Mindfulness, Self-Compassion and Parenting Online Research Meeting

Sona Dimidjian, Ph.D. is Director of the Renée Crown Wellness Institute and Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on cultivating mental health and wellness among women, children, and families by engaging people’s capacities for learning to care for themselves and their communities. She develops and studies programs and practices in education and healthcare settings, with an emphasis on navigating key developmental transitions, such as the perinatal period, early childhood, and adolescence. She also has a longstanding interest in expanding access, scaling, and sustaining effective programs, using both digital technology and community-based partnerships. Her current research projects focus on preventing depression and supporting wellness among new and expectant mothers, promoting healthy body image and leadership among young women, and enhancing mindfulness and compassion among youth, families and educators. She is the co-author with Sherryl Goodman, Ph.D., of a book for new and expectant mothers, Expecting Mindfully: Nourish Your Emotional Well-Being and Prevent Depression During Pregnancy and Postpartum. She also is the editor of Evidence-Based Practice in Action: Bridging Clinical Science and Intervention. She is the recipient of numerous awards acknowledging her teaching and clinical research, including the Dorothy Martin Women’s Faculty Award, the Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award, and the Robert L. Stearns Award at the University of Colorado Boulder along with the Susan Hickman Award from Postpartum Support International and the Women and Psychotherapy Award from Division 35 of the American Psychological Association. She received her BA in psychology from the University of Chicago and her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Washington.

I am a child clinical psychologist who studies child and family health disparities and well-being from an interdisciplinary perspective. The purpose of my work is to facilitate social justice for young children and their families and to understand and promote resilience processes while decreasing risk and trauma exposure. To do this, I study the health and social, emotional, and cognitive development of high-risk infants and young children and their families, including children with incarcerated parents, children raised by their grandparents, and children born preterm, including examining the intergenerational transmission of risk, trauma, resilience, and healing. I use both quantitative and qualitative methods in my work, especially observational methods that focus on young children and families in their natural contexts as well as physiological measures. I also design and evaluate interventions for children and their parents, including interdisciplinary multimodal interventions that can be used in the criminal justice system and contemplative practices aimed at decreasing stress and increasing well-being in children and families.

Samantha Brown, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Schools of Social Work and Public Health at Colorado State University. She studies the risk and protective pathways through which early adversity shapes child health and development and family functioning. She applies a social justice lens to advance the right to equitable health and well-being through the development and testing of health-promotive and mindfulness-informed interventions that meet the unique needs of marginalized children and families. Dr. Brown’s recent work delineates key biological and behavioral correlates, such as stress physiology and sleep, that may be implicated in child maltreatment risk and child health disparities. Dr. Brown is a Licensed Professional Counselor in Colorado, and her clinical experience includes infant and early childhood mental health, domestic violence counseling, and child welfare casework.

A significant number of children experience at least one early life adversity, such as poverty or family violence. Although exposure to early life adversity may have profound effects on children, emerging evidence shows that supportive parenting can buffer the impact of adversity on later health and well-being. Intervention research suggests that cultivating mindfulness, or the ability to be aware of present-moment experiences with an attitude of acceptance and non-judgment, may have promising effects in the context of parenting. Indeed, mindfulness may not only provide caregivers with adaptive coping skills, but it may also foster resilience in children exposed to early adversity. The goals of this presentation are to (1) briefly summarize the current state of knowledge regarding the influence of mindfulness training among families with low-income and at risk of child maltreatment, (2) describe the development and preliminary efficacy of a two-phase pilot study testing the intervention, Mindful Parenting and Problem Solving, for families involved with human service systems, and (3) identify the barriers and promotors for successfully implementing mindfulness-informed intervention for underserved and hard-to-reach populations.

Dr. Tuyen Huynh, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a health disparities postdoctoral fellow in Obstetrics and Gynecology, School of Medicine and Public Health. Her research program examines existing mindfulness-based programs for families with young children. These programs include equipping parents with feasible strategies to cultivate greater mindfulness, compassion for self and others, and empathy in family relationships. In collaboration with community partners, Dr. Huynh’s work also uses iterative processes (e.g., focus groups) to co-adapt existing programs to meet the specific needs of families within the community, ensuring the long-term sustainability and the relevance of the program content and activities for families.

