evident at the class’s introductions, Tronick said, “this program works to fulfill the mission of the university and its commitment to our nation’s families. The clinicians who will become graduates will extend the university’s ‘pipeline’ to the infants and children who may become our students in twenty years.”
Awed by the cadre of talented clinicians who will impart the expertise they gain to some of the nation’s neediest locales, Brazelton reminded them of the singularly most powerful skill they can possess in working with children: careful observation of the interaction between child and parent. “That will be the foundation for making a difference in the lives of families,” he added. Evidently assured that the future of his field is in good hands, Brazelton concluded: “What you are doing, what you are going to learn over the next ten months will give you a new sense of power.”
Professor Tronick offers a UMass Boston Minute
A lecture series of nine luminary speakers (Alicia Lieberman, Bruce Perry, Alice Carter, Barry Lester and others) will begin in October. Learn more about the program and the lecture series.
Dorothy Richardson, Ph.D.
Program Director
617.232.3916
To learn about opportunities to support the program:
Nan Cormier
University Advancement
617.287.5326
Make a gift (note IPMHPGCP in the "other" field)
