Infant & Early Childhood SIG Update

Infant & Early Childhood SIG Update

By Caroline Kerns, PhD & Miller Shivers, PhD 
IEC SIG Co-Chairs

The Infant and Early Childhood (IEC) SIG has had a busy past few months. We have grown our membership to 310 members and counting and are pleased that number includes many students and trainees. We have several committees within the SIG that have been meeting and planning initiatives. As a highlight of some of the recent work, the Education and Training Committee pursued an initiative to increase awareness of infant and early childhood mental health (IECMH) internship and postdoctoral training opportunities. The subcommittee worked with the Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers (APPIC) to obtain a list of all training directors to survey the prevalence of IECMH training opportunities. Results were shared with APPIC in order to highlight the need for a specialized infant/early childhood category on the APPIC Directory, allowing applicants to view the extent to which each training program offers opportunities to work with young children and their families. APPIC is working on the infrastructure to include this new update, offering a sustainable avenue for increasing awareness of IECMH training opportunities. 

Additionally, the IEC SIG has started hosting virtual seminars on various topics related to the field and on May 19th we featured our inaugural presentation from the Network for Enhancing Wellness in Disaster-Affected Youth (NEW DAY), a program that provides professional training, consultation, and technical support in youth disaster mental health. Jami Furr, PhD from NEW DAY presented an overview of professional trainings they provide, including Psychological First Aid (PFA), Skills for Psychological Recovery (SPR), and Child-Adult Relationship Enhancement (CARE) after disasters.

We will host our next seminar on July 14th at 1:00 PM CST featuring a panel discussion on “Perspectives on Early Childhood Policy and Practice Research”. Panelists will represent IECMH policy and clinical research perspectives and partnerships and will include Meghan Schmelzer, LMSW, Senior Policy Analyst within the Infant Early Childhood Mental Health (IECMH) Team at Zero to Three; Nicole Catherine, PhD, Associate Director of the Children’s Health Policy Centre in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University (SFU); and Virginia E. Vitiello, PhD, Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning (CASTL), University of Virginia.

If you would like more information about the IEC SIG, want to join a committee or would like to join a virtual seminar, please contact the co-chairs, Caroline Kerns, PhD and Miller Shivers, PhD at  Ckerns@luriechildrens.org and Mshivers@luriechildrens.org