Charlie Slaughter is a primary prevention services coordinator with a focus on early childhood for the CT Dept. of Children and Families and has a passion for children, parents, and providers thriving in life. 

 

Charlie has been instrumental in helping to spread Circle of Security Parenting (COSP) to CT communities and community organizations. Nearly 1,700 people in CT have now been trained in COSP. COSP has been adopted by a wide variety of providers and integrated into a wide variety of settings in CT. 

 

Charlie is particularly interested in the design and development of a community-wide attachment approach that gives parents, teachers, and caregivers new tools to create better quality relationships with infants, children, and students. In turn, these better quality relationships equip infants, kids, and students with various capacities needed to thrive in terms of education success, health, employment, and in relationships with other people. These capacities include curiosity, self-regulation, connection, trust, empathy, kindness, sustaining attention, perseverance, and joy of learning. This approach operates from the guiding principle that these essential capacities are not genetic endowments but are created and strengthened in parent-child, teacher-child, and caregiver-child relationships. They are best built in a quality of relationship that also builds and supports secure attachment.