Based on a framing that integrates social justice, diversity, and trauma-informed practices, this webinar will provide an overview of the impact of the intersection of structural inequities and the pandemic on children from zero to five years in Latin American families. Intimate partner violence will be addressed in this context, as well as its implications from the perspective of the young child, caregiver/parent and attachment relationships. Support/intervention strategies based on relationship, development and socio-cultural context will be discussed to promote security, stabilization, restoration of attachment relationships and protection factors in these families. Considerations at the level of advocacy and public policy will also be discussed. A combination of teaching presentation, case vignettes, and group reflection will be used to discuss the material.
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This session is part of a series led by the MHTTC Network in partnership with the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN).
 

About the presenters: 

Carmen Rosa Noroña, LICSW, MSW, MS. Ed., an IECMH-E® Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Mentor-Clinical - Carmen Rosa Noroña is originally from Ecuador. For over 25 years, she has provided clinical services to young children and their families in a variety of settings. She currently is the Child Trauma Clinical Services and Training Lead at Child Witness to Violence Project and the Associate Director of the Boston Site Early Trauma Treatment Network at Boston Medical Center, an NCTSN Category II center. She is a Child-Parent Psychotherapy National Trainer, an expert faculty of the Diagnostic Classification of Mental Health and Developmental Disorders of Infancy and Early Childhood Training (DC: 0-5) and one of the developers of the Harris Professional Development Network Diversity Informed Tenets for Work with Infants Children and Families Initiative (https://diversityinformedtenets.org) and of the Boston Medical Center Family Preparedness Plan for Immigrant Families.

Wanda Vargas, Ph.D.- Dr. Wanda Vargas, currently the Senior Psychologist at New York Presbyterian’s Family PEACE Trauma Treatment Center, an NCTSN Category III center, dedicates herself to improving the safety and well-being of underserved young children and caregivers who have been exposed to trauma. Dr. Vargas immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic at the young age of 3, and later earned a Ph.D. in the combined Clinical and School Psychology program at Hofstra University where she developed an interest in maternal stress and mother-child dyads. Through her leadership at Family PEACE, Dr. Vargas has been working on creating a trauma-informed approach to identifying at-risk young children and developing programming that is client-centered and culturally attuned to the needs of the community, in the hopes of fulfilling a dream of one day being able to break the intergenerational transmission of trauma for our nation’s children.