We offer professional development and technical assistance tailored to individual programs, community agencies, regions, and state systems. Our services help leaders throughout early childhood systems strengthen practitioners’ skills and knowledge across all roles and disciplines—leading to better outcomes for young children, their families, and the professionals who support them.
How We Help
Our team provides the highest standard of reflective practice to nurture and sustain practitioners’ reflective practice skills and capacities so they can effectively implement infant and early childhood mental health principles and practices into their programs and communities. Our professional development and technical assistance practices are customized for individual programs, community agencies, regions, and state systems to build high-quality systems of professional development and reflective practice.
Service Delivery
- Hybrid
Who Will Benefit
- Systems serving early childhood
- State and local administrators
- Leaders and staff of child care and early education programs
- Maternal and child health home visitors
- Early intervention/preschool special education personnel
- Child protective service system providers
Ready to work with us to promote early childhood mental health?
Connect with a WestEd expert.
Featured Experts
Leslie Fox
Jennifer Miller
Monica Mathur-Kalluri
Connecting Research With Practice
Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health
Infant and early childhood mental health (IECMH) is shaped by family, community, and cultural influences, which together foster social and emotional development that lays the groundwork for lifelong learning, relationships, and resilience.
The interdisciplinary field of IECMH focuses on strengthening relational health through services for young children and the adults who care for them, delivered via a continuum of promotion, preventive intervention, and treatment. Practitioners across this continuum require high-quality professional development in IECMH content as well as support for engagement in reflective practice.
Reflective Practice
Reflective practice is an essential component of delivering IECMH services across the promotion, preventive intervention, and treatment continuum.
Our team provides experiential learning that develops reflective practice skills and competencies for engaging with early childhood professionals in a continuous process of deliberate self-observation and analysis of experiences, thoughts, and feelings in the context of one’s work to better understand one’s own actions and the reactions those actions prompt in oneself and others. This potentially results in developmental insight; a refocus of thinking; the generation of new ideas; and modifications of actions, behavior, treatment, and learning—with a goal of improving one’s professional practice (California Compendium of Training Guidelines, Personnel Competencies, and Professional Endorsement Criteria for Infant-Family and Early Childhood Mental Health, 2016).
