Learn the Signs. Act Early. (LTSAE) is a program of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that encourages parents of children ages birth to 5 years and providers who care for them to promote developmental monitoring. The program offers parent-friendly milestone checklists and complimentary resources, printable from the CDC website or accessible through a free app, that make developmental monitoring practical and easy. This session will introduce the materials and strategies for embedding use into your practice. Note: The materials provided by LTSAE are parent education and engagement tools that support developmental monitoring and help staff decide when to refer a child to other professionals for screening; they are not a replacement for developmental screening.

Infant Mental Health is a growing field of research and practice aimed at promoting early childhood social-emotional development through high-quality relationships. The first three years of life are critical for building infant brain architecture. Relationships are the “active ingredient” in the environment's influence on early brain growth. As such, Infant Mental Health practice promotes the optimal development of infants and very young children through enhanced infant-caregiver interactions. In this presentation, the key principles of Infant Mental Health will be reviewed. In addition, the importance of having a workforce best prepared to promote high-quality relationships is critical, especially for those infants and very young children at-risk. Infant Mental Health Endorsement serves to ensure that professionals working with very young children and their families have attained expertise and mastery of best-practices for enhancing developmental outcomes through dyadic work.

Babies begin learning about the world and assimilating new knowledge as soon as they are born. Participants will learn how early milestones provide a foundation for future academic skills and how STEM skills are integrated in early child development. Participants will learn practical strategies to teach parents how to promote kindergarten readiness and activities to integrate into the classroom.

How can we support families to discover their vision for a “good life” for themselves and their children? In this session, the presenter will discuss how the LifeCourse tools from the National Community Of Practice for Supporting Families can be used to help families develop their vision and use it to guide future decision making. Tools will be shared that can be used by families and supporters to think about and plan for the support they need to achieve the lives they want.

Are you new to the Family Support Data System? Do you have some experience but still have questions? Come learn strategies to enter data and use that date once it is entered.

(A repeat of this session will be held at session 4C)
This introduction to the Be Strong Parent Café Model will provide a foundational level of information for organizations/agencies that are interested in hosting Parent Cafes. Participants will learn: How Pennsylvania is supporting the implementation of this national model of family support; how Parent Cafes strengthen protective factors in families and build family leadership; understand the next steps to identifying an implementation team and access training to become certified in hosting Parent Cafes.

This is a two-part session. Participants should register for both sessions.
The Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors, identified by the Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP), are strengths and resources that families can draw on when life gets difficult. When these five factors are present and robust, they keep families strong and children safe. In this interactive workshop, we will define each factor, identify everyday actions that promote them in families and explore resources for family support professionals to incorporate this approach into their work.

Pennsylvania was selected to participate in the MIECHV Continuous Quality Improvement Practicum. This breakout will review the unique 8-month opportunity that allowed OCDEL and the Nurse-Family Partnership at Einstein Medical Center Montgomery to work on a small scale Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) project. The CQI Project was structured towards improving Performance Measure 5 and working to increasing the caregiver’s knowledge of family planning and birth control.

Building relationships, having conversations around screenings, and maintaining professional boundaries is not always easy. In practice, it can be a challenge to maintain a balance between the three and get the desired outcomes that lead to the most accurate and reflective data. “Integrating” instead of “balancing” relationships, conversations, and boundaries is one way to enhance the effectiveness of conversations around screenings. This session will cover the cultural implications that can create barriers and/or assist in relationship building, provide in-depth guidance on best practices in reviewing screening tools with families, and how to delve into tough conversations through the integration of relationship building, dialogue, and boundary setting. Visual demonstrations of conversational practices will be provided and time will be allotted for personal practice and reflection.

Disclaimer- this session will briefly touch on conversational topics around Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) and Maternal Depression. Some of the content could activate personal and/or professional participant experiences and questions around screenings may be raised regarding these topics. If you feel this session might not be appropriate for you at this time, you are encouraged to choose a session that is best fit for your personal and/or professional needs.

