Unlock the Power
of Heart-Centered
Connections

Explore meaningful ways to nurture stronger bonds with your child.

Embrace the Power of the 24-Hour Cycle

Every moment in your childcare routine is an opportunity to build trust, love, and understanding. With 4,380 chances each year to Talk, Touch & Listen™, you can create lasting connections that strengthen your relationship with your child while honoring your culture and community.

Discover resources, tools, and strategies to make every interaction count and foster heart-centered connections that will resonate for a lifetime.

Meeting the Need:
Tools for Connection and Healing

To nurture thriving families and foster resilient communities, we must address the pressing need to fill critical gaps:

Develop culturally grounded theories and psychosocial tools to strengthen parent-child attachment relationships and foster parental self-efficacy.
Disrupt harmful intergenerational narratives of acceptance and rejection based on skin color and hair type, promoting unconditional love and inclusion.
Equip social workers and Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health (IECMH) professionals with practical, relationship-centered tools to support families navigating stress, separation, and loss.

GROWING CONNECTIONS TO CHILD, FAMILY, CULTURE & COMMUNITY

Solutions That Strengthen Bonds

The Power of Family Routines and Rituals

Family routines and rituals are powerful anchors in family life, especially during challenging times like the COVID-19 pandemic. They provide stability, foster connection, and protect mental health under high-stress conditions by creating order and predictability.

Everyday Routines Can Help Families:

Enhance Cognitive Skills: Encourage learning and problem-solving through structured activities.
Reinforce Values-Based Behaviors: Teach roles, rules, and responsibilities that align with family values.
Expand Emotional Vocabulary: Foster emotional intelligence by naming and discussing feelings.
Model Positive Communication: Use clear and intentional words to guide behaviors and strengthen relationships.
Build Adaptability and Resilience: Develop the skills to navigate change and recover from setbacks.

With intention and consistency, routines and rituals can transform everyday moments into opportunities for growth, connection, and emotional well-being.

Learn more

Discover Marva’s Expertise and Services

Marva L. Lewis, PH.D, IMHM-E®
Associate Professor at Tulane University

Dr. Marva L. Lewis is a renowned researcher and educator specializing in the rituals and routines of hair-combing interactions and their impact on parent-infant attachment relationships, with a focus on addressing colorism. She provides national training and consultation on critical topics, including:

Early Relational Health
Implicit Bias
Historical Trauma of Slavery
Racial Disparities in Child-Serving Systems

Dr. Lewis combines her extensive academic knowledge with practical strategies to empower families, professionals, and communities.

This groundbreaking contribution to the field of infant and early childhood mental health invites practitioners to critically examine and transform dominant paradigms of practice and knowledge.

It provides essential tools to effectively recognize, uplift, and prioritize non-dominant ways of knowing, sources of strength, and pathways to healing within Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) families and communities.

Reflective questions interwoven throughout the book encourage practitioners to deeply engage in self-reflection on topics such as race, racism, and the formation of internal working models of relationships. Readers are guided to explore the origins of personal values and beliefs, their influence on professional practice, and their role in fostering change to promote equity and liberation.

SERVICES

“This timely gift to the field of infant and early childhood mental health urges practitioners to question and transform dominant paradigms of practice and knowledge offering tools to effectively recognize, elevate and prioritize non-dominant ways of knowing, sources of strength, and pathways to healing in Black, Indigenous and Other People of Color (BIPOC) families and communities. . . The reflective questions woven throughout the book challenge practitioners to engage in critical self-reflection about race, racism and the formation of internal working models of relationships, the origin of personal values and beliefs, their impact on who we are and what we do and on our responsibility in changing practice to promote liberation.”

Carmen Rosa Noroña, Child Trauma Clinical Services and Training Lead, TheChild Witness to Violence Project – Division of Developmental and BehavioralPediatrics, Boston Medical Center