Deconstructing Systemic Racism within our Infant & Early Childhood Mental Health and Early Childhood Systems

By Dr. Barbara Stroud

As providers within the Infant, Early Childhood Mental Health and Early Childhood service systems, we are charged with developmental promotion, prevention and intervention. Now is the time to name and dismantle the race-based inequities within our systems. The goal of this session will be to identify the negative impact of systemic racism within our developmental science. How might our current service delivery systems be hampering successful outcomes for families of color or otherwise marginalized groups within the prenatal to five community? Our Eurocentric entrenched intervention models often re-enact historical traumas of injustice, marginalization, and emotional abuse for the most disadvantaged groups. It is time to take a hard look at our systems and service delivery. Our children and families deserve better; this session will prepare us for the challenge by:

● Describing the history of white supremacy, as it is present in our developmental science and how BIPOC, Queer, Disabled people and many more are unseen, miss-seen or dismissed

● Naming the current challenge of systemic racism and how it impacts families and providers at the relationship level, and the assessment, and intervention phase

● Proposing approaches to address these inequities in services and systems. Action steps include an assessment of our systems, putting health before profit, adopting a public health approach to developmental supports, an 'every child' model vs 'those children' model, applying a trauma informed lens to our broken systems and slowing down for reflection by all parties.

Following the presentation, Dr. Stroud will moderate a panel of cross system experts who will discuss unique challenges within their system and identify strategies to address them.

Date & Time

Wednesday, May 18, 2022

12:00pm – 3:00pm EST