I-CEPS 2025 Program
Evidence based parenting support for all families: The challenge, progress and future directions.
Professor Matthew Sanders - Keynote Address
"Professor Matthew Sanders is a Foundation Professor of Parenting Studies and Family Psychology, Strategic Advisor to the Director of the Parenting and Family Support Centre and Founder of the Triple P Positive Parenting Program at The University of Queensland. Professor Sanders is a global leader in the development, implementation, evaluation and dissemination of parenting and family interventions. His major career accomplishment is the development of the Triple P – Positive Parenting Program, a unique multilevel system of evidence-based parenting support that is the world’s most extensively evaluated and widely implemented parenting intervention system. The internationally recognised Triple P-Positive Parenting Program is now run in 72 countries around the world in 23 languages. Research on Triple P has been conducted in 42 countries. Over 106,000 practitioners have been trained to deliver Triple P programs. Professor Sanders has published extensively on parenting, family psychology and the prevention of social, emotional and behavioural problems in children. Triple P has million families around the world."
Bringing Incredible Years Programs to Scale with Fidelity
Professor Carolyn Webster-Stratton - Keynote Address
"Carolyn Webster-Stratton, MSN, MPH, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington, School of Nursing, and Developer of the Incredible Years® Series. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and pediatric nurse practitioner. Dr, Webster-Stratton is a leading expert on training parents and teachers in child behavior management skills as well as training clinicians in curriculum for helping children develop social and emotional skills, problem solving and school readiness. She has published books for teachers, therapists, parents and children as well s numerous randomized control group studies evaluating the Incredible Years programs. She has over 40 years of clinical and research experience in helping families and teachers who have young children with challenging behavior, Attention Deficit Disorder and developmental delays. "
Digital support for parents: Reflections on its rationale, research support, challenges and future directions.
Professor David Kavanagh - Keynote Address
David Kavanagh is an emeritus professor in psychology at Queensland University of Technology who also has honorary positions at the Universities of Queensland and New South Wales. While his research has primarily focused on improving treatments for addictions and other mental disorders, facilitating parental and family wellbeing has long been a significant theme. Since 1995 he has been developing and testing remote delivery of psychological support using letters, web programs and apps, and from 2013-20 he led eMental Health in Practice, which encourages and supports the use of digital mental health by practitioners across Australia. He has published over 290 refereed journal papers, 9 books and 50 book chapters, is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and has won multiple research awards. He has contributed to many expert advisory committees to governments, including work on Australian standards for digital mental health services.
Parental stress and distress in war-affected populations: why addressing caregiver wellbeing is essential to supporting the wellbeing of conflict-affected children
Professor Kennith Miller - Keynote Address
Ken Miller is the Edith Lando Professor of Counselling for Refugee and Immigrant Youth and Families at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His work is focused on understanding and addressing the mental health needs of conflict-affected populations. He has published extensively on the various pathways by which war impacts mental health and has a particular interest in parental wellbeing and parenting in war-affected families. Together with teams in Lebanon and Gaza, he recently led the development and evaluation of the Caregiver Support Intervention (CSI), a nine-session mindfulness-based group intervention aimed at lowering stress and distress in conflict-affected parents. Dr. Miller is the co-editor of The Mental Health of Refugees and the author of War Torn: Stories of Courage, Love, and Resilience. His blog The Refugee Experience can be found on PsychologyToday.com
Children Vary in Their Developmental Plasticity/Susceptibility to Environmental Influences
Professor Jay Belsky - Keynote Address
Jay Belsky is Emeritus Professor Human Development at the University of California, Davis (2011-present), an internationally recognized expert in the field of child development and family studies, and author of more than 500 scholarly publications, including The Origins of You: How Childhood Shapes Later Life. His area of special expertise addresses effects of developmental experiences and environmental exposures early in life on psychological and behavioral development. He was named among the 200 Eminent Psychologists of the Modern Era in 2014 (Archives of Scientific Psychology); in 2015 listed among the top 100 “Greatest Living Behavioral and Brain Scientists” based on citation analysis; and in 2019 among the top 0.01% of all scientists based on impact (PLoS Biology, Ioannidis et al.). His latest book entitled The Nature of Nurture: Rethinking why, how, and for whom early life shapes later life will be published in 2025 by Harvard University Press.
Perinatal strategies to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents experiencing complex trauma
Professor Catherine Chamberlain - Invited Address
Professor Catherine Chamberlain is a Palawa Trawlwoolway woman (Tasmania), Head of the Indigenous Health Equity Unit at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne. A Registered Midwife and Public Health researcher, her research aims to identify perinatal opportunities to improve health equity across the lifecourse. She is inaugural Editor-In-Chief of First Nations Health and Wellbeing Lowitja Journal, inaugural Chief Midwifery Officer for the College of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nursing and Midwifery, and Principal Investigator for three large multi-disciplinary projects which aim to address intergenerational trauma impacting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in the perinatal period – Healing the Past by Nurturing the Future, Replanting the Birthing Trees, and Relighting the Firesticks.
