Next cohort of the HeartMinded Parenting training starts on October 9th, 2026.
For more information about free promo videos, please email us: mail@silviacasabianca.com.
See details below
Next Cohort Starts: October 9th, 2026 (2 hr- Weekly sessions)
Capacity: Maximum of 8 participants
Investment: $250 (Group discounts available)
CEUs: Approved for 12 CEUs in Florida (Dept. of Mental Health, Clinical Social Work, and Marriage and Family Therapy)
Contact: Email mail@silviacasabianca.com for more information or to set up custom dates for your organization.
- Transformative Learning Methods: Experience an inductive, non-lecture format designed to make the training a personally meaningful and healing experience.
- Breaking Intergenerational Cycles: Learn how to address and overcome client’s habits of mind and unconscious mental frameworks, that prevents changing inherited parenting practices and beliefs.
- Inductive Discipline: Learn about parenting methods that help raise children who are self-compassionate, and remain deeply sensitive to how their actions affect others (grounded in the work of Martin Hoffman).
- Decoding Behavior: Understand behavior as a developmental language rather than a compliance issue (Alyson Schafer, Adler).
- Neuroscience of Parenting: Explore brain development from birth to ensure how to prevent the consequences of parenting methods that slicing fear, inhibit a child’s natural capacity for generosity, empathy, altruism, prosocial behavior and mutual support.
- Prevent or Address parents’ “Blockage of Care”: Learn systemic interventions to support exhausted parents, ensuring the whole family system reinforces children’s clinical progress.
HeartMinding Parenting Training
Understanding what happens between parents and children
Many of the ways we parent are learned long before we become parents. Beliefs about authority, discipline, obedience, and what children “should” do are often inherited from our families and cultures without our consciously choosing them.
HeartMinding Parenting (HMP) offers a different way of looking at these patterns.
Grounded in neuroscience, developmental theory, and the work of Martin Hoffman and Daniel Batson, HMP explores what happens when fear is no longer the organizing force in the parent-child relationship.
Rather than focusing primarily on compliance or behavior correction, HMP invites parents and professionals to look beneath behavior and consider what a child may be experiencing and communicating. Through inductive discipline, children are given repeated opportunities to consider how their actions affect others, fostering the development of cognitive empathy and empathic concern.
HMP also recognizes that changing parenting practices involves more than learning new techniques. Parents bring their own histories, beliefs, and habitual ways of responding to the relationship. Reflective writing, mindfulness, self-compassion, and transformative learning provide opportunities to examine these inherited patterns and consider different ways of relating to children.
What the training explores
The neuroscience of fear and emotional regulation
Explore how fear and threat affect the developing nervous system and how emotional safety can support the child’s emerging capacity for regulation.
Behavior as communication
Learn to look beneath behavior for the emotional need or distress being expressed, rather than interpreting behavior primarily as a challenge to parental authority.
Inductive discipline
Explore Martin Hoffman’s work on induction and its relationship to the development of cognitive empathy, empathic concern, and moral understanding.
From empathy to caring action
Examine how understanding another person’s experience can develop into concern for that person and, ultimately, prosocial behavior.
Intergenerational patterns of parenting
Consider how experiences, cultural expectations, and inherited beliefs about authority and discipline become frames of reference that shape parenting.
Transformative learning
Use reflective writing, mindfulness, and self-compassion to recognize habitual ways of thinking and create space for new ways of relating to children.
The developing capacity for affiliation
Explore the relationship between emotional safety, autonomy, empathy, and the human capacity for connection, mutual support, and care.
Preventing the blockage of parental care
Consider what can happen when escalating behavior and punishment interfere with a parent’s capacity to remain emotionally available to a child, and how the family system can support the work of therapy.
Who is this training for?
HeartMinding Parenting is designed for psychologists, mental health counselors, clinical social workers, nurses, and parent educators who work with children, parents, and families.
The framework can be used in direct clinical work with parents and children, parent education, group settings, community programs, and dependency court contexts.
Next HeartMinding Parenting Training
October 9, 2026
12 hours of training · Weekly sessions
Maximum of 8 participants
$250 · Group discounts available
12 Florida CEUs approved
For information about the training, free promotional videos, or dates for your organization, contact:
An invitation to change perspective
HeartMinding Parenting is an invitation to examine the assumptions beneath our responses to children and to consider what becomes possible when fear is no longer the foundation of the parent-child relationship.
Don’t hesitate to contact us to participate in the course that starts on August 28th or to set up further dates for your organization.
Who can participate? This ongoing course (newt cohort starts October 9/26) is set for 2-hr weekly sessions to complete 12 hours of training. It’s approved by the Dept, of Mental Health, Clinical Social Work and Marriage and Family therapy for 12 CEUs in Florida. Max number of participants is 8. $250 ($220 for early birds, if registered before Sept 28) with a discount for groups.
Call us for more information: (239) 948-9444
Dr. Silvia Casabianca has been training parents for over 30 years!
HeartMinded Parenting — raising children to evolve into compassionate citizens takes both love and wisdom.
Imagine a world where we deeply care for ourselves, others, and the planet. That world is not a utopia — it is a biological possibility. Neuroscience teaches us that we are born with the capacity for affective empathy. But feeling what another feels does not translate into action on its own. It requires something more: the courage to turn toward suffering — our own and others’ — rather than look away, and the wisdom to understand what a person truly needs (Dr. Paul Gilbert).
These are the qualities we want children to develop. But we cannot guide children toward what we have not found in ourselves. Before we can help a child love themselves and feel genuine concern for others, we must be willing to reflect on our own lives — to become aware of where and how we carry our own wounds. That is where HeartMinded Parenting begins: not with the child, but with the adult who raises them.”
After three decades working with families, I’ve developed a comprehensive approach to parenting that integrates neuroscience, attachment theory, inductive discipline, trauma-informed care, and transformative learning. This parenting modality isn’t about techniques to force the child into compliance and change of behavior—it’s about understanding what needs are expressed through behavior, how children’s brains develop cognitive empathy and how we can nurture that capacity from the beginning.
What we explore:
- How the science of the brain can be applied to cultivating cognitive empathy and compassion in children and families (Outcome expected? Less fear, less conflict, better relational skills)
- How reflective practice helps us recognize ingrained patterns and beliefs that block empathic presence (Elevated awareness of how we are adopting parenting practices that didn’t work for us!)
- How inductive discipline builds moral reasoning (so that children learn to guide their behavior by the do-no-harm principle rather than by avoiding punishment or seeking of rewards) — and why this matters for raising principled, compassionate human beings with an ethics of care who will go into the world capable of supporting others,
- How to read behavior as a language expressing the child’s emotional needs
- How to foster cooperation over competition
- How self-compassion and active listening transform family relationships
- How emotion regulation — for caregivers and children alike — keeps us from being hijacked by the fight-or-flight response, so we can access the brain’s affiliative capacities
- How moral development requires developing an ethics of care and how raising children by applying punishment/reward does not contribute to moral development, a principled life around the golden principle.
The curriculum is student-centered and flexible. It adapts to the learning needs of either the families or the counselors in training (12 Florida CEUs – Cebroker 50-625)
Interactive. Practical. Grounded in research and decades of clinical experience.
Interested?
Call (239) 948-9444 or email mail@silviacasabianca.com
Let’s talk about what your training needs are, and how we can set up a Heartminded training.