National Substance Use Disorder Summit

The Brazelton Touchpoints Center (BTC) held its second National Substance Use Disorder (SUD) Summit, Families in Recovery: The First 1,000 Days – Pregnancy, Newborns, and the First Years, on Wednesday, February 1, 2023, from 11 AM – 5:30 PM ET / 8 AM – 2:30 PM PT. Participants engaged in three nationwide conversations on: 

• Preconception and Pregnancy: In this conversation, parents with lived experiences and frontline providers shared what they have learned on the recovery journey before and during pregnancy. Together, we spotlighted strengths-based approaches that value birth equity, are inclusive, and create communities of belonging while also addressing the isolation, fear, trauma, loss, and grief experienced by expectant and birthing families as they move toward healing and transformation.
• The Newborn: Newborns showing signs of withdrawal can be challenging to care for, undermining new parents’ confidence and trust in their skills and relationship. Yet the new responsibility of caring for a newborn can motivate parents to seek treatment and strive for recovery. Unfortunately, when seeking support for themselves and their infants, birthing families in recovery all too often face stigma — stigma that can reactivate stress responses of distrust and withdrawal.
• Infants and Toddlers: The first years of life can be challenging and exhausting for all parents. Children are just learning how to regulate their feelings and behaviors, require more time and energy than many parents feel they have, and need access to concrete, material resources, such as food, safe housing, and health care. For parents living with SUD, these challenges can feel overwhelming. Adults with SUD need time and energy for their own recovery, often struggle with their own self-regulation due to prior or ongoing trauma, and may be catching up on their own development that SUD and trauma have derailed.

Download the 2023 Summit Program

Download the 2023 Summit Resources

Thank You to Our 2023 Summit Sponsor

At BTC’s inaugural National Substance Use Disorder Summit, Innovating Partnerships with Families in Recovery, in January 2022, participants engaged in three nationwide conversations on: 

• Peer-to-Peer Supports: Recovery coaches with lived experience of SUD, and their parent and professional partners will describe how and why peer-to-peer approaches work, and why they are critical to equitable and inclusive recovery interventions that center family voice, shift power, and build on families’ strengths, resources, and wisdom.
• Comprehensive Systems Approaches: Leaders innovating organizational, community, county, and state-based system changes will share what they are learning about how to strengthen whole communities by assembling, connecting, and coordinating the broad array of sustainable supports, services, and resources for parents in recovery whose disease so often disrupts even basic survival needs.
• Transdisciplinary Collaboration: Frontline providers and parents will distill the key ingredients of effective approaches for building therapeutic relationships based on safety, trust, and hope that promote parents’ motivation for recovery, children’s well-being, and healing, and resilient responses to the relapses and recurrences that characterize this chronic disease’s course.

Download the 2022 Summit Program Guide

Thank You to Our 2022 Summit Sponsor