The prevalence of significant emotional and behavioral challenges in young children ranges from 4-10 percent. Early Childhood Mental Health is an emerging new discipline designed to address these challenges and to support the healthy social/emotional development of all young children in early care settings.  Instructors Dr. Tom Davis and Sherry Shamblin, PCC-S, will offer a summer survey course on the principles of early childhood mental health through Ohio University's Counseling Departmen...

Please join child advocate and author, Holly Schlaack in a videoconferenc presentation/ discussion:  Between the Babbles: Understanding the Language of Abused and Neglected Infants and Toddlers. Sponsored by the Southeastern Ohio Early Childhood Mental Health Learning Group, the program will take place on January from 17 8:30-9:30.  There will be CEU’s for Counselors and Social Workers Please e-mail Sherry Shamblin at sshamblin@tcmhcs.org to participate. For over a decade, Ho...

With funding from Project LAUNCH, teachers in the Logan Hocking School District and their mental health partners have expanded their highly successful PATHS program. Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies or PATHS is a social-emotional violence prevention curriculum listed on the SAMSHA National Registry of Evidence Based Programs and Practices. In previous years, the LHSD program primarily focused on elementary students.

Check out some of the latest early childhood mental health news and program updates, as well as practical teaching tips for helping children develop self-control and friendships.  If you'd like to contribute your own ECMH news and strategies to future newsletters, you can e-mail them to sshamblin@tcmhcs.org.   http://www.ipacohio.org/Websites/ipac/images/vol%201%20ed%201%20ecmh%20newsletter.pdf

Sherry Shamblin, Director of Early Childhood Programs for Tri-County Mental Health and Counseling Services, also former IPAC Chair and current board member, has been selected for Robert Wood Johnson’s Evaluation Fellows Program for Retooling Professionals.

The goal of the fellowship, which targets mid-career, non-profit professionals who are undeserved in the evaluation field, is to increase the capacity of an organization to conduct program evaluation and to become better consumers of information for decision-making. Ms. Shamblin will use this opportunity to refine the evaluation of Tri-County’s early childhood mental health (ECMH) model, assess the program’s effectiveness, expand evaluation efforts to other programs within Tri-County, and disseminate lessons learned to advance the field of ECMH consultation.

Dr. Zeanah

On September 20th, the Southeastern Ohio Early Childhood Mental Health Peer Learning Group kicked off their program year by hosting a practical and informative video-conference with Dr. Charles Zeanah, the editor of the Infant Mental Health Handbook and Executive Director of Tulane University’s Institute of Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health.

Dr. Zeanah opened his remarks by commenting that young children are “best understood, assessed, and treated in the context of their primary care relationships.” Focusing on assessment protocols, he used multiple video-clips to display an array of behavioral and emotional responses between young children and their caregivers. His casual demeanor and extensive knowledge made the complex issues associated with child-parent relationships readily accessible.

In August, 10 of our local social workers and two local psychologists received training in Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, an evidence-based treatment for young children with emotional and behavioral disorders that places emphasis on improving the quality of the parent-child relationship and changing parent-child interaction patterns. Two specialists from the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Robin Gurwitch, PhD, and Erica Pearl, PsyD, conducted this intense week-long training tha...