The BabySteps Program

The BabySteps Program has been designed by the YCS Institute for Infant and Preschool Mental Health to support parents’ capacities to provide a nurturing environment to their children and respond to their infants’ wonderful capacities to form relationships.

The families meet together in age specific parent-child developmental playgroups. They then are also offered the opportunity to meet with an individual psychotherapist who provides dyadic therapy. The groups last for an hour and light food/refreshments are provided.

It has been our hope that providing a nurturing, supportive, and caring environment for the parents themselves might free them to form healthy relationships with their children and new, supportive relationships with one another. For all parents, the arrival of their baby is a catalyst for reawakening past experiences. Our groups help to address these experiences in an effort to alter any intergenerational transmission of problems in relationships.

The sense of isolation of parenting a young child and the particular isolation associated with living in communities plagued by poverty and intergenerational trauma can be so painful. The sense of community that develops over time in the groups is our response to the internal sense of many of the participants that this is the way the world is and was intended to be for themselves and their babies. We work to present a new possibility for connection and caring in relationships—a new possibility that begins to shift parents’ relationships with us, with each other and with their infants; hope for loving relationships that may be passed on through the generations.

Groups include:
Mothers of Babies infant – 12months; Teen Parents and Babies; Parents of Toddler;
Mothers-to-Be/New Parent and Infants

Please contact Dr. Dayna Egan at dzegan@ycs.org or at 862-444-1721

Baby Steps is generously funded by The Todd Ouida Children’s Foundation, The Child Welfare Fund. The Linden Foundation, The FAR Fund and The Reitman Foundation.