Living the Process: Family Perspectives on the Power of Relationships
Friday, March 6, 2026 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Tyler P. Choate, MS, CCC-SLP, IECMH-E® with Rebecca Berg, OTR/L, IMH-E®; Jeannie Gutierrez, PhD; Ricki Robinson, MD, MPH

In this interactive workshop, families are invited to speak directly about what has shaped their experience of care. This session centers families’ voices and lived experiences as essential sources of knowledge in relationship-based practice.

Through a curated selection of guided interviews, participants will hear from families reflecting on their experiences within developmental, relationship-centered interventions. Families with a range of backgrounds, needs, and experiences will speak to what shifted over time, what supported growth, what fostered safety and trust, and how being held within a relational process affected not only the identified child, but the family system as a whole. These stories illuminate the subtle process in which the power of relationships is manifest in growth, healing, and development.

Following a set of brief recorded interviews, participants will engage in small-group dialogue using a reflective guide designed to support meaning-making, integration, and resonance with their own clinical, educational, or caregiving roles. Attention will be given to relational presence, tangible relational tools, and the ways families experience being partners in treatment without hierarchical boundaries between professionals and patients.

The session concludes with a panel response from interdisciplinary clinicians who will reflect on the family narratives and synthesize themes from across day one of the conference. Panelists will explore how family perspectives deepen and challenge professional assumptions, and how relationship-centered work unfolds across contexts, disciplines, and roles.

Together, this session offers space to slow down, listen carefully, and reflect on how relationships shape development in the context of family systems.

As a result of this presentation, participants will be able to:

1. Integrate family and caregiver perspectives into clinical thinking that guides assessment, intervention, and goal making.
2. Describe the impact of relationship-based interventions, trust, and connection on family wellbeing.

Working with Children Using a Family Systems-Socio-Cultural Framework
Sunday, March 8, 2026  11:15 AM – 12:45 PM
Martha E. Edwards, PhD
Panel Discussion
Moderator: Sima Gerber, PhD, CCC-SLP
Panelists: Martha E. Edwards, PhD; Griff Doyle, PhD; Beth Osten, PhD, OTR/L

Donald Winnicott famously said, “There is no such thing as a baby… there is a baby and someone.” And that someone is not just one person. That someone is a caregiving system that is embedded in nuclear and extended families who are, themselves embedded in a socio-cultural context. In working with children clinically, it is essential to consider how their neurobiology might shape their behavior and understand their experience – what they think, feel, need, intend. And it is equally essential to identify the impact of the family system on the child – including each parent’s interaction with the child, the parents’ relationship, the sibling relationships, and relationships with extended family. And it is also essential to recognize how the family’s socio-cultural context provides support and/or causes stress to the family and its members.

In this session, Dr. Edwards will use her work with a five-year-old child and his family to illustrate how these complex dynamics surface in the treatment of child difficulties. Through video clips of therapy sessions, she will: (1) demonstrate how to use play therapy activities to build a working model of each family member and assess family dynamics, (2) demonstrate how to use video review with parents to assess their capacity to reflect on themselves and their children; (3) present a developmental-socio-cultural conceptualization of the child and family that will guide treatment.

As a result of this presentation, participants will be able to:

1. Identify the following parenting processes in a family’s life: (a) developing the emotional relationship; (b) promoting exploration; and (c) guiding towards interdependence.
2. Apply at least three family play therapy activities with families.
3. Develop a relational hypothesis that helps explain a family’s dynamics and guides the interventions to resolve the presenting problem.

Creating Healthy Families-Therapists and Parents Partnering Together
Sunday, March 8, 2026 12:50 PM – 1:50 PM
Diane Selinger, PhD

This presentation will focus on the collaboration between therapists and caregivers in relationship-based, developmental therapy. DIR has a long history of actively involving caregivers in therapy sessions and resisting trends that exclude and sideline them from the process. With a therapist as partner, caregivers can be agents of their children’s growth—and the wellbeing of their whole family. Participants will develop a consideration of the whole family when providing effective support to children and caregivers. There will also be a special emphasis on siblings, who have a unique experience within the family.

This session will apply core components of the DIR framework to our working model for supporting families and caregivers. The Functional Emotional Developmental Levels (FEDLs), a cornerstone of DIR, will serve as an anchor. We will use this critical component of the model to think about supporting caregivers in regulating, engaging, interacting, playing, communicating, problem solving and thinking with their children. Another emphasis will be on framing the interaction between a child’s and a caregiver’s individual differences as they arise in sessions or as part of everyday life. By growing an awareness of their own profile and experience, caregivers are better equipped to help a child climb the developmental ladder. Thus, this presentation will discuss therapist-parent collaboration at both the family level and in micro, moment to moment interactions that occur between child, parent, and therapist.

As a result of this presentation, participants will be able to:

1. Explain the individual differences of parent/caregiver, and explain why this is important.
2. List two strategies on how to partner with parents/caregivers to work at the different Functional Emotional Developmental Levels.

The History and Future of DIR: Lessons Learned from Families
Sunday, March 8, 2026 4:55 PM – 5:55 PM
Serena Wieder, PhD with Ruby Salazar, LCSW, BCD

The DIR Model emerged from a deep commitment to comprehending and supporting each child’s and family’s unique developmental path. DIR provided a revolutionary framework that shifted the focus from symptom reduction and isolated skills to the holistic promotion of emotional, social, and cognitive development, redefining development, identifying the role of individual differences and the power of relationships across the lifespan. Did we need another model of development? Yes. This session will describe the journey we took over forty years to create the DIR Model and a conversation with Ruby Salazar reflecting on lessons learned and needed.

Dr. Wieder and the conference chair, Ruby Salazar, offer a critical perspective on the value of families in our therapeutic frameworks. Together, they will synthesize and integrate key concepts from the conference, and adjust our focus on those concepts through a DIR lens. Participants will witness the kind of reflective thinking that is required to integrate multiple perspectives and drive our work forward.

As a result of this presentation, participants will be able to:

1. Describe the origin of the DIR model and how it relates to families.
2. Recognize the core concepts of DIR to integrate them into individual and family-based interventions.