Parent’s emotional well-being and strong family relationships are important for positive child development. Unfortunately, poor parent emotional well-being is associated with high parenting stress, resulting in less sensitive parenting approaches (e.g., emotional unavailability) and can undermine critical regulatory processes related to adaptive emotion regulation and secure parent-child relationships. Specifically, racial/ethnic minority families disadvantaged by poverty and health disparities can exhibit elevated parenting stress. Focusing on parents impacted by these stressors may benefit from learning intrapersonal coping resources that support their emotional well-being and responsive caregiving. In partnership with the United Methodist Children’s Services in Wisconsin, the goal of this study is to systematically adapt and implement a community-based mindfulness-based program, Cultivating Healthy Intentional Mindful Educators + Families (CHIME+), with racial/ethnic minority families living with low-incomes and who have young children. The overarching goal of this pilot project is to co-adapt a mindfulness parenting program with families that is feasible to implement and is perceived to be helpful. In this presentation, we will share the history of the original CHIME program for educators and the iterative research design of the CHIME+ program for the parents and families in our study.

Dr. Holly Hatton-Bowers, Ph.D., University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is an assistant professor in child, youth, and family studies at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln and an Early Childhood Extension Specialist. Her primary interests and scholarly activity include co-creating and implementing programs using iterative designs that aim to enhance the quality of early childhood development and care, with a particular focus on emotional well-being and social-emotional development. These programs include the use of strategies that cultivate reflective practice, resilience, mindfulness, and compassion among caregivers and families. Her work informs the development of intervention and training models in family and childcare contexts.
Currently is a Principal Investigator for a ACF Head Start University Partnership Grant aiming to research the implementation of the Cultivating Healthy Intentional Mindful Educators program using community-based participatory methods.

Parent’s emotional well-being and strong family relationships are important for positive child development. Unfortunately, poor parent emotional well-being is associated with high parenting stress, resulting in less sensitive parenting approaches (e.g., emotional unavailability) and can undermine critical regulatory processes related to adaptive emotion regulation and secure parent-child relationships. Specifically, racial/ethnic minority families disadvantaged by poverty and health disparities can exhibit elevated parenting stress. Focusing on parents impacted by these stressors may benefit from learning intrapersonal coping resources that support their emotional well-being and responsive caregiving. In partnership with the United Methodist Children’s Services in Wisconsin, the goal of this study is to systematically adapt and implement a community-based mindfulness-based program, Cultivating Healthy Intentional Mindful Educators + Families (CHIME+), with racial/ethnic minority families living with low-incomes and who have young children. The overarching goal of this pilot project is to co-adapt a mindfulness parenting program with families that is feasible to implement and is perceived to be helpful. In this presentation, we will share the history of the original CHIME program for educators and the iterative research design of the CHIME+ program for the parents and families in our study.

Inspired by a longstanding interest in the promotion of well-being and the prevention of neurodevelopmental disorders and psychiatric illness, Dr. Short’s early research examined prenatal influences (stress, infection) on the offspring’s brain and behavioral development. Results from this work show an enduring influence of prenatal perturbations on offspring’s brain structure, immune function, stress reactivity and behavior. Her research has also examined the development of brain structure and function in relation to foundational cognitive abilities (working memory) in typically developing and high-risk children.

Building on this prior work, Dr. Short’s more recent research has been directed toward her ultimate goal to conduct research that informs the design and efficacy of early interventions. These research projects have included an investigation of neural plasticity associated with cognitive training in young children, the development of a Parent-Child Mindfulness Based Training program and a large scale longitudinal study that focuses on the impact of poverty on early child brain development. With the receipt of an award from the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD), Dr. Short and colleagues are currently investigating how poverty ‘gets under the skin’ to impact children’s socioemotional health and the development of cognitive skills that are important for learning (executive functions).

Another portion of her work is dedicated to community engaged scholarship. As a member of Mindfulness for All, Sarah is learning so much from her M4A partners who, as community leaders, are bringing mindfulness practices and teacher trainings to underserved communities and to People of Color for whom mindfulness practices have previously been inaccessible.

Systemic and structural racism has led to profound and persistent racial and ethnic disparities in access to mental health services, including mindfulness-based interventions. Mindfulness has been shown to promote well-being, reduce anxiety and depression, and improve health-related outcomes. However, White culture, experiences and social references are embedded in mindfulness programs in the United States and as a result, these benefits are not widely accessible to minoritized racial and ethnic communities who experience chronic exposure to race-related stressors and elevated health risks. For this reason, we have developed a collective of practioners to revise mindfulness curricula with enhanced religious, spiritual and cultural relevance that are developed by and available to People of Color (POC). This initiative titled, Mindfulness for All includes several project arms with leaders who represent and interface with multiple community sectors including: Tribal members of the Menominee Nation; African American teachers and students of the Madison Metropolitan School District; Latinx community members; a White Affinity group; and UW-Health Mindfulness which offers MBSR, teacher training and retreat experiences for BIPOC.

