The DTD Newborn Communication Skills Course
Reading Infant Cues and Temperament
Babies are communicating all the time; but as adults we aren’t always well-versed in understanding them or recognizing their cues. The key to parent satisfaction, confidence, and infant mental health is parental sensitivity to infant cues. Once parents learn to read their babies, they can usually lessen infant crying and develop successful approaches to sleep and feeding. We’ve designed this course to help doulas and medical professionals explore, identify, and respond to infant communication so they can better support their parent clients and patients in connecting with their new infants. This course is ideal for:
- Perinatal professionals
- Clinic and hospital nurses
- Home visitors
- Birth and postpartum doulas
- Midwives
- Lactation professionals
- Physicians
- Childcare providers
- Parenting educators
Course Recognition
The course is approved by Doulaing The Doula for 5 CE’s hours. This training has been approved for 4 nursing continuing education contact hours by the California Board of Registered Nursing Licensed Continuing Education Provider #CEP16959. While the total length of the course is five hours, one hour is considered review material for nurses.
Course Content
This workshop is designed to increase the skill and accuracy of doulas, nurses, and other perinatal professionals in recognizing infant cues to an advanced level of 85% agreement. Participants will:
- Analyze infant communication video content focusing on a wide range of babies as both individuals and in small groups
- Learn how to engage parent curiosity in what their child is naturally doing
- Identify and analyze the nine measures of infant temperament and key temperament profiles. Exploring ways to co-create knowledge with parents about their child
- Developing a working model of that child‘s temperament with their parent(s)
- Discuss subjective and objective criteria for infant communication and cues
- Participate in peer practice
Tuition: $200 Register for Course
About Your Course Facilitator,
Dr. Amy Gilliland
Amy L. Gilliland, Ph.D., BDT(DTD), CSES, is a Research Fellow in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Human Ecology, with advanced degrees in human development. She is also an AASECT certified sexuality educator supervisor with advanced training in attachment, infant communication and infant mental health. She is also a highly regarded birth doula researcher, one of the most highly regarded birth doula trainers in her field, and a decade as a psychology faculty member at Madison College. Mostly she just enjoys hanging out with babies when she gets a chance.
