Lauren Porter

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Essential Parenting: Enhancing All Families

Parenting ideas are typically reduced to tips for parents or programmes to follow, often mirroring the author's personal leanings or opinions.  This can make it very difficult to make personal parenting decisions or guide families you work with.  Research in the fields of neurobiology, psychology, child development, infant mental health and attachment can help illuminate a path that provides a pragmatic, evidence-based paradigm for parenting while remaining flexible to the needs, choices and values of individual families.  Topics to be covered are sensitivity and attunement, rupture and repair, regulation, and the neurology of socio-emotional relating.  
 
This workshop is suitable for any level of knowledge.  Those familiar with the research will find it grounded in realistic and pragmatic strategies; those newer to the topic will gain the basics along with their more in-depth applications.

Biography: Lauren Porter is the Co-Director of the New Zealand-based Centre for Attachment.  She obtained her Masters Degree in Social Work from New York University in 1995 and has since been dedicated to working with families, children and adolescents in the field of mental health counselling and training, in Germany, the US, and New Zealand. She is experienced in working with families struggling with issues pertaining to conflict and trauma, including child sexual abuse, and currently is focusing on the merging of attachment theory with neuroscientific data. A member of the External Advisory Group to the Taskforce on Child Maltreatment and Secretary of the Infant Mental Health Association Aotearoa New Zealand, Lauren is also the mother of two children.