This presentation will review lessons learned over the last four years as our team fell apart, came together again, and developed trust and an authentic partnership to realize the dream of actualizing diversity, equity and inclusivity in mindfulness teaching and practice. We aim to showcase our experience as a template for other communities to follow and to develop a sustainable local culture where POC feel a sense of belonging in the mindfulness community and White participants and teachers acknowledge and address structural racism, racial privilege, and their biases.

Dr. Parent received his Ph.D. in Clinical and Developmental Psychology at the University of Vermont and completed his clinical psychology internship at the Alpert Medical USING BIO AS ABSTRACT FOR NOW…. School of Brown University. He is a clinical psychologist at the Children’s Partial Hospital Program at Bradley Hospital and Assistant Professor (Research) of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University. He is the author of over 60 articles, and his research is currently supported by grants from NIMHD and NICHD and has been recognized through several awards (e.g., NIH/OBSSR’s Early Stage Investigator Award, APS Rising Star).

Dr. Parent’s program of research explores mechanisms through which families influence child adaptive and maladaptive development with the goal of optimizing intervention and prevention outcomes. Current research involves understanding how enhancing family well-being alters stress-related physiological systems (e.g., epigenetics) among at-risk youth.

Dr. Cameron (Camie) Neece is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Loma Linda University. Her research interests are in the development of psychopathology under conditions of risk, with a specific focus on transactional models examining family factors that may ameliorate or exacerbate risk over time. The majority of her work has focused on the development of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Over the past decade, her research has focused on testing the efficacy of mindfulness interventions in reducing parenting stress, harsh parenting behavior, and subsequent child externalizing behavior problems in families of children with IDD/ASD. More recently, Dr. Neece has conducted clinical research evaluating the benefit of adding parent mindfulness interventions to existing parenting interventions to enhance the efficacy of these interventions. She is honored and humbled to have the opportunity to present at this conference.

Parents of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) typically report very high levels of parenting stress and their children are reported to have elevated levels of behavior problems. Research suggests a transactional relationship, with parenting stress driving an exacerbation in child behaviors, which in turn contribute to heightened parenting stress over time. Although the mechanisms through which parenting stress influences child behavior problems remain unclear and understudied, recent evidence suggests that parenting stress may contribute to negative parenting behaviors, including criticism and harsh disipline, and these behaviors have been linked to child behavior problems in families of children with IDD/ASD. Furthermore, parental stress has been found to attenuate the efficacy of the gold-standard, empirically supported parent-training interventions for improving parenting behavior and reducing child behavior problems, further underscoring the importance of targeting parenting stress for this population. This presentation will examine the impact of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in enhancing effective parenting behavior and improving engagement in behavoral parent training interventions across several randomized clinical trials in an effort to better understand the associations between parenting stress, parenting behavior, and child outcomes.

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Nirbhay N. Singh, Ph.D., BCBA-D, is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Health Behavior at the Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University, Augusta, Georgia, USA. His research interests include mindfulness, mental health, and assistive technology for supporting individuals across the lifespan. He is the Editor-in-Chief of two journals: Mindfulness and Advances in Neurodevelopmental Disorders, and Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Mindfulness, Buddhism, and Other Contemplative Practices. He has over 760 publications, including 30 books and 120 book chapters. His most recent co-edited books include Handbook of assessment in mindfulness research (2022) and Mindfulness-based interventions with children and adolescents (2021), and co-authored book, Mindfulness in the classroom: An evidence-based program to reduce disruptive behavior and increase academic engagement (2020). He is the developer of three evidence-based mindfulness-based programs, Mindfulness-Based Positive Behavior Support (MBPBS), Soles of the Feet (SoF), and Mindfulness-Based Pause, Discernment, and Response (MBPDR).

Mindful parenting is a specific application of mindfulness to child rearing processes across cultures. Since Jon and Myla crystalized the basic tenets of mindful parenting, a number of researchers have developed and tested various mindful parenting programs in an effort to help children grow into wholesome human beings who are loving, kind, compassionate, empathic, joyous, and can handle the ups and downs of life with some degree of equipoise. This presentation will briefly touch upon extant research and current trends in mindful parenting, and suggest areas for future research and collaboration across diverse fields.

