Working with Children and Families: Clinical, Cultural, and Community Perspectives on Stress and Resilience

Zoë A Berko, PhD

Playing Behind Bars: The Use of Play Therapy with Incarcerated Youth with Developmental Trauma

Developmental trauma impedes the “behavioral system of exploration and play" (Straus, 2017). This presentation will use composite case material to illustrate how play can be incorporated into treatments to allow incarcerated youth to discover/rediscover the capacity to play in the world of emotions thereby fostering psychological growth and resilience.

Zoë Berko, PhD, is a psychologist with the New York State Office of Children and Family Services where she works with adolescents placed in juvenile justice facilities. She previously worked in secure detention for the New York City Department of Juvenile Justice. She is also an adjunct assistant professor in the MA Program in Forensic Mental Health Counseling at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice CUNY and an adjunct clinical supervisor in the PhD program in Clinical Psychology at City College, CUNY. Her clinical and research interests center on the assessment and treatment of juvenile offenders, forensic psychotherapy and Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT).

Aubrey Uresti, PhD

“There’s More to Me Than What You See”: Understanding the Inner World and Day-to-Day Lives of Children of Incarcerated Parents

The perspectives of children of incarcerated parents are underrepresented in mass incarceration research. This presentation highlights qualitative research findings about adolescents’ insights regarding parental incarceration and how the meaning they make from having a parent in jail or prison is situated in their individual, family, and extended family (school) lives.

Aubrey Uresti, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Counselor Education at San José State University. Her research focuses on individual, family, and extended family-level implications for and meaning-making processes of adolescents who experience parental incarceration. Dr. Uresti’s background as a K-12 educator, school counselor, and therapist informs her exploration of urban education and school counseling, school-based support, grief and loss, peer victimization, child and adolescent development issues, and lifelong learning for counselors through qualitative interview, image-based research, critical discourse analysis, and ethnography.

Tommy Chou, MS

Community, Compassion, and Creativity: Partnering with afterschool programs to support socio-emotional learning for traditionally underserved youth

Tommy Chou, M.S.^1,2, & Stacy L. Frazier, Ph.D.^1
1 Department of Psychology, Florida International University
² Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Brown University

This presentation will discuss efforts to develop a children’s book infused with content about emotions in partnership with caregivers and educators in Liberty City, and collaboration with nonprofit organizations to provide workforce support in the implementation of evidence-based socio-emotional learning strategies in afterschool programs.

Po-hun “Tommy” Chou began doctoral training through the Clinical Science in Child and Adolescent Psychology Ph.D. Program at Florida International University in 2013. He initially trained under Dr. Jonathan Comer, with whom he predominantly examined the use of technology to reduce barriers to evidence-based mental healthcare. Tommy transitioned to Dr. Stacy Frazier’s mentorship in his third year to pursue a growing interest in dissemination, implementation, and services research, and went on to foster partnerships with community-based organizations in Liberty City, a Miami community with high rates of poverty and violent crime predominantly home to Black/African American families. His NIH-funded dissertation work occurred in the context of this collaboration and focused on the development of a children’s book enriched with content about emotions in partnership with local caregivers and educators, and workforce support in the application of evidence-based socio-emotional learning practices in afterschool settings. To date, he has distributed over 200 copies of his book, “Have a Good Day, K!”, to Liberty City children and families through local schools, nonprofits, and public libraries. Tommy aims to build a career serving communities impacted by poverty, is currently completing his predoctoral internship at Brown University, and is thrilled to continue his journey in their Child Mental Health T32 Program this summer.

Arietta Slade ’73, Ph.D. is a Clinical Psychologist whose passion for understanding early development took hold while she was an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence. Now Professor of Clinical Child Psychology at the Yale Child Study Center, and Professor Emerita in the doctoral program in Clinical Psychology at the City College of New York, she is an internationally recognized theoretician, clinician, researcher, and teacher.  She is Co-Founder and Director of Training of Minding the Baby®, an interdisciplinary reflective home visiting program for high-risk mothers, infants, and their families at the Yale Child Study Center and School of Nursing.  Winner of the Bowlby-Ainsworth Award, Dr. Slade has published widely on attachment, mentalization, and the early parent-child relationship.  She is author, with Jeremy Holmes, of Attachment in Therapeutic Practice (Holmes & Slade, SAGE Publications, 2018), and editor of Major Work on Attachment (Slade & Holmes, SAGE Publications, 2014), of Mind to Mind: Infant Research, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis (Jurist, Slade, & Bergner, Other Press, 2008), and Children at Play (Slade & Wolf, Oxford University Press, 1994).  She is currently writing a book on reflective parenting (Slade, forthcoming, Guilford, 2021). She has also been in clinical practice for nearly 40 years, working with individuals of all ages.