Approximately 240 early childhood educators, coaches, consultants, and advocates gathered on June 12, 13, and 14 for San Francisco’s third infant/toddler conference, hosted by DEC and WestEd. The event was an opportunity for San Francisco’s infant/toddler educators to learn, share, and play together with the goal of centering children’ emotional security in our early childhood programs. This year’s conference theme was “Safety in the Spaces Between”, building on the concepts and conversations that began at previous conferences and various training events throughout the year.
A new element of the 2025 conference was a pre-conference session entitled, “Attachment in Context: Supporting Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder” presented by Cynthia Zierhut-Ursu, Ph.D. Dr. Zierhut-Ursu provided information about the early autism profile in infancy and strategies for helping children with autism feel seen, known, and heard. This year’s pre-conference topic was inspired by questions and conversations from last year’s conference—just one example of how we are striving to be responsive to the field’s professional development needs!
Throughout the main conference, attendees continued their exploration of the attachment relationship as a critical space for supporting infant/toddler emotional development, emotion understanding, and emotion regulation. A key focus was exploring our own emotional competence as a necessary part of facilitating children’s developing emotional competence.
Emotional competence is comprised of emotional expression, emotion knowledge, and emotion regulation. Each of the conference plenary sessions focused on one of these components, while the breakout sessions looked at some of the dynamics that take place within the attachment relationship.
- Our first breakout session, “Are You Safe?”, presented an opportunity for attendees to consider this layered question from the child’s point of view.
- As my caregivers, how much do you understand about your own emotional lives? Are you connected or disconnected from your own emotional experiences? In your “befores”, did someone provide emotional safety for you?
- How do your early experiences impact your ability to be a source of emotional safety for me now?
- Our second breakout session, “Am I Safe?”, focused on the messages that children receive from their attachment figures. Can I be myself with you? Is it safe for me to explore and express the full range of emotional experience? Can you hold my big feelings…or will you prevent, dismiss, shame, or fear them?
- Our third breakout session, “Let’s Be Safe Together”, explored co-regulation as a key process through which children receive support from their caregivers for modulating and managing their feelings in times when their emotional experiences exceed their resources.
As always, DEC leadership was there to welcome and participate alongside our multi-lingual audience. Director Ingrid Mezquita gave opening remarks, Programs Quality Manager Jennifer Delos Reyes presented the conference vision and values, and Deputy Director of Early Learning Meenoo Yashar sent us off with reflections from her clinical background. This year’s conference also featured a stellar lineup of new and returning conference presenters: Zoila Cartagena, Elizabeth Criswell, Janelle Espino, Diana Gameros, Amber Morabito, Ee Leng (Elaine) New, Cathy Tsao, and Cynthia Zierhut-Ursu. We hope you will join us for the next conference in June 2026 as well as several other attachment-focused events throughout the year!