Parenting support for refugee and migrant families: Is it needed, and does it make a difference?
Associate Professor Fatumo Osman - Invited Address
"Dr Fatumo Osman is an associate professor and senior lecturer at Dalarna University in Sweden. She is also the deputy head of the School of Health and Welfare. Dr Osman obtained her PhD in Medical Science at Karolinska Institutet in 2017 with a dissertation evaluating culturally tailored parenting support programme for Somali-born parents living in Sweden. Her research interests are parenting support programmes tailored and delivered to immigrant and refugee parents, refugee children and young people's acculturation and mental health, and community-based intervention. In her research, Dr. Osman places great emphasis on engaging directly with the people being studied—not just researching about them, but collaborating with them. In 2018, Save the Children in Region Vastmanland in Sweden awarded Dr Osman for Children's Rights."
An Attachment and Trauma Informed Program (Connect) for Parents of Adolescents with Serious Mental Health Challenges: Evidence, Mechanisms of Change and Scaling Up Across Diverse Populations
Professor Marlene Moretti - Invited Address
Marlene Moretti (moretti@sfu.ca), Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Canada Research Chair Tier 1 and licensed clinical psychologist, is the developer of the Connect Program, a manualized, 10-session attachment-based and trauma-informed intervention designed for parents and other caregivers of adolescents with serious behavioural and mental health problems. Over 25 years, this work has entailed close collaborations within culturally, politically and economically diverse communities, and international scientific, community and government partnerships, to promote the awareness, development and implementation of evidence-based interventions specifically tailored to parents of teens. Supported by national and international RCTs and broad implementation trials, and translated in nine languages, Connect is recognized as a Level 1 (recommended) intervention by the California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare. Connect has proven to be flexible to gender, culture, and economic diversities while retaining flexibility and positive program outcomes for youth, adoptive and birth parents, and kinship and foster carers.
The New Ecology of Early Childhood: Challenges and Opportunities for Parenting Support Research, Practice, and Policy
Dr Phillip Fisher - Invited Address
"Dr. Philip Fisher is the Diana Chen Professor of Early Childhood Learning in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, where he serves as founding Director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood. He is also a Courtesy Professor of Pediatrics at the Stanford School of Medicine. His research, which has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies since 1999, focuses on (1) developmental neuroscience of early life adversity, (2) supporting community-based early childhood systems to insure that all children thrive from the start, and on (3) developing tools and identifying pathways to accelerate the pace of early childhood research. He is particularly interested in prevention and programs for improving children's functioning in areas such as relationships with caregivers and peers, social-emotional development, and academic achievement. He is the developer of a number of widely implemented evidence-based interventions for supporting healthy child development in the context of social and economic adversity, including Treatment Foster Care Oregon for Preschoolers (TFCO-P), Kids in Transition to School (KITS), and Filming Interactions to Nurture Development (FIND). Dr. Fisher is also currently the lead investigator in the ongoing RAPID-EC project, a national survey on the well-being of households with young children. He has published over 200 scientific papers in peer reviewed journals. He is the recipient of the 2012 Society for Prevention Research Translational Science Award, and a 2019 Fellow of the American Psychological Society."
What's new at I-CEPS 2025?
Themes
Design your own schedule
The theme of the 2025 I-CEPS is “Parenting support: A common pathway to improving diverse outcomes for children and young people.” In line with this theme, the Congress aims to bring together a mix of perspectives to effectively address the varied issues related to parenting support. Learn more about the Congress sub-themes and abstract submission process here.
The main program will run continuously across three 24-hour days (4-6 June 2025). With access to a range of live and recorded presentations, you can design your schedule to fit within an average working day, or block out some time to network with international attendees and presenters.
Improved navigation options and key word searching will make it easier to identify the presentations most relevant to your interests.
Parent Day
We are proud to introduce 'Parent Day,' an event co-designed with parent organisations to facilitate meaningful dialogue and collaboration between parents and professionals. Parent Day will be held on the Congress's fourth day (7 June, 2025). Planned activities include topic-specific parent seminars, skill-building workshops, Q&A sessions with program leaders, and inspirational guest speakers.
Networking opportunities
The program will have dedicated time for live Q&A's, interactive workshops, and Action Circles allowing direct contact with international leaders and presenters in the field of parenting support.
We are also introducing a matchmaking feature to facilitate interactions between participants with similar interests.