Helping Parents Cope with Stress and Find Resilience

Mona M. Delahooke, PhD is a Clinical Psychologist specializing in the development of infants, children, and their families. She has received specialized training as an infant mental health specialist, and works widely with multi-disciplinary teams supporting children with developmental or emotional delays. She is a faculty member of the Early Intervention Training Institute (EITI) of the Los Angeles Child Guidance Clinic. She is a senior faculty member and Mental Health Working Group Co-Chair of the Profectum Foundation. Dr. Delahooke also provides training to personnel in the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health and the Westside Infant Family Network. Currently in private practice in Arcadia, California, she consults with parents, preschools, regional centers and school districts in the areas of developmental screening, assessment and intervention for children and their families.

Barbara Kalmanson has 40 years experience working with infants, children and their families, as well as with schools and agencies serving children environmentally and developmentally at risk . She is a founder of the Oak Hill School in San Anselmo, California, a developmental, relationship-based school for children and adolescents with Autism Spectrum and related neurodevelopmental disorders. Dr. Kalmanson has extensive experience as a clinical psychologist, a special educator, and an infant mental health specialist, including work with the Infant-Parent Program at the University of California in San Francisco; The San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, Child Development Program; California Pacific Medical Center, Child Development Center and in private practice in San Francisco and Marin County. She provides interdisciplinary consultation to schools and agencies nationwide and internationally. Dr. Kalmanson is the recipient of a FAR fund grant for the Kids Attuned website, promoting the importance of healthy relationships in infancy and early childhood. She teaches infant mental health at the Stella Maris Institute, the neuropsychiatric institute of the University of Pisa medical school. Dr. Kalmanson was the founding Academic Dean of the ICDL Graduate School, and senior faculty and for the Interdisciplinary Council on Learning & Developmental Disorders (ICDL). She’s served on multiple boards of directors including the Mayor’s Advisory Board on Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health in San Francisco, California. She received her doctorate in Psychology and Special Education from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Kalmanson is a recipient of the Zero to Three: the National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families Harris Fellowship, The Frederic Burk Foundation for Education Fellowship and a National Institute of Mental Health Training grant. Her publications and presentations focus on early identification and treatment of autistic spectrum disorders, relationship-based intervention and the importance of family-provider relationships. Recent publications include: Infant Parent Psychotherapy for Early Indicators of Autism Spectrum Disorders:How We Know How to be with Others, In Bonovitz and Harlem (eds.), Therapeutic Action in Child Psychotherapy, (in press) Echoes in the Nursery: Insights for the Treatment of Early Signs of Autism in a Baby Sibling, Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, vol. 8, no.1,2009, and Autism Assessment and Intervention: the developmental individual difference, relationship-based DIR/Floortime model, with Serena Wieder and Stanley Greenspan, Zero to Three, March 2008.

Elissa Epel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, at UCSF. Dr. Epel received her training in psychology from Stanford and Yale University, with a focus on health psychology and behavioral medicine. She studies the impact of stress physiology on ‘metabolic health,’ including food intake, insulin resistance, obesity, and premature aging at the cellular level, and how health enhancing interventions might enhance regulation in these systems. Along with Elizabeth Blackburn (Nobel Laureate, 2009), and other UCSF colleagues, she demonstrated novel links between stress and stress arousal with markers of cellular aging (telomere length and telomerase activity). Her basic research aims to understand, from a psychological and biological perspective, why some people are more vulnerable and others are more resilient to chronic stress. Her recent studies focus on mothers of children with autism, and caregivers of family members with dementia. She is leading clinical trials examining how stress reduction interventions might reverse or slow cellularaging. She has a special interest in parenting stress, and with a group of interdisciplinary colleagues is working to promote parenting stress resiliency training using a combination of workshops and technology (smartphone applications).