Mothers who are dependent on alcohol and illicit drugs are at risk for a wide range of parenting deficits. Behavioral parent training programs for mothers with substance use disorders have had limited success in improving parent-child relationships or children’s psychological adjustment. In her groundbreaking work with this population, Dr. Nancy Suchman has developed an attachment-based intervention that attends to disruptions in the mother-child relationship. This intervention focuses on building a mother’s reflective functioning, i.e. her capacity to attend to her own and her child’s mental states in order to promote secure attachment and emotional development. In this presentation Dr. Suchman will describe her program, review findings from a randomized clinical trial, and present case vignettes illustrating the experience of mothers who participated in the intervention.
Date: April 15, 2010, 8:30 – 11:30 a.m.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Suchman completed her PhD in 1994. She did her postdoctoral fellowship at Yale in addiction treatment and research. She became interested in parenting intervention and with colleagues at the Yale Child Study Center, established a clinic-based laboratory for studying attachment in mothers with substance use disorders who were caring for infants and toddlers. In addition to receiving two NIH-funded career awards (in 2002 and 2008), she received NIH funding in 2005 to develop an attachment-based parenting intervention for mothers with substance use disorders. Dr. Suchman’s research integrates perspectives from attachment theory, neuroscience of addiction, and developmental psychopathology. She has published in the developmental, pediatric, family, adult psychiatry, and addiction literature.
Cost: $35. Space is limited.
Please RSVP to Deborah Walker, Administrative Coordinator, Infant-Parent Training Institute at [email protected] or 781-693-5652.
CEU’s available for Social Workers.
For more information about this master class, please visit the JF&CS website.