Dr. Tara Chaplin is an Associate Professor of Psychology at George Mason University. Her research interests are in parenting, child and adolescent emotional arousal, and the development of substance use and psychopathology. Her research also focuses on developing parenting-focused interventions to improve family functioning and prevent adolescent substance use. With funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Dr. Chaplin is currently conducting a large randomized controlled trial of a mindful parenting intervention for highly stressed parents of adolescents.

Adolescence is a risk period for substance use (SU) and externalizing symptoms. Interventions are needed that target known risk factors to prevent SU and symptoms. One well-established risk factor for SU and symptoms is parent stress. The present study developed and tested effects of a mindfulness intervention in preventing adolescent SU and symptoms. We also explored multi-modal measures of parent stress reactivity as potential mechanisms of intervention effects.
Ninety-six mothers of 11-17 year olds (51% boys; 65% White) with elevated stress were randomly assigned to an 8-session mindfulness intervention for parents (Parenting Mindfully [PM]) or 3 session parent education control. At pre- and post-intervention and at 6-month and 1-year follow-ups, adolescents reported on SU and number of SU problems and mothers reported on adolescent externalizing symptoms. At pre- and post-intervention, parents completed self-report, laboratory, and (for 20 parents) fMRI measures of stress reactivity.
Results showed significant PM effects on preventing growth in adolescent SU, SU problems, and externalizing symptoms to 1 year follow-up, with medium effect sizes. Results also found signficant PM effects in reducing reported parenting stress and parent stress reactivity to a lab stressor. Finally, there was a non-significant finding for PM to reduce amygdala responses to negative emotional stimuli with a medium effect size.
Findings show that parent mindfulness training can prevent adolescent SU/symptoms with medium effect sizes. Findings suggest parental stress reactivity as a potential mediator. Our future work is testing PM in a large-scale RCT with examination of neural mediators.

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Liliana Lengua, Ph.D. is UW’s Maritz Family Foundation Professor of Psychology and has directed CCFW since its founding in 2011. A child clinical psychologist, she studies the effects of adversity on children and examines risk and protective factors that contribute to children’s resilience or vulnerability. Her research has focused on the contributions of children’s temperament, coping, and parenting in contributing to children’s responses to adversity.

My research uses a bioecological framework to understand children’s emotional, social and behavioral adjustment, examining the complex relations among individual, interpersonal, and contextual factors in development. I am particularly interested in individual differences in children’s responses to economic disadvantage and adversity, identifying children who are vulnerable or resilient in the face of risk. My research examines children’s temperament, self-regulation, appraisals and coping as potential mediators and moderators of the effects of risk. I’m also interested in the role that parents and families play in protecting children who experience adversity and promoting well-being.

Eva Potharst works as a health care psychologist, infant mental health psychologist, mindful parenting trainer and a researcher at UvA minds, treatment centre for parents and children of the University of Amsterdam. Together with prof. S. Bögels and others, she developed the interventions Mindful with your baby and Mindful with your toddler.

Background: Parental stress is a risk factor for maternal well-being, the mother-infant relationship, and the development of the infant. Therefore, psychological interventions for mothers experiencing parental stress are important. Mindful parenting interventions may be suitable, as they do not only address intrapersonal, but also interpersonal challenges. Until now, the Mindful with your baby course has only been evaluated in a clinical setting. The aim of the current study is to compare the effectiveness of Mindful with your baby course in an outpatient treatment centre versus a preventive setting.
Methods: Mothers who participated in the Mindful with your baby course, in a treatment centre (n = 39, 67.2%) and a preventive setting (n = 19, 32.8), completed questionnaires on mindfulness, mindful parenting, parental stress, and parent-child relationship problems at pre-test, post-test, and 8-week follow-up.
Results: Multilevel analyses showed significant improvements in mindfulness and mindful parenting, and a decrease in parental stress and parent-child relationship problems at post-test (medium to large effect sizes). At follow-up, the effects were maintained for all variables except for mindfulness, which still showed a medium effect, but did no longer reach significance. No differences in effects between the settings were found. Improvement in Listening with full attention and Acting with awareness predicted improvements in parent-child relationship problems in the total sample.
Conclusions: Mindful with your baby seems to have a positive effect, not only for mothers who are referred for psychological treatment, but also for mothers who admit themselves for a course in a preventive setting. Improvements in mindfulness and mindful parenting could be beneficial for the developing parent-child relationship.

