Touchpoints
Help build strong family relationships to support the promotion of positive early childhood development
Touchpoints is an evidence-based, culturally safe approach for building strong family-child relationships from before birth through age six and beyond. This training will help you support families to lay the vital foundation for children’s early learning and healthy development. Touchpoints was developed and pioneered by Dr. T Berry Brazelton MD, an internationally renowned pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital, whose scientific research and clinical observation of babies and young children reshaped the practice of pediatrics.
Touchpoints is three days of intensive in-person training, followed by six one-hour virtual reflective sessions. The facilitation team includes representation from various professional backgrounds, including physicians, public health nurses, and mental health clinicians.
Participants will learn:
- Strategies to build partnerships with patients/clients that promote strengths
- A lens to promote cultural competency and responsiveness
- A framework to understand the developmental process and behavior that may be challenging and confusing
- Techniques for talking with families about their child’s development
- Strategies for active listening, collaborative problem-solving, and relationship building
Learning Outcomes:
- Increased knowledge of the developmental process
- Increased confidence building relationships with families
- Increased ability to build caregiver confidence to support their child
- Improved provider-family relationships
- Decreased parental stress in populations where parental stress tends to increase over time
- Increased ability to see the perspective of the child/infant, and the caregiver
- Increased understanding of attachment, and coregulation as the foundation for all learning
- Improved ability to apply Touchpoints developmental and relational frameworks to systems and teams
- Decreased compassion fatigue for the participants
Who should take the training?
Everyone who is supporting, or passionate about, children, families and caregivers, including:
- Family support providers
- Early years providers (ECE, daycare providers)
- Mental health clinicians
- Strong start facilitators
- Public health and maternity nurses
- Outreach workers
- Social workers
- Pregnancy outreach workers
- Mid-wives, doulas and childbirth educators
- Physicians
Training Structure
- In Person: Three days of interactive, experiential small-group learning, including scenario-based practice and group work facilitated by a multidisciplinary team of Touchpoints Facilitators.
- Virtual: Six follow-up one-hour virtual reflective practice calls that reinforce the strategies and tools learned and encourage integration of the information into practice.
Testimonials
When asked what they liked best about the training, participants said:
- “Tangible resources, awesome facilitation, beautiful learning opportunity.”
- “All of it! Knowledge, tools, dialogue, exercises, interactions, handouts, presentations, location, facility, food and facilitators were all excellent.”
- “It was so informative and made me think of different ways to approach difficult conversations with moms & dads, or even just ways to open the relationship with parents to help them and encourage their relationship with their kids.”
- “Touchpoints may very well be the answer to reduce racism in the healthcare system. I wish every organization that has had Touchpoints training put a sticker on their door to let Indigenous people know that it is a safe place to receive care.” Elder Dr. Evelyn Voyageur
- Lots of training is great, but it is the “head work”, Touchpoints is the “heart work”. Elder Dr. Evelyn Voyageur
About the National Trainer
Jan Ference has spent her entire career working with at-risk children and their families. She completed her Bachelor of Education at the University of Victoria and got her first teaching job in an inner-city school. She completed a Master’s in Counselling program at the University of Portland. About fourteen years ago, while managing a behavior resource department for a School District, her colleague suggested she attend a three-day workshop on trauma, and that was Jan’s first exposure to Dr. Bruce Perry’s model. Jan currently mentors clinicians from around the world, who are training with Dr. Perry. In 2016, Jan graduated from the Infant-Parent Mental Health Fellowship through the University of California. This fellowship was life changing, as the knowledge and understanding of early caregiving experiences is the key to understanding all life experiences that follow. In addition, she has recently completed the Reflective Supervision Academy 2021/ 2022, through UC Davis. In 2016, Jan created and led a specialized, early intervention, trauma team. This team has had inspiring outcomes working intensely with women in the perinatal period who have Opioid Use challenges. They have been able to facilitate community system change based on the rich learnings gained from the perinatal work. Jan is currently leading the transformation of the education system in the Yukon.
For more information, or to organize a training for your agency or community, please contact bccf@bccf.ca