The Supporting Child Caregivers Podcast

Iyanu Shonukan, a first year student at Harvard College talks about the values he was taught by his Nigerian-American parents and how they have shaped his ambitions to provide underserved people with culturally responsive care in the mental health space.

What is the number one family value for Chinese adolescents and young adults? You may be surprised. Two Chinese students, Joanna and Jacky, join us from Hangzhou, China, and Boston Massachusetts, to describe two different school experiences but the same family values.

Dr. Muhammad Zeshan, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and social media influencer speaks about how he recommends passing on cherished family values to your children.

Dr. Abishek Bala, Director of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Central Michigan University, who traveled with me on my second trip to india, talks about the values he learned from his Indian family that he hopes to pass on to his young daughter living with him and his wife in the US. It is a thoughtful interview and includes some surprises for those of us brought up in the U.S.

Prajna Neelgund, software engineer, teacher, administrator, and actor talks to us about family values in traditional and contemporary India—how they are changing and the effects on young families.

Rohan Abhijith, a man of many talents-- educator, gamer, business strategist, and cartoonist and illustrator—talks about the family values he learned in his childhood in India. I met Rohan at Deenabandhu Trust, a school for children from low-resource families and was lucky enough to meet this mother and father in the beautiful city of Mysore.

SCC Pod host Alexandra Harriso draws on her decades of clinical experience and her experience as a parent to share her reflections on the importance of family values and how they can help guide parents through hard times.

Dr. Henry Marquez-Castro talks about how parents can strive to empower their children.

Ask Me Anything: 1) How do you detect depression in elementary school children? 2) How much of a problem is "screen time" for children? 3) How do I overcome the desire to be a "perfect parent" and to develop a support system? 

Dr. Duyen Trieu brings her compassion, interpersonal and language skills, and cultural knowledge, to serve the community of Vietnamese immigrants in the Boston area. She speaks about early relational health from this perspective.

Dr. Jaclyn Ruggiero speaks about what she has learned about early relational health from her work as a neonatologist in the NICU.

A teacher and advocate for excellent early care and education of young children and their families, Lisa Matter tells stories about some of the families she has worked and how she learned to “listen to the behavior” of the children.

Efuru McLeod, a licensed social worker born and raised in the small island, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, gives a moving and inspiring story of her childhood experience with multiple caregivers. She explains how her personal experience of different and complementary care from family members informs and enriches her current work with children and families.

Hoda Shawky, a pediatric nurse practitioner and lactation and mental health practitioner, describes the evolution of her spiritually and culturally based support of mothers of infants and their families.

Early educator, Katie Mervin, talks to us about her passion for providing a comforting and facilitating environment for very early learners and for supporting their teachers.

Kailey Enayati, a Doctor of Physical Therapy, treats patients on the continuum from birth to end of life talks about what she has learned about early relational health from her patients' life stories and is in the process of designing an app to facilitate ERH-centered documentation that would make it easier for home visitors and families to write or access providers and improve referrals to other services

Dorothy Richardson talks about her pioneering work to support families of young children at the Rice Center and in establishing the Early Relational Health certificate program at U Mass Chan Medical School.

Dr. Bonnie Hepler talks about her studies of relationships between mothers, infants, and healthcare providers and how she works with vulnerable populations to achieve equity of quality and compassionate care.

Charles C. Daniels, the CEO of Fathers' UpLift Inc., talks about the significance of father-child relationships and how this led him to the field of Early Relational Health. He tells stories of fathers who found their role as fathers after being lost to substance abuse and in doing that, found themselves.  

Dr. Dvir speaks about a collaborative care model in which child psychiatrists and pediatricians work together to support early relational health.Dr. Yael Dvir is a child and adolescent psychiatrist at UMASS Chan Medical School/UmassMemorial Health, where she is Vice Chair and director of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Her current clinical work focuses on enhancing access to pediatric behavioral health through collaborative care models, and includes directing the UMASS - Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Program (MCPAP) site and the MCPAP for Early Childhood Program as well as precepting psychiatry trainees in the child psychiatry bridging clinic, a short term stabilization clinic.

Dr. Meeder, a pediatrician and Medical Director of a Family Child and Youth Mental Health Program, talks about how he came to understand the importance of early relational health as a pediatrician and how he works to support ERH in his pediatric practice. An accomplished athlete and world traveler, Rob also brings a spirit of adventure and an interest in culture to his work with families. 

Claudia Gold, a developmental pediatrician and author of four books on parenting, will introduce our new series, “What is Early Relational Health”?

In this Ask Me Anything episode, Alex responds to a question about what parents should do when a little boy insists on wearing dresses.

Jennifer Black combines expertise in early development with management consulting, exploring ways of helping systems grow—family systems and organizational systems. As a speech and language pathologist, a trainer in the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics, and a trainer in the NCAST model from the Parent-Infant-Child Institute, she brings her considerable skills to this talk, including a consideration of how to facilitate communication in families in indigenous communities in Hawaii and Alaska.

Matthew Valleau is a bilingual speech and language pathologist whose career trajectory took him from early intervention, where he worked with families in their homes, finally to working with children in the Boston Public Schools. Matthew brings a special set of talents and perspectives to helping children communicate.Reference: Valleau M, Arunachalam S (2017). The effects of linguistic context on visual attention while learning novel verbs, Proceedings of the 41st annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Ed. Maria Lamendola and Jennifer Scott, 691-705. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press.

