Child First Mental Health & Development Clinician

Overview

JOB SUMMARY:

The Mental Health and Developmental Clinician partners with a Care Coordinator to support families referred to Child First. The Clinician uses Child Parent Psychotherapy, a relationship-based, dyadic, parent-child treatment model, which focuses on the primary attachment relationships of the young child. The Clinician engages with both the caregiver and child in a supportive, reflective, and exploratory manner which fosters a protective, nurturing, and responsive parent-child relationship.

The Clinician’s therapeutic intervention focuses on
1) helping caregivers understand typical developmental challenges and expectations;
2) increasing caregivers’ ability to reflect on the meaning and feelings motivating a child’s behavior;
3) supporting caregivers’ problem solving; and
4) helping caregivers understand the psychodynamic relationship between parental feelings, history, and the caregiver response to the child. The Clinician also provides consultation to teachers in early care and education settings, as needed. The best candidate for this position is highly organized, self-motivated, reliable, and flexible with an openness to learning, capacity for self-reflection, eagerness to participate in reflective clinical supervision, and desire to be part of a team.

• Engage with the Child First family and the Care Coordinator in the collaborative family assessment process (i.e., gather information from interviews, observations of interactions and play, reviewed records, collateral sources, and standardized measures).
• Use all available information to develop a thoughtful, well-integrated clinical formulation and Child and Family Plan of Care, in partnership with the Care Coordinator and family.
• Provide Child First home-based psychotherapeutic intervention with young children and their caregivers using relational, dyadic psychotherapy (CPP) and other modalities.
• Help the caregiver gain insight regarding personal history (including trauma history), feelings for the child, and current parenting practices.
• Support crisis situations by assisting the family in times of urgent need (e.g., risk of harm to child or caregiver, pending child removal), in consultation with the Care Coordinator and Clinical Supervisor.
• Provide mental health and developmental assessment and consultation within early care and education settings and to other early childhood providers.
• Embrace use of videotaping to enhance both therapeutic work with families and reflective supervision.
• Engage in weekly individual, team, and group reflective clinical supervision with Clinical Supervisor.
• Engage actively in all aspects of the Child First Learning Collaborative, including in-person or live-remote training, distance learning curriculum, and specialty trainings.
• Track completion of all assessments and enter in the appropriate database.
• Keep all appropriate documentation for clinical accountability and reimbursement.
• Maintain schedule and complete tasks to achieve home visiting Benchmarks and meet Accreditation standards.
• Participate in other clinical and administrative activities as appropriate.

• Licensed or license-eligible (provisionally licensed) master’s level mental health provider.
• Experience working psychotherapeutically with culturally diverse children and families, including parent-child therapeutic work and play therapy with very young children (0-5 years), for a minimum of three years preferred.
• Past CPP training is highly valued.