Working With Teenage Parents: training for practitioners

Length

3½ days (Spread over two consecutive Fridays & Saturdays)

Location

Anna Freud Centre

Tutor(s)

Joan Raphael-Leff

Start time

09:00

End time

17:30

Who is this course suitable for?

Any practitioner working in a professional context with pregnant teenagers or very young parents and/or their children.

Aims of course

The course offers you a chance to gain additional knowledge of theoretical concepts and relevant research, to enhance emotional understanding and to discuss policy developments relating to infants and their young parents.

• The focus is on mental health issues and infancy as a critical period of psychosocial development.
• The training addresses physical, behavioural and emotional risk factors associated with psychological immaturity of very young parents.
• It promotes early identification of problems associated with parental emotional disturbance, neglect, violence and trauma.
• The experiential component of the course enhances awareness of cultural and ethnic diversity of families, and offers opportunities to identify personal bias and blind spots, and to tolerate the anxieties such work entails.

Training for course leaders:

An additional training session (£50) will enable you to deliver the full 'Adolescence as a Second Chance' course comprised of five half study-days, to be run by you fortnightly in your own location. This in-house course will bring together the different practitioners working with this high-risk client group in your area, to enhance their understanding of the needs, risks and double demands of adolescence and parenthood. 

You can choose to qualify as a Course Leader if you:
• are familiar with psychodynamic principles and mental health issues 
• have the leadership qualities, enthusiasm and organisational skills to deliver the Course in your own locality

Course Leaders will help their delegates:

• To develop understanding of emotional development and needs in infants, toddlers and teenagers based on a psychodynamic framework.
• To increase participants' practical proficiency of observation and listening skills, mentalization and the capacity to work with ethnic and cultural diversity, and with troubled or traumatised families in a variety of settings, identifying those at-risk with a focus on infant mental health.
• To facilitate examination of participants' cases, in safe and confidential small-groups, through exchange of ideas and casework experience, enabling participants to apply the concepts being studied to their own work practice.
• To promote multi-agency efficiency through the interdisciplinary nature of the course and appreciation of organisational dynamics.

Availability

There are currently no dates scheduled for this course. We hope to announce new dates shortly.