This workshop is an overview of a four-part training program that was developed to teach home visitors about how the brain develops, and how strong brain development can be fostered effectively through fun and engaging activities In the second half of the workshop, participants will put into action what they just learned. They will play the highly interactive, “Brain Architecture Game.” The Brain Architecture Game is a tabletop game experience that builds understanding of the powerful role of experiences on early brain development.

Working with very young children and their important people is both rewarding and challenging. While there is great joy and satisfaction in helping promote optimal developmental outcomes for very young children, there is also exposure to sad, frightening, and even traumatizing family stories and events. Sometimes we are reminded of our difficult histories and difficult feelings are evoked. Reflective Supervision/Consultation is a model of ongoing professional development that supports the unique needs of the early childhood work force promoting model fidelity, deepening the understanding of the work with very young children and their families, and protecting the workforce from the burdens of work-related stress, vicarious trauma and burn out.

(A repeat of this session will be held at session 4D)

Kayla Kressler, creator of Families in Recovery: Strengthening Connections One Day at a Time will share about her journey from childhood adversity, to wellness and education. Kressler will guide a dialogue about families impacted by substance use disorder and will demonstrate how collaboration, compassion, and consistency strengthens both professional practice and family wellness.

This is a two-part session. Participants should register for both sessions.

The Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors, identified by the Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP), are strengths and resources that families can draw on when life gets difficult. When these five factors are present and robust, they keep families strong and children safe. In this interactive workshop, we will define each factor, identify everyday actions that promote them in families, and explore resources for family support professionals to incorporate this approach into their work.

We will review the importance of breastfeeding for mothers and infants, especially those who are opioid exposed. We will discuss strategies on how to support women who wish to breastfeed and discuss when and why breastfeeding may not be the best option for some women.

This is a hands-on training that will require you to bring a laptop as we will be working on an assignment during the session.

This training will be a beginner’s guide and overview of Microsoft Excel and some of its most popular tools. During this session, you should expect to learn the basics of Excel, broken out into 3 sections: Structure, Aesthetics, and Organization of Data. After the presentation and overview section is completed, attendees will have the opportunity to work in Excel and use their new-found tools.

The session will be comprised of four parts focused on critical components of the 2020 Pennsylvania MIECHV statewide needs assessment. Part 1 will highlight the work of stakeholder engagement and process development as well as our experiences building relationships with key individuals across disciplines to better understand stakeholder priorities and inform the strategic direction of the needs assessment. Part 2 will describe the innovative quantitative methods and the considerations behind these methods used to identify at-risk communities so that Pennsylvania’s home visiting programs may strengthen services to targeted populations in those areas. Part 3 will present the promising practices that were identified through community surveys and interviews and could re-shape service delivery to better address community needs. Part 4 will share our dissemination plan and application opportunities for making the needs assessment a meaningful resource for the audience and other relevant stakeholders.

Participants will learn steps and strategies to administer the ASQ3 and ASQ:SE2. They will have opportunities to practice engaging families in screening process and sharing results. These tools are especially helpful to guide discussion with families about children’s development. Participants will have the opportunity to explore resources and activities that families can do at home to enhance their children’s development.

The experience of trauma changes the brain and shows up in clients’ behaviors. Substance use is a purposeful means of soothing the disruption caused by trauma that in the words of Bessel Vanderkolk “works until it doesn’t.”When it no longer works, families are easily overwhelmed.

Both trauma and substance use disrupts families and causes harm. Reference to the Adverse Childhood Experience research will be discussed.

This workshop will define addiction and trauma. It will look at behaviors that are often symptoms of trauma. It will provide information related to trauma-informed care that reduce re-traumatization and inform staff on methods for addressing both addiction and trauma within families.

This training will describe the implementation processes used by a diverse set of twenty local implementing agencies to engage and support families impacted by substance use disorders in high-prevalence communities. The presentation will expand thinking about the infrastructure needs to implement new methods of enrollment, retention, and service coordination for vulnerable populations and identify lessons learned from local pilot program implementation across communities in a single state. This includes how to build meaningful partnerships with community-based providers and other child and family-serving agencies, engage with policymakers on this topic to ensure appropriate systems supports, and conduct and engage with research on this topic.

