Longfellow Lecture
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Item The Relational Foundations of Reflection: Supporting the Development of Attachment and Symbolization in Young Children and their Caregivers(2021-04-30) Slade, AriettaArietta Slade, Ph.D. is a Clinical Psychologist whose passion for understanding early development took hold while she was an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence. Now Professor of Clinical Child Psychology at the Yale Child Study Center, and Professor Emerita in the doctoral program in Clinical Psychology at the City College of New York, she is an internationally recognized theoretician, clinician, researcher, and teacher. She is Co-Founder and Director of Training of Minding the Baby®, an interdisciplinary reflective home visiting program for high-risk mothers, infants, and their families at the Yale Child Study Center and School of Nursing. Winner of the Bowlby-Ainsworth Award, Dr. Slade has published widely on attachment, mentalization, and the early parent-child relationship. She has also been in clinical practice for nearly 40 years, working with individuals of all ages. In this talk, Dr. Slade outlines the lessons learned from Minding the Baby® and how reflective parenting, a capacity foundational to the child’s safe and secure attachment, supportive of health, wellness, openness to learning, and the capacity to love, informs the ways that practitioners, educators, and communities can support parents in developing these foundations and provide a safe and secure environment in which their children can flourish.Item Giving Children Hope: The Value of Therapeutic Play(2018-04-12) Brown, FraserThis presentation summarises the findings from a small scale observational study of the impact of a therapeutic playwork project on a group of children in a Romanian paediatric hospital. The children were abandoned at birth, and subsequently spent most of their time tied in a cot, with little positive input into their lives. Although a playworker started working with the children, nothing else changed for them. They still spent the rest of their day tied in the same cots, having little interaction with anyone else. They were not bathed, their nappies were left unchanged for long periods, and they were not fed properly. During the first year of the project we used a combination of research methods to identify developmental changes in the children: i.e. diaries, systematic & participant observation, and our own play development assessment tool. In some cases, the changes were dramatic, providing strong evidence of the power of play as a therapeutic and developmental agent. The evidence shows a speed of ‘recovery’ that was quite unexpected, and casts doubt on the ‘ages and stages’ view of play development, as seen in the work of Piaget, Parten, Sheridan, etc. The presentation will be supported by ‘before and after’ video footage (which some people may find disturbing).