Filling in the Gaps of Missed Experiences:12-Week Professional Course
Are You Supporting Children and Families Impacted by Early Trauma? This 12-week online professional course is designed for clinicians, social workers, adoption and foster care professionals, and other helping professionals seeking a deeper understanding of developmental trauma and its impact on children, youth, and caregiving systems.
Grounded in attachment theory, developmental neuroscience, and trauma-informed practice, this course explores how early missed experiences shape behavior, regulation, relationships, and emotional development—and how professionals can better support families in creating healing environments.
You’ve likely encountered children and youth who seem resistant to connection, struggle with emotional regulation, display extreme behaviors and do not respond to traditional interventions. Families are exhausted, overwhelmed, and losing hoping of being able to help their child.
And as a professional, you find yourself carrying the weight of those families alongside them. You may leave meetings wondering if you missed something important that could have made a difference. You may feel helpless watching caregivers burn out while the child’s behaviors escalate. You may question whether the strategies you were taught are helping—or unintentionally increasing shame, fear, or disconnection.
When children have experienced developmental trauma, the behaviors can feel overwhelming: aggression, control battles, emotional shutdowns, rejection of support, chronic dysregulation, and ongoing crises that leave everyone feeling defeated. Professionals often hold immense responsibility while often receiving limited training in how early trauma and chronic stress shapes all aspects of development, attachment, and relational safety and what to do about it!
This course is designed to help bridge that gap.
This training focuses on a deeper understanding of how interruptions to specific stages of development (ex. Birth to 18 months) can influence a child or youths’ way of thinking about the world, relating to peers, responding to correction, building attachment and engaging in the foundational experiences of childhood. It is alarming to imagine that trauma before the age of a year can influence the developmental outcomes of a middle schooler. It doesn’t have to be this way. With the right understanding, information and determination a child family and their support people can help them fill in the missing pieces of development that were interrupted early on.
Children and youth impacted by trauma are rarely lacking empathy, are not chronically angry and don’t choose difficult behaviors intentionally. They have missing foundational developmental experiences and skills that should have been built during infancy and early childhood to make it possible to develop the later childhood skills of attunement to others and self regulation. Without these experiences, children develop adaptive survival responses that keep them alive and safe while they are in the crisis and then appear as dysregulation, aggression, control, avoidance, relational instability, or emotional shutdowns when the crisis is over.
This course focuses on helping professionals identify those missed experiences and developmental gaps so they can support families with interventions designed to meet the child’s actual underlying needs.
A central focus of the training is understanding how early childhood experiences shape later behavior, emotional functioning, attachment patterns, and ways of relating to others during middle childhood and adolescence. When professionals understand how developmental trauma alters regulation, trust, identity, and relationships, they are better able to create interventions that support healing rather than unintentionally escalating shame, fear, or disconnection.
This is not a course about managing behavior more effectively. It is about understanding why behaviors develop in the first place, what needs or skills are driving them and how to create therapeutic, relationship-based interventions that help fill in the gaps of missed experiences
Do you work with children, youth, and parents/caregivers experiencing:
Have you noticed that behavioral interventions are not addressing the root issue or achieving long term gains? In fact, they seem to escalate the situation leading to confusion, exhaustion and overwhelm for everyone involved. If so, this course was created to deepen your understanding of developmental trauma and strengthen your ability to support healing-centered care
This 12-week professional training course explores how trauma during the first 12 years of life impacts emotional regulation, attachment, peer and social relationships, identity development, sensory processing, relational safety, motivation, school/academic success, risky behavior and neurological development.
Participants will learn how missed developmental experiences can contribute to behaviors often labeled as “oppositional,” “manipulative,” or “non-compliant,” and how to reframe these behaviors through a developmental and trauma-informed lens.
The course focuses on helping professionals support caregivers in responding strategically by understanding the developmental needs of that child or teen based on missed experiences in a way leads to interventions that are both child and family specific and effective
Andrea Chatwin, MA, CCC Clinical Therapist | Founder of A Child’s Song
Andrea has over 20 years of experience supporting children, youth, and families navigating developmental trauma, attachment disruptions, adoption, foster care, and complex emotional and behavioral needs.
Her work integrates developmental theory, trauma-informed practice, attachment-based interventions, and relational healing approaches to support both caregivers and professionals working within high-stress systems.
Andrea has run this course for parents over the past two years and witnessed incredible shifts andchanges in families ability to understand their child and respond in a way that is therapeutic and developmentally appropriate.
"Andrea helped us stop seeing our child as ‘difficult’—and start seeing what he needed from us to feel safe and connected.”
— Foster parent in Smithers, BC
“I finally understand why my child hoards food, lashes out, and lies about everything. More importantly, I now know how to respond in a way that helps her feel safe enough to consider other alternatives to her current behavior.”
— Adoptive mom in Calgary, AB
“I don’t want to sound dramatic, but this course was life changing for our family, particularly for me and my partner but also for our teen. We learned so much about what she needed from us to FEEL safe, and it was surprising. We had no idea that under all that defiance was a scared kid who didn’t know how to do what we were expecting her to do and still be able to protect herself.’
— Adoptive dad in Surrey, BC
“I didn’t realize when I decided to parent my two nieces that their first two years of life would have such an impact on their as they got older. We struggled to feel connected, struggled with behaviors and school was a huge source of stress for everyone. This course gave me the insight I needed to see how I could try to give them what they didn’t get in those first two years. Once I focused on that instead of the current problems we were experiencing, I started to see things change."
. — Aunt & Parent in Winnipeg, MB
Spots are intentionally limited to support meaningful learning and participant engagement.
Course Opens: Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Optional Live Sessions: Tuesday Evenings starting October 6, 2026
Email Andrea directly: info@achildssong.ca