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Stephanie Rayburn is a current doctoral candidate in Applied Developmental Science and a practicing marriage and family therapist. Stephanie’s research interests focus on community-engaged research and father development at the transition to parenthood, including identifying and developing intervention programs for perinatal fathers.

The transition to parenthood introduces new responsibilities, stressors, roles, and relationship changes for both parents; however, existing support systems and resources frequently overlook fathers. A lack of father-focused support programming at the transition to parenthood may have possible consequences for fathers’ mental health, relationship function, and engagement with their children. Identifying opportunities for supporting perinatal fathers is a critical challenge in the field and an emerging opportunity for supporting healthy family development from the beginning. Although pressure is building to increase external support systems for fathers (such as paternity leave, father-inclusive resources, and recognition by obstetric and perinatal healthcare providers), a more immediate opportunity is supporting fathers in successfully navigating the transition to parenthood within existing systems. Developing habits of mindfulness and compassion in perinatal fathers is one possible strategy to increase fathers’ ability to cope with experiences of role conflict, parenting stress, and relational stress in early fatherhood. This presentation discusses the inclusion of integrated mindfulness and compassion components in two related intervention programs, Becoming Fathers and DadSpace, and initial evidence supporting their use. Challenges and opportunities in presenting mindfulness to perinatal fathers are discussed.

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Stephanie Thompson is a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for Child and Family Well-Being. She is particularly interested in understanding the experiences of mothers that span economic adversity, depression, anxiety, pregnancy, and parenting with the hope of tailoring maternal health services to best support them. Stephanie has specific interests in how stress affects infant and children’s endocrine, parasympathetic, and neurological development. Stephanie serves as teaching faculty with the University of Washington’s Applied Child & Adolescent Psychology Master’s program, where she teaches courses on the diagnosis of psychopathology and normative social and emotional development. Stephanie is the Clinical Director of Cadence Child and Adolescent Therapy Clinic in Bellevue, WA, a training clinic founded to serve high risk youth in an outpatient context.

Encouraging research has shown mindfulness-based interventions can ameliorate stress and mental health problems and that sensitive, responsive parenting in can offset the risk for self-regulation problems often seen in infants born in families experiencing adversity. Using an intervention study, this research compared three programs that differed in timing and target: (1) A Prenatal Mindfulness-and Self-Compassion-Based Stress Management program, (2) A Postnatal Mindfulness-and Self-Compassion-Based Stress Management program and (3) A Mindfulness-Based Parenting program.

The study included 189 mothers. The sample was racially and ethnically diverse. All participants were at or below 200% of the federal poverty threshold. Participants completed 4 assessments: T1 was during their second trimester, T2 when their infants were 2-4 months, T3 when their infants were approximately 6 months, and T4 when their infants were 10-12 months.

The prenatal program was related to lower depression and a trend toward lower anxiety during pregnancy. However, treatment benefits did not persist into the postnatal period. Mothers who received the Mindfulness-Based Parenting program demonstrated lower depression than the other groups. There were no other differences in anxiety, mindfulness or self-compassion.

Mothers who received Mindfulness-Based Parenting program demonstrated higher responsiveness than all other groups. All 3 groups demonstrated higher levels of scaffolding behaviors compared to the control group.

Of important note, rates of attendance in the post-natal groups were low. Together, findings highlight that it is critical and possible to support parental mental health and effective parenting in the peripartum, but barriers to participation limit access for parents experiencing economic disadvantage.

Dr. Laurel Hicks, PhD is a Research Associate at the Crown Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. The central aim of her research agenda is to improve the health and wellbeing families from pregnancy to three years old, especially those at high risk for negative outcomes due to stressors such as violence exposure, poverty, childhood trauma, and psychopathology. She is passionate about integrating mindfulness and self-compassion into interventions and always considers the dyad of parent-baby when working with families. She is particularly interested in developing scalable and sustainable interventions that are co-created with communities and address their needs not only from a mental health point of view, but also considering a systemic and environmental context. Her work straddles clinical research, implementation and dissemination and also includes policy advocacy to ensure sustainable and effective solutions are considered and put into action. She collaborates with Dr. Sona Dimidjian on the Mindful Mood Balance for Moms study, the Alma Peer Mentoring study as well as the Lullaby study. Additionally, she is a Policy Fellow with 2020Mom and is working to change policies both in Colorado and Federally.

