This is the VIDEO version of It's More Than Milestones: Mental Health Strategies for Parents of Children with Disabilities or Complex Medical Needs.

Continuing education hours:

3 CE credits
Applicable for maintaining/renewing your PMH-C through Postpartum Support International

This course is for you if:

You’ve sat with a parent who’s juggling feeding tubes, IEP meetings, and sleep deprivation and thought, “Yeah, this is way more than a checklist can fix.”
You’re tired of surface-level advice and want the real-deal: how to hold space when the parenting path includes grief, pride, burnout, and medical equipment all in one messy, beautiful mix.
You know that saying “all parents are tired” doesn’t cut it for your or your clients.
You’re ready to get curious about how disability, systems, and bias show up in the therapy room.
You’re cool with doing a little self-reflection (even if it’s uncomfortable) because you’d rather grow than keep accidentally reinforcing ableist crap.
You want actual tools you can use tomorrow—not just hashtags, awareness months, or “thoughts and prayers.”

Course Description:

Parenting a child with a disability or complex medical need often begins with love but quickly collides with overwhelm. These parents aren’t just navigating appointments, therapies, or equipment. They’re navigating a world that wasn’t built with their family in mind.

This training goes far beyond the milestone charts and checkbox interventions. We’ll explore the layered emotional, psychological, and systemic realities of parenting in this context: the grief no one talks about, the pride that lives alongside pain, the invisible labor of advocacy, and the unique identity shifts that unfold over time. Whether a diagnosis comes at birth or later in early childhood, the mental health implications for parents are profound and too often overlooked.

Grounded in trauma theory, systemic awareness, and clinical compassion, this course helps therapists better understand how disability, bias, and structural inequities intersect with perinatal and parental mental health. We’ll also dig into therapeutic interventions that don’t shy away from the hard stuff, instead meeting it with nuance, flexibility, and humanity.

If you’ve ever wondered how to truly support the parent who feels like no one gets it—this one’s for you.

Learning Objectives:

Identify unique challenges within parental mental health in the context of children with disabilities or complex medical needs with a trauma-informed, socioculturally-attuned lens
Highlight how bias impacts parental mental health within a variety of sociopolitical contexts, including evaluating potential barriers within the self-of-the-therapist
Explore practical treatment approaches and case studies when working with parents of children with disabilities and complex medical needs to support emotional resilience and mental well-being