The USF College of Arts and Sciences Family Study Center (FSC) shared its newest discoveries with an international gathering at the 18th World Association for Infant and Mental Health (WAIMH) Congress in Dublin, Ireland.
The WAIMH attracted more than 1,650 attendees from across the globe in July to advance the mental wellbeing and healthy development of infants, taking into account cultural, regional, and environmental variations, according to the organization’s congress website.
Four panelists from the conference's invited symposium on fathers (from left) presenters Richard Fletcher (Australia), Paul Ramchandani (U.K.), Julia Scarano de Mendonça (Paraguay) and discussant James McHale (USA). (Photo courtesy of Dr. Julia Scarano de Mendonça)
“WAIMH has shown significant interest in the Family Study Center’s approaches to infant mental health guided by our coparenting and family systems framework,” said Family Study Center Director James McHale. “The plenaries and workshops we presented gave us a chance to share the FSC’s latest work and discoveries directly with an international professional audience able to make use of that work.”
The FSC’s model encompasses collaborative research and programming involving community, state, and national partners who share the common aim of helping every child grow up healthy and nurtured, McHale explained.
“Our center’s work focuses mainly on infants and toddlers birth to age 3, a period when 80-85 percent of all lifetime brain development occurs,” he said. “The FSC partners throughout Pinellas County and the Tampa Bay area with agencies that likewise serve families with infants and very young children. We offer support and guidance to agency partners, and to families themselves, in applying different kinds of coparenting supports that work for the countless different life situations of today's modern families.”
McHale explained that the center concentrates on coparenting because when babies experience trauma and early adversity, the trauma also affects their primary caregivers.
“If professionals work with only one caregiver and don’t include others in the caregiving network—which sadly, is typical—problems can spread if that one caregiver faces their own hurdles, which happens often. But connecting with other family adults helps broaden the baby’s safety net if new threats arise. This model applies to all families across situations, and it guides all the FSC’s work,” he said.
Positive coparenting, according to McHale, doesn’t only offer protection against harm; it also supports social and emotional development and promotes thriving in infant and toddler-aged children.
At the WAIMH Congress Dr. Selin Salman-Engin from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, a visiting scholar at the FSC in 2022-23, organized a collaborative group workshop called: “Framing the Work: A coparenting model for guiding infant mental health encounters with families.”
The group, known as the International Coparenting Collaborative, unveiled a blueprint for intake and assessment with families. The blueprint, which was created during Dr. Salman-Engin’s year collaborating at the FSC, included contributions from Russia Collins, Clinical and Training Director for the FSC’s direct services clinic, the Infant-Family Center; Dr. McHale; and collaborators from hospitals and universities in Israel, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and Canada.
Practitioners who attended the workshop learned initial guidelines for engaging with families of infants and toddlers who experience trauma or early adversity and show emotional or behavioral aftereffects.
Attendees also heard about early implementation experiences of the eight collaborating sites, including USF, field testing the new clinical procedures. Just a few weeks after the workshop, on August 23, an article detailing the Collaborative’s early efforts was published in the Infant Mental Health Journal.
“Many providers agree that it's good to know all the coparenting figures impacting the child's care and well-being, especially if they see emotional or behavioral challenges. However, during the intake process it is often standard practice to contact the child's mother, and maybe complete a dyadic (infant-mother) observation," explained Collins, whose clinic at the FSC has been co-leading the International Coparenting Collaborative. “Procedures for assessing the full family, and for giving feedback to the family about the assessments and what they showed, have not been available. Often times, they’re not even considered missing by practicing professionals. The new work from the Collaborative details those procedures in a way that authentically honors the families that we aim to serve.”
FSC program innovations were also the topic of a master lecture detailing new breakthrough concepts in serving higher risk and underrepresented families. Featured in McHale’s invited lecture were USF programs serving unmarried and divorced coparents, families with child welfare involvement, and families being served by preventive programs collaborating with the FSC—including Pinellas County substance abuse treatment, maternal and child home visiting, and faith-based agency programs.
Other sessions the FSC helped anchor at WAIMH were panels describing programming for unmarried fathers and mothers across the transition to new coparenthood, support for parents in community settings including parent cafes, and the joint efforts of infants’ fathers and mothers helping their child regulate emotions during play. The latter research report, presented by FSC’s Dr. Yana Sirotkin, also presented video recordings illustrating young babies’ precocious use of their own eye gaze as a means of regulation, communication and emotion sharing.
Last, in a symposium featuring international fatherhood experts from Europe, Australia, and South America, McHale urged conference participants, most already gifted at and accustomed to supporting mothers of young infants, to build comparable facility understanding men and men’s mental health, to further their efforts with mothers, fathers and families across cultures.
“We hope those attending gained new perspective, awareness of new skills needed, and a connection to the FSC and our work should they or their organization seek additional resources,” he said. “The prominence of the USF research and clinical initiatives at this year’s Congress should help assure that coparenting remains a major priority within WAIMH in the coming years,” McHale said.
During the new academic year, as the FSC celebrates its 20th anniversary, the center will continue its many active ongoing collaborations with partners throughout Pinellas County and the Tampa Bay area and launch some new ones. Learn more about the FSC’s latest research and initiatives.