Description
LIVE STREAM: May 27 – 29, 2026 from 8:30am – 4:00pm (Winnipeg, MB) Please adjust your start time according to your specific time zone.
ON-DEMAND: Recorded footage & course content (certificate, videos, quiz) will be available until July 5, 2026. Please allow 3 – 10 business days for footage to be processed. Extensions cannot be granted under any circumstances.
May 27, 2026 | Day One
Optimizing Self-Regulation and Managing Big Emotions with Children & Adolescents
Presented by Caroline Buzanko, Ph.D., R. Psych
In today’s world, our children and youth face an unprecedented level of stress and pressure, making it hard to effectively self-regulate and manage day-to-day stressors. As parents, educators, and mental health professionals, it’s essential that we equip ourselves with effective strategies to help children and teens develop the skills they need to navigate life’s challenges. When they don’t know how to manage those emotions, problem behaviours often result and can negatively affect their physical, psychological, academic, and social well-being. For many, they struggle to meet even the most basic expectations. It is essential they receive the right support.
Join us for a transformative workshop designed for mental health professionals, educators, parents, and caregivers to build self-regulation and emotional management skills in children and teens. During this workshop, you’ll learn evidence-based interventions and practical tools to promote healthy self-regulation and emotional management skills in children and youth. This workshop will provide you with the knowledge and skills you need to make a meaningful difference in the lives of the children and teens you work with. Join us in this engaging and practical workshop, where you will leave with the skills and knowledge to empower children and youth to manage their emotions, overcome challenges, and build resilience.
May 28, 2026 | Day Two
Executive Functioning Skills for Children and Adolescences
Presented by Carissa Muth, Psy.D., CCC, R.Psych
8:30am – 11:45am
Planning, organizing, and emotionally regulating all are executive functioning that, when impaired, can significantly impact activities of daily living. In childhood this can range in presentation from the ability to complete homework, to the ability to refrain from anger outbursts. While executive functioning never fully develops until young adulthood, certain children are at risk for lifetime impairments. Risk factors include trauma, low socioeconomic status, stress or neurodevelopmental disorders such as ADHD or ASD. In this workshop, Dr. Muth will present tools that can be implemented in the therapeutic setting and have been evidenced to have a lasting impact on children with low executive functioning. Many skills have been suggested by professionals, such as exercise, computer games, music, but only a few have been found to have a lasting impact once the intervention ceases. For children with low executive functioning, particular nontypically developing children (including children with neurodevelopmental disorders or behavior problems), improving skills in these areas can significantly improve their ability to flourish throughout their life.
Why Attend?:
- Adopt Effective Interventions: Research has indicated that while many interventions temporarily improve executive functioning skills, not all techniques have lasting impact or allow children to apply skills to a variety of situations. This workshop will provide participants with practical interventions that have been evidenced to have lasting impacts.
- Increase Toolbox: Given the vast range of risk factors for impairment in executive functioning development, many children attending therapy would benefit from interventions, whether or not they have a neurodevelopmental disorder. As such, developing skills to address executive functioning deficits will be helpful for anyone working with
Practical Solutions to Address Anxiety Disorders with Children and Adolescents
Presented by Carissa Muth, Psy.D., CCC, R.Psych
12:45pm – 4:00pm
As high as 20% of children in Canada will experience an anxiety disorder before reaching adulthood. For many of these children, symptoms of anxiety will impede their life and development to a degree that will create impairments into adulthood. Developmental vulnerabilities place children and adolescents at unique risk and also in need of specialized knowledge regarding the assessment and treatment of their anxiety symptoms. In this workshop, Dr. Muth will ground the assessment and treatment of anxiety for children and adolescent in a neurological understanding of human development. Presenting developmentally appropriate CBT and play therapy interventions, Dr. Muth will provide practical tools for working with children and adolescents with anxiety. Participants will walk away with the ability to identify anxiety symptoms and apply immediate interventions to address psychological symptoms and reduce the likelihood of continuation of issues into adulthood.
Why Attend?:
- Practical Application: CBT is widely evidenced as the most effective method for treatment for anxiety for children and adolescents yet commonly misunderstood in application. This workshop will provide practical guidance for applying developmentally appropriate interventions for the cognitive (e.g. thought reframing) behavioural (e.g. imaginal and in vivo exposure) and physiological (e.g. addressing autonomic arousal) aspects of CBT.
- Expanded Toolbox: While protocoled therapies are often more widely studied and, as such, evidenced, alternative methods have also demonstrated efficacy in addressing anxiety in children. This workshop will present an overview and easy to apply play therapy interventions to equip participants to utilize a myriad of interventions to meet a variety of client needs.
May 29, 2026 | Day Three
Working with Stuck Kids: An Attachment Based Relational Perspective
Presented by Eva de Gosztonyi, M.A.
With over 40 years of experience working in schools, it ads become clear that there are no easy answers for teaching and working with students who have challenging behaviours. The construct of psychological immaturity (not everyone grows up as they get older) has been with us as an intuitive concept for ages, but only recently has developmental science advanced to a state where it can now yield effective strategies and interventions to address learning and behavioural challenges.
Rather than asking, “What can we do to fix this student?” we must, instead develop an understanding of why children get stuck, creating a situation which results in many kinds of challenging behaviours. This understanding comes to us through the neuroscience of development and the research on the effect of adverse childhood experiences (complex trauma) on development, learning and behaviour. It is anchored the attachment-based developmental paradigm developed by Gordon Neufeld, PhD, which considers the keys to human development: maturation, vulnerability and attachment and the role of emotions. This presentation will start with theory and then move on to present a variety of attachment-base and developmentally friendly interventions that have been implemented with success in schools across Quebec. Using this knowledge, it also becomes apparent that some of our “tried and true” interventions are not only ineffective, but they can, at times, make things worse for our students. An Intervention Continuum will be presented that proposes a number of in-class and in-school interventions that are preventative in nature, require minimal additional resources and are applicable at both the Elementary and Secondary levels.