Ann Densmore is a certified speech pathologist and audiologist with a doctorate in education from Clark University (specialty in child discourse) and a master's in human development and psychology from Harvard University Graduate School of Education.Resources:Douglas S, Dunkel-Jackson, Sun T, Owusu P (2022). A review of research related to the POWR intervention: a Communication partner intervention to support children with neurodevelopmental disorders, Current Developmental Disorders Reports, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40474-022-0244-6.Vallotton C, Mastergeorge A, Foster T, Decker K, Ayoub C (2017). Parenting supports for early vocabulary development: Specific effects of sensitivity and stimulation through infancy, Infancy, 22(1):78-107. doing: 10.1111/infa.12147. Knolle F, Vallotton C, Ayoub C (2018). Maltreated children use more grammatical negations, J Fam Child Stud, 27:453-464, dot:10.1007/s10826-017-0905-3. Olswang L, Prelock P (2015). Bridging the gap between research and practice: Implementation science, Supplement Article, J Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, doi:10.1044/2015_JSLHR-L-14-0305. Densmore A, Helping Children with Autism Become More Social (2007). Greenwood Publishing Company.

Sara Douglas, Assoc Prof at Michigan State University in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies talks about her life-long mission to support communication in children with language disabilities.

Dr. Prelock talks about her studies of the nature and treatment of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) emphasizing the role of emotion regulation, social communication and perspective taking as important components of social cognition.

131 the SCC Pod: Jaclyn Roberto speaks about her work supporting children with communication problems and their families in weekly out patient sessions.Jaclyn is a speech-language pathologist who has been in the field for about 13 years.  Although she has worked in multiple settings over the course of her career, most of her career has been in a pediatric outpatient setting, where she works closely with families who bring their children for weekly speech therapy sessions. She has a passion for working with early childhood language, children on the autistic spectrum, pediatric feeding disorders, and augmentative-alternative communication. 

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Claire Vallotton, a professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Michigan State University. She studies communication between preverbal children and their parents and educators, and develops curricula and workshops to help caregivers understand and respond to young children's communication cues so that they can respect babies as little individuals with legitimate feelings, wants, and needs.

Carol Krusemark is a speech/language pathologist with over 30 years of clinical experience.  While she currently specializes in serving professional voice users, she has also worked in hospitals, schools, and on early intervention teams.  Her current areas of interest include teaching, supervision, and incorporation of trauma-informed care principles into clinical care.

We are delighted to welcome Sara MacIntyre to begin our series on Kids and Language. Sara is a speech and language therapist who specializes in stuttering based in Philadelphia. She owns YouSpeak Stuttering Therapy and hosts a webinar series and a podcast. She is also an Adjunct Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. 

Alexandra Harrison talks about “Co-Regulation”.

Dr. Isabella Caldwell talks about the very common problem of sleep disorders in autistic children on the autistic spectrum.

Dr. Catherine Lord talks about the beginning of her research that led to the powerful assessment tool, the ADOS, and then the longitudinal study that has contributed so much to our understanding of autistic individuals and their families. She also talks about her current work developing tools for families to use with their children.

Dr. Gauri Divan, Director of the Child Development Group in the non profit Sangath, focuses on creating innovations that use a task-sharing approach with non-specialist workers.

Dr. Charlotte Tan talks to us about her clinical work in the evaluation and treatment of neurodiverse children in her practice in the Philippines.

Dr. Robert Hendren talks to us about the “terroir” in neurodevelopment disorders and his translational interventional outcomes research.

Dr. Susan Sherkow will speak about her knowledge and her experience with autism spectrum disorders as an expert psychoanalytic clinician and as the founder and Director of the Sherkow Center for Child Development and Autism Spectrum Disorder in New York City.

Dr. Kevin Coughlin, Medical Director of the new Neurodevelopmental Disorders Unit of Cambridge Health Alliance talks about his experiences setting up this unit to fill a crucial gap in treatment for ASD youth—and talks about the roots of his interest in ASD

Lori Hogenkamp, the pioneering mind behind the Evolutionary-Stress Framework draws from her personal journey and extensive research in psychoneuroimmunology to offer her insights into the challenges faced by neurodiverse individuals and ways to help them meet those challenges.

Dr. Rogerio Lerner, Professor of Psychology at the University of Sao Paolo, talks about how he used psychoanalytic knowledge to inform a cost-effective instrument for low resource communities in Brazil and was even able to influence public policy.

Recognized author and psychoanalyst from London speaks about her remarkable work with children on the autistic spectrum. 

Dr. Levine, a developmental child psychologist, discusses several helpful interventions for children on the autism spectrum suffering anxiety and fears.

Ruby Salazar, child and family developmental therapist, talks about her long experience working with children on the autism spectrum and their families and effectively advocating for them.  

Ilene Lefcourt, author of several parent guidance books, member at Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training, and founder of the Sackler Lefcourt Center for Child Development in 1982, has provided developmental consultation to parents for over 35 years. She speaks about how she reached parents being haunted by “ghosts from the nursery” and helped them correct their misapprehensions of their infants' behavior in order to respond to them with sensitivity.

Robin Holloway, is a psychologist working in Toronto. He has written about and worked with children on the autistic spectrum for decades and he approaches our subject with knowledge and a special sensitivity. He talks to us about his work and tell us some stories about the children who helped grow that knowledge. 

Well known pediatrician, Dr. Michael Yogman, talks about his long-term interest in involving fathers in their children's lives-- how he supported fathers in his pediatric practice, and how he continues to do so in international organizations.

Dr. Connie Keefer adds another episode to our series on the NBO. Dr. Keefer, one of the creators of the NBO, talks about experiences she had using the NBO with babies born with problems, and also tells a story about her experience with a tribe of American Indians. 

Alexandra Harrison talks about helping a 3-year-old stop throwing and responds to Dr. Vivek Murthy's remarks about an “epidemic of loneliness” with thoughts about connectedness. 

Alexandra Harrison responds to a question about a child who is a picky eater.