How Listening Changes the Growing Brain:

From Labels, Medications, and Quick-Fix Solutions to

Listening, Growth, and Lifelong Resilience

Wednesday, May 4, 2016 from 4:00 - 6:00 pm

This presentation will begin by offering evidence, as described in in Dr. Gold’s first book, Keeping Your Child in Mind, that when caregivers and clinicians are curious about the meaning of behavior, rather than simply responding to the behavior itself, we promote a child’s capacity for emotional regulation, flexible thinking and social adaptation. Using material from her new book, The Silenced Child, she will show how, in contrast, our current system of care, in which we simply label behavior and seek to eliminate it with behavior management or increasingly medication, may interfere in a child’s development if we do not protect time for listening. She will integrate the wealth of new research at the interface of developmental psychology, neuroscience and genetics showing how the brain grows in relationships, with the stories she has heard from children and families in her 25 years practicing pediatrics. Behind every “behavior problem” is a story that gives meaning to that behavior. Only when we know that story do we know how to help that child and family. Dr. Gold will describe ways of listening, including listening to the body, listening for loss, and listening with uncertainty, that become available to us once we have protected the needed space and time.

Learning objectives:

• Recognize that a child’s behavior is a form of communication
• Explain how understanding that communication supports healthy emotional development
• Describe how labeling and eliminating problem behavior in the absence of listening can interfere in healthy development

Program Code: GB16

2 CE Credits for psychologists, social workers, LMHCs, educators and nurses - $25

FREE - No CE Credits

Location: William James College, Newton

Claudia M. Gold MD, is a pediatrician and writer. She has practiced general and behavioral pediatrics for 25 years, and currently specializes in early childhood mental health. She is the author of The Silenced Child: From Labels, Medication and Quick-Fix Solutions to Listening, Growth and Lifelong Resilience (May 2016) and Keeping Your Child in Mind: Overcoming Defiance, Tantrums, and other Everyday Behavior Problems by Seeing the World through Your Child’s Eyes (2011). She writes regularly for Psychology Today. Dr. Gold is on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts Boston Infant-Parent Mental Health program, William James College, and the Austen Riggs Center.