2023 Nebraska Counselor Cafe: Cultivating Self-Compassion as a Helping Professional

Dr. Holly Hatton-Bowers, Ph.D., University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is an associate professor in child, youth, and family studies at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln and an Early Childhood Extension Specialist. Her primary interests and scholarly activity include co-creating and implementing programs that aim to enhance the quality of early childhood development and care, with a particular focus on mental health, emotional well-being and social-emotional development. These programs include the use of strategies that cultivate reflective practice, social-emotional learning, resilience, mindfulness, and compassion among caregivers, helping professionals and families. She is committed to addressing issues of systemic inequities in early care and education and brings these issues to the forefront of her work. Currently, she is a Principal Investigator for an Administration Children and Families Head Start University Partnership Grant aiming to research the implementation of the Nebraska Extension Cultivating Healthy Intentional Mindful Educators program (CHIME) in Early Head Start and Head Start child care settings using community-based participatory methods. She serves on the IANR Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Advisory Group | Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources (unl.edu), the UNL Extension’s Reaching One, Reaching All, Cultural Competence | Nebraska (unl.edu) team, is the Program Leader for the Early Childhood Extension team, and co-leads the Nebraska Association for Infant Mental Health, Home : Nebraska Association for Infant Mental Health (neinfantmentalhealth.org) with Sami Bradley; advocating for child and family mental health.