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is an efficacious intervention that prevents depressive relapse among pregnant women as compared to usual care. Despite MBCT’s effectiveness, there are barriers to dissemination, including availability of trained therapists, cost, time, transportation, and stigma. To overcome these barriers and to sustainably scale MBCT, an innovated digital program based on MBCT, specifically designed for women during the perinatal period, Mindful Mood Balance for Moms (MMB for Moms) was created. This presentation will explore the experience of individuals who were randomly assigned (n=230) to participate in MMB for Moms. Email messages collected during the intervention are qualitatively analyzed using grounded theory to describe and identify themes from the participants personal experiences and session completion data will be summarized descriptively. These data will help us to understand the intervention and potentially improve aspects of it based on the participant’s feedback.

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Yaffa is the founder and director of the Community of Mindful Parenting, a co-founder of Listening Mothers, and the clinical director of both Listening Mothers and Finding Calm, two research-based parenting programs. Yaffa earned a degree in clinical social work and a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Jerusalem University. She is a licensed mental health counselor with advanced training in infant mental health. She is an advocate for the well-being of children and their families and served on several local and national boards that promote this agenda, including the Governor’s Commission for Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention. Yaffa believes that by supporting parents and creating nurturing communities for them, we can set the foundation for the positive growth of children’s social, emotional, and mental health.

Yaffa is a certified facilitator of Mindful-Self Compassion. She participated in the Stanford yearlong teachers training program called CCT (Compassion Cultivation Training) that was offered through Stanford’s Center for Compassion, Altruism, Research and Education. She also completed the advanced training program in MSC (Mindful Self-Compassion) with Drs. Kristin Neff and Chris Germer

Ron is Executive Director of the Maritz Family Foundation, focused on the developing child, from the perinatal experience through adolescence, and the relationships that shape their social, emotional, neurological, and cognitive domains of development. We are especially interested in the capacity of the adults who surround and support these children and youth to manage their own stress, regulate emotion, focus attention, and to be mindfully present in the service of co-regulation, secure attachment, and the subsequent development of empathic and compassionate hearts and minds. We collaborate with representatives from local and national universities and community-based organizations to develop place-based comprehensive and coordinated exemplary models that will support optimal development for infants, toddlers, youth, and their caregivers, especially in stressed and disadvantaged communities. Ron serves on the UW CCFW Board. Ron also served as Managing Director of Seeds of Compassion, a five-day event in 2008 that hosted His Holiness the Dalai Lama and focused on early childhood development within the context of greater societal change. In addition to his philanthropy work, Ron maintains a clinical practice focusing on individual adult and adolescent psychotherapy.

Becca Calhoun, MPH is the Director of Community Programs and Training at the CCFW. She leads collaborations with community partners to create, deliver and evaluate mindfulness and compassion-based programs that support the well-being of families and providers. She previously managed the NEW Moms Connect study, which included conducting mindfulness and self-compassion interventions for pregnant and postpartum women facing economic adversity. Her previous experience includes research and non-profit management, the development and facilitation of specialized mindfulness programs for trauma survivors, 9-1-1 dispatchers and parents in the perinatal period. She has worked extensively in paid and volunteer positions to promote and support the well-being of incarcerated pregnant women, first responders, LGBTQI+, immigrant/refugee and indigenous communities.

Becca holds a BA in International Development and Geography from Clark University and a Master’s in Public Health from the University of Washington with graduate certificates in Maternal and Child Health and International Health. She is trained in both Mindfulness-Based Childbirth & Parenting and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and has been teaching mindfulness classes for over 10 years. In addition to her work at CCFW, she serves as faculty for the Mindful Birthing and Parenting Foundation, providing training and mentoring for new mindfulness teachers.

Maria is deeply committed to and passionate about supporting relationships, especially the earliest ones, with a spirit of nurturing and inquiry. In her current role, she does this through directing the Mindfulness in Early Childhood Project at ZERO TO THREE. Her current work focuses on increasing understanding and use of mindfulness and compassion in early childhood settings and parenting. As a trained meditation instructor, Maria supports others in discovering creative ways to integrate mindfulness in their parenting, relationships and work. In previous roles at ZERO TO THREE, Maria has provided leadership to two national home visiting technical assistance centers. Prior to joining ZTT in 2011, Maria developed extensive experience consulting, coaching and training on reflective practice, evidence-based program implementation and early childhood system development in Washington State.