The 2008 "Babies Can’t Wait" conference will be held March 25 at UCO in Edmond. OK-AIMH is proud to announce that Alicia Lieberman, PhD, will present the morning keynote presentation, titled "Ghosts and Angels: Promoting Infant Mental Health in the Family and the Community."

This presentation will highlight the impact of interpersonal and community-based traumatic stressors on early development, promote a relationship based approach to treatment and promote inter-system collaboration to enhance infant and family mental health.

In the afternoon, she will present in Session A, "Trauma-Focused Child-Parent Psychotherapy," which will teach the domains of intervention in child-parent psychotherapy, highlight the importance of putting traumatic experiences into words, illustrate translation of clinical material between parent and child and provide clinical application of theoretical principles.

Alicia’s major interests include infant mental health, disorders of attachment, child-parent interventions with multi-problem families and the effects of trauma in the first years of life. Her current research involves treatment outcome evaluation of the efficacy of child-parent psychotherapy with traumatized children aged birth to six and with pregnant women involved in domestic violence.

This year’s format has changed to include a keynote in the morning followed by a buffet lunch. Lt. Governor Jari Askins will be the featured guest luncheon speaker.

Three break out sessions will be offered in the afternoon. In addition to Dr. Lieberman’s presentation in Session A, Barbara Moss will facilitate Session B titled "Integrating the Principles and Practices of Infant Mental Health in Programs for Young Children and their Families." This presentation will teach intervention practices that support emotional and mental health needs of young children and families, highlight the importance of attachment and nurturing relationships to child development and offer models of services to implement principles and practices of infant and early childhood mental health into all programs that work with young children.

Dale Wares and Fran Morris will facilitate Session C titled "Promoting Social and Emotional Competencies in Young Children." This presentation will present an overview of curriculum promoting social emotional competence in young children, highlight the Teaching Pyramid: a model for promoting social emotional development and preventing challenging behavior and offer implementation strategies in the context of naturally occurring routines and environments.

For more about each speaker and their topics, see the conference brochure.