hi everyone welcome back to annual conference live at zero to three I'm will hallux excited to be here for a fireside chat on neurodevelopment for from birth to three and I'm joined here by Jesper Nala I'm she's a licensed family and merits therapist with Foothill Family Services in Pasadena Jess thanks for being here yeah hi thanks for having me this is incredibly exciting yeah absolutely for us too and so I wanted we were talking a little bit before we started rolling about the the growing knowledge that we have about brain development and just what a crucial time it is for the first couple of years to make sure kids have a strong start so can you tell us a little bit about that yeah absolutely I mean this is clearly something I love talking about um so you know one of the really fascinating things is that we're learning is that 85 to 95 percent of brain development actually takes place in the first five years of life so what that means is that the neurons in a child's brain are firing like off-the-hook crazy and this is the time where it's imperative for any sort of learning to take place right and you know this is the reason why kids aged 2 & 3 can learn multiple languages at a time right whereas us I've been trying to learn Spanish for the past like 10 years so so because of this knowledge we know that any sort of interaction we have with the kid any sort of intervention with a kid at this age is gonna produce the greatest amount of opportunity for growth and development absolutely and um so this is and this is one of the things you know we're here to talk a little bit about therapy for for infants and young children and when people think of therapy that may not be the first thing that they think about so what does that look like with kids that young yeah I know that's an excellent question um you know I think when when people hear the words infant and early childhood therapy they're very confused because they're like do you do therapy with an infant because my idea of therapy is you know someone sits on a couch and someone sits on a chair and they ask how you're feeling and you talk about your feelings but how do you do that with let's say a four month olds right so what infant and early childhood mental health looks like and what the services look like is really parent-child dyadic therapy so the client isn't the child but the client is the parent in the child dyad themselves so because at this early age in the way that the brain is developing children are dependent upon their caregivers for the learning right and especially the social-emotional growth and development so when you have a kid who's been exposed to trauma or a kid that I'm you know as having behavioral challenges the therapy really looks like working with the parent to help the child learn how to regulate to help the child learn coping skills to teach the parent coping skills so that they can stay calm in order to better support the child yeah absolutely and as we're talking about this I'm thinking about some of the services and programs that are out there what's the importance of something like Early Head Start for example in in this early place of socio-emotional development yeah I mean any sort of early intervention program especially in the first three to five years of life is imperative I mean early headstart I work for an Early Head Start so plug to EHS for sure you know Early Head Start really offers what they call comprehensive services right so you have a child entering into a program and you have a whole team of specialists not just mental health people but health nutrition parent family community engagement education all with their eyes on the child and the family right so yes social-emotional growth is a huge aspect of it but if a child isn't eating healthy or if a child is sick all the time that's going to affect their social emotional growth if parents don't have access or it accesses to resources that's going to affect their social emotional growth and development so these programs really aim to target the family as a whole to get all the needs met in addition you know these programs provide they mandate developmental screenings so we can identify very early on if a child has some sort of a developmental delay is having a typical behaviors right and when we can do that we can early link these children up to services and these early intervention services are so important going back to that eighty-five to ninety percent of brain development when a child's brain is that moldable if they have any sort of a delay or exposure to trauma or anything like that you get in and you get services at that age and the brain just absorbs it all and that's actually it's a really good segue to our next which is and we have a lot of professionals in the audience professional caregivers and service providers and what sort of advice do you have for them in terms of distinguishing between typical challenging behaviors and and things that might benefit from an early intervention that's an excellent question so one of the first things you can do to really kind of identify what is typical what's challenging in typical versus what's challenging and atypical is to learn about developmental milestones so you know for example going on the Center for Disease Control website they have a listings of you know at what age what you should be seeing and at what age if you're seeing this it's something to worry about so that's one of the first things is to really kind of educate yourself on what development looks like the second thing I would really recommend is coming at things from you know what we call a trauma-informed lens where you want to really be curious about what's happening with the children and what's happening with their families you know so if you have the kid that's coming in every day engaging in really challenging behaviors little things tend to set them off you want to really be open and curious kind of with the the family about hey you know like I'm wondering what's going on here what's going on at home how are you guys doing is there anything that's kind of happened to you or to this child that's causing this kid or to kind of had these reactions like this and when you can kind of be open to that you can treat you know you look at the child differently you look at the behavior differently yeah absolutely and they're they're definitely additional resources to explore online that are related zero to three org slash AC live we're going to be posting some related resources from this conversation there we hope you'll also join us for our next fireside chat which is gonna be at the top of the next hour on that's going to be about critical competencies for infant and toddler educators on but in the meantime Jess thanks so much for joining us thank you for having me it's been wonderful thank you we'll see you soon