Let’s Connect® Parenting Intervention: Virtual Training (August 2025)

What is Let’s Connect®?

Let’s Connect® (LC) is a trauma-responsive parenting program that teaches caregivers to identify and respond to children’s emotional needs and behaviors in a way that builds connection and warmth and promotes children’s emotional competence, sense of emotional security, and well-being. Let’s Connect® does this in four primary ways:

• Provides caregiver education about resilience, social and emotional development, family emotional climate, children’s behavioral challenges, and other topics specific to each family, including child trauma.
• Builds caregivers own social and emotional skills and well-being, including caregiver self-awareness, perspective taking, emotional regulation, and supportive presence.
• Supports caregivers in developing intentional environments that integrate rituals, routines, and daily rhythms into the home to promote predictability, consistency, and opportunities for connection.
• Teaches caregivers specific skills for interacting with their child in a way that promotes supportive relationship quality, child social and emotional competence, and children’s mental/behavioral health and well-being.

Let’s Connect® skills are grounded in developmental and clinical research. Research shows that caregiver response to child emotion is central to fostering children’s social and emotional competence (e.g., emotion regulation), emotional security, mental/behavioral/physical health, and overall resilience.  LC offers individualized training, skills modeling, and live support for skills practice for caregivers of children and youth (ages 3-15) over approximately 12-16 sessions. LC can be implemented in-person or virtually. 

Families gain specific tools for addressing behavioral challenges, understanding their youth’s underlying needs, and talking about important, and sometimes difficult family topics, including family transitions, divorce, separation, illness, trauma, grief and loss.

Let’s Connect® can be delivered as a stand-alone parenting prevention program for any family as well as for families who have experienced significant adverse life events, trauma, or other challenges. Let’s Connect® can also be used as a ‘strategic enhancement’ to evidence-based child and family interventions, such as Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Let’s Connect® has been designated as a promising practice by the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. For more information, please visit: letsconnect.org

LC skills include:

• Noticing and Appreciating
• Listening to Learn more
• Labeling and Focusing on Feelings
• Emotion Support/Validation skills
• Emotion Coaching skills
• Strategies for reducing behavioral challenges

LC skills are taught to parents/caregivers using a variety of methods:

• direct instruction and discussion
• role play
• live, guided skills practice
• reflection
• guided mindfulness & self-care practices

Let’s Connect® developers and trainers have experience delivering Let’s Connect® to hundreds of families and supporting communities with cultural adaptations nationally and internationally. LC is currently being delivered across the US, including with many Spanish-speaking families, as well as internationally in Canada, Singapore, and Japan. The Let's Connect® team is committed to continually learning how to improve feasibility, relevance and cultural responsiveness of the program, through collaboration with families and community providers. During Let's Connect® four-day virtual training, attendees will:

• Learn how to implement Let’s Connect® with individual families
• Practice Let’s Connect® skills through role-play/vignettes
• Receive coaching and feedback on use of Let’s Connect® Skills by trainers/consultant.
• Learn how to track parents’ skill acquisition and use
• Gain access to clinician tools and family materials
• Be eligible for the optional LC group delivery training 

Training will be highly interactive with case examples, self-reflection and active skills practice.

Training Schedule:

Dates: August 4th, August 5th, August 11th, August 12th 2025

Time: 8:00am-12:00pm SGT

(August 3rd, August 4th, August 10th, August 11th, 2025 6:00pm-10:00pm MDT)

Ongoing Web-Based Consultation 

Web-based consultation is available for applying LC with your child/family cases following the in-person training for 6 months (a total of 12 hours). Consultation meetings are 60-minutes in duration and held over Zoom conferencing. Groups have approximately 8-10 clinicians.

• Consult meetings are 2x monthly  

Additional details regarding consultation will be provided during training.

Cost: SGD 825 per participant, includes:

• 16 hours of live virtual training
• 12 hours of follow-up web-based case consultation
• Materials and resources

Special Rates:

• Early Bird: Register by July 15th to receive a 5% discount on individual tickets (automatically applied during checkout).

• Group Rate: A 10% discount is available for groups of 10 or more from the same agency. Please contact natalie.blunt@colorado.edu to coordinate group registration.

  Please note: Humanitix applies a processing fee to all rates listed above.

Contact Information: For any questions or concerns, please email Natalie Blunt by email at natalie.blunt@colorado.edu.  

Trainer Biographies

Let's Connect® Trainer

Monica Fitzgerald, Ph.D. 

Dr. Monica Fitzgerald is a licensed clinical psychologist and Senior Research Associate at the University of Colorado Boulder.  She directs the Center for Resilience + Well-Being within the Institute of Behavioral Science. Dr. Fitzgerald has deep expertise in childhood trauma and resilience, social emotional development, family communication and parenting. She has extensive experience with community dissemination of evidence-based, trauma-focused interventions for youth and families and implementation science.  She and her CRW team also focus on expanding prevention services for youth and families, through developing and evaluating trauma responsive prevention programs that build strong adult-youth relationships and safe, supportive environments in families and schools. Dr. Fitzgerald is a co-developer of Let’s Connect® and Resilience in Schools & Educators (RISE), and a certified trainer and consultant in the trauma focused family interventions AF-CBT and TF-CBT. She enjoys training and consulting nationally and internationally and learning with communities applying cultural adaptations. She is committed to living trauma-informed anti-racist principles, actions and restorative practices.

Dr. Fitzgerald obtained her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the University of Georgia and completed a clinical internship and NIMH Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Child Traumatic Stress studies from the National Crime Victims Research Treatment Center at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, SC. She has published numerous articles and chapters. Dr. Fitzgerald loves being a parent of three and enjoys rock climbing, mountain biking, skiing, and tending to her orchids at home in Boulder, Colorado. 

Marcela Torres Pauletic, Ph.D.

Dr. Torres Pauletic is a clinical psychologist and Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She has expertise in child development, child trauma, early childhood mental health, family focused evidence-based mental health treatments and school-based prevention and mental health programming. She is an approved TF-CBT Trainer and Consultant and leads several local, national, and international TF-CBT training and implementation efforts, including for bilingual clinicians serving immigrant and migrant families.