Executive function skills are the mental processes that enable us to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully. We are not born with these skills, but we can all learn them over time. This session is designed for administrators who will examine their own executive function skills and discuss implications for working with staff who may have a very different set of skills.

(A repeat of this session will be held at session 1F)

This introduction to the Be Strong Parent Café Model will provide a foundational level of information for organizations/agencies that are interested in hosting Parent Cafes. Participants will learn: How Pennsylvania is supporting the implementation of this national model of family support; how Parent Cafes strengthen protective factors in families and build family leadership; understand the next steps to identifying an implementation team and access training to become certified in hosting Parent Cafes.

(A repeat of this session will be held at session 2F)
Kayla Kressler, creator of Families in Recovery: Strengthening Connections One Day at a Time will share about her journey from childhood adversity, to wellness and education. Kressler will guide a dialogue about families impacted by substance use disorder and will demonstrate how collaboration, compassion, and consistency strengthens both professional practice and family wellness.

This presentation will provide an overview of the Oral Health Story Kit for Home Visitors, a self-contained, self-sustaining tool developed by the PA Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics to provide early childhood home visitors with resources to educate parents and families across Pennsylvania on the importance of oral health to overall health and provide guidance on adopting good oral health habits. Participants will learn why taking care of your mouth is important and how kits can be integrated into your work with families. The session will also include roundtable breakout discussion and action step development to support implementation of oral health conversations and activities during home visits.

This presentation will give participants an understanding of the dynamics that exist in unhealthy and abusive relationships, and the tactics and methods of control that specifically apply to maternal health. Participants will also learn about common health risks associated with domestic violence and pregnancy, and how to discuss and respond to domestic violence in a manner that is both trauma-informed and survivor-centered. Topics will include reproductive and sexual coercion, escalation of abuse during pregnancy, maternal and fetal health risks, conversational screening, and warm referral to domestic violence support providers.

Representatives from the MIECHV evaluation team will describe the prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) among home visiting families in Pennsylvania. Panelists will then give a background on the epidemiology of IPV and describe the impacts that IPV has on the health of individuals and families. We will also share best practices for identification of and response to IPV, as well as what is known in the field about prevention strategies.

A panel of providers that are successfully implementing fatherhood programming will share experiences from their individual communities. Panelist will share challenges and lessons learned. Attendees will have the opportunity to interact and asks questions about what steps were taken to provide successful programming and increase father engagement.

This training will take participants through the science of social-emotional development. Participants will learn the various stages of typical social-emotional development and which parts of the brain are affected as children grow. Participants will discuss the importance of attachment and relationships between caregivers and young children and how home visitors can best support the caregiver and young child relationship to increase health social-emotional development.

It is easy to feel hopeless when you find out that a child or caregiver has experienced trauma. It is true that the impacts of trauma on the brain and body can be severe, pervasive and long-lasting. However, just as a traumatic experience can alter a life in an instant, so too can a therapeutic encounter. Join us for a discussion about trauma and how the adults around a child/family can play an active role in the healing of others by providing “therapeutic encounters or moments”.

As home visitors and family support specialists, you are already leaders within the field of early childhood. Participants will learn how to foster needed collaboration through self-awareness, self-care, and mindfulness strategies. Easy to implement resources grounded in DEC Recommended Practices will be provided to support leaders of all kinds within the field through this highly interactive session.

Autism Navigator (AN) is a collection of web-based courses & tools that include extensive videos and print materials. AN courses and resources intend to bridge the gap between research and community practice by increasing the knowledge and skills of those who support young children with autism/risk for autism and their families. Using video illustrations and a tour of AN print and interactive resources, participants will actively explore AN tools and reflect on how these tools can enhance their work with children and families and support them in identifying the very early signs of autism. Participants will also learn how to access AN courses and tools.