The ICDP Nordic conference took place on 21st and 22nd of September 2023. Report from Merethe Kvernroed:
There were close to 200 participants – mainly from Norway – but quite a few also from our neighboring countries Sweden, Denmark and Finland. Day one was mandatory for trainers in Norway and day 2 was optional. Still, many joined Day 2 as well.
The theme of the conference, “Building robust and resilient relations”, appeared to be one of great interest to many participants. Interestingly, there is a fair amount of public debate around these questions in Norway at present.
We had two keynote speakers who addressed this theme, also with slightly provocative concepts, such as “helicopter parenting” (term used by Line Warholm, a psychologist and writer) and the role of optimal frustration for healthy development (discussed by psychologist Zemir Popovac, who came to Norway from Bosnia when he was 18 years old). The combination of these two speakers was very interesting, because Line Warholm stirred the waters, while Zemir Popovac provided some very interesting tools.
Participants had the opportunity to walk and talk on the same theme, including a fun task of creating a photo to illustrate core discussions. The photos were shown as a movie in the plenary session on the following morning.
There were two discussion panels; one on questions relating to universal preventative programming for parents and on the following day there were lively discussions on implementation. After lunch there were mini-workshops that worked on providing practical examples of implementation by sharing experiences from various settings such as: refugees and integration; ICDP for parents in prisons; ICDP implemented in the care of the elderly in Oslo; ICDP in schools (Denmark) and presentations from ICDP Sweden and Finland.
Participants were very satisfied with the content of the conference and felt the various discussions were useful and inspirational for their future work with ICDP.
Here is the link to some of the photos from the conference:
Nordisk ICDP Konferanse 2023 – Robuste relasjoner – ICDP Norge