Raising Connected, Happy, Successful Kids through Art
Learn how to harness play and creativity to engage more effectively with children.

Our experiential program provides parents, teachers, and other community members with tools for building social, emotional, and cognitive skills in children; it aims to:
- Redirect and shift energy in children
- Get attention without having to use one’s voice
- Establish boundaries and engage cooperation playfully
- Communicate nonverbally, when words aren’t working
- Support emotional safety and academic effort with non-judgmental language
- Respond to difficult emotions or traumatic stress reactions
- Facilitate interpersonal problem solving and decision making
- Build self-care into daily life
Background

Background

Our inaugural public workshops will take place in the 2019-2020 academic year. Arrangements for private workshops can be made at any time. Click here to watch a brief, animated video about The Innovative Parent: Raising Connected, Happy, Successful Kids through Art, which offers examples of the kinds of tools that will be shared in the program.
Instructors
Erica Curtis, LMFT, ATR-BC is a Board Certified Art Therapist and Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. Erica is an internationally sought speaker on creative approaches to emotional and relationship health. She regularly serves as a mental health expert for articles, appearing in more than 100 media outlets including: USA Today, ELLE, The Boston Globe, PBS, and Women’s World Magazine, to name a few. Formerly an instructor in the Loyola Marymount University Department of Marriage and Family Therapy with a specialization in art therapy, she now serves as their admissions consultant and maintains a therapy practice in San Juan Capistrano. Erica has served multiple terms on the board of directors of the American Art Therapy Association, is a past president of the Southern California Art Therapy Association, and was formerly clinical director at the Help Group, a widely respected Los Angeles non-profit agency. Erica serves as an expert consultant for organizations such as The Foundation for Art and Healing and the Board of Behavioral Sciences, for whom she consults on standard of care in disciplinary cases brought against therapists. She also supervises art therapy interns. Erica is an award-winning author, with Ping Ho, of The Innovative Parent: Raising Connected, Happy, Successful Kids through Art.
Ping Ho, MA, MPH is Founder and Director of Arts & Healing Initiative, an organizational member of the UCLA Integrative Health Collaborative, of which Ping is a steering committee member. She was founding administrator for the UCLA Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology, which led to the privilege of writing for Norman Cousins and co-writing the professional autobiography of George F. Solomon, M.D., founder of the field. She has a BA in psychology with honors from Stanford—where she was appointed to establish the still-thriving Health Improvement Program for faculty and staff, an MA in counseling psychology with specialization in exercise physiology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MPH in community health sciences from UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Ping is associate editor for the Creative Arts Therapies section of the Journal of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. She spearheaded the Certificate Program in Social Emotional Arts (SEA) and the SEA on a Shoestring program of supportive art, movement, music, and writing for individuals or groups in any setting. In addition, she co-developed and served as principal investigator for the evidence-based program, Beat the Odds®: Social and Emotional Skill Building Delivered in a Framework of Drumming. She is co-author, with Erica Curtis, of the 2019 National Parenting Products Award-winning book, The Innovative Parent: Raising Connected, Happy, Successful Kids through Art (Ohio University/Swallow Press, March 2019).
FAQ
General
Policies
Participant Expectation Policy
In accordance with our mission and cultural, equity and inclusion practices, our aim is to foster a supportive, healing, and collaborative learning environment, whether in an online or in-person setting.
With this goal in mind, we ask our program participants and staff to acknowledge, and abide by, the following community agreements:
- Practice loving kindness, nonjudgment, and listening to understand
- Acknowledge your feelings and the feelings of others
- Practice cultural humility, acknowledging the lived experience of others and our own privilege and biases
- Hold in confidence what is shared here personally
- When speaking, be mindful of time for others to be heard
- Practice self-care and seek support as needed
- Keep cameras on, if/when possible, to maintain your presence
In order to protect participant and staff safety as well as the integrity of our programming, we have adopted and maintain a zero tolerance policy for inappropriate and/or triggering behavior, whether accidental or intentional. Such behavior includes offensive or discriminatory actions related to sex, gender, gender identity or expression, race, color, ancestry, religious creed, national origin, age, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation, marital status, military or veteran status, medical condition, genetic information, or any other characteristic.
Digital Media Release Policy
By registering, you give Arts & Healing Initiative approval to record this event, still and/or moving images from which may appear in printed materials or digital channels for archival, educational, or promotional purposes. Note that Zoom breakout rooms are not recorded.
Refund Policy
In order to keep our programs affordable yet self-sustaining, we regret that we are unable to offer refunds on enrollment fees ; however, we are happy to provide you with credit good for one year from the date of the program toward the next offering of the same program or a different one. Credit applied toward a program with higher registration fees will require payment of the balance. In addition, credit may be applied toward purchase of curriculum materials for any program. Unused fees after one year would then be tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law because no goods or services would have been received for them.
Click here for our Certificate Program in Social Emotional Arts refund policy.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are my professional options in the field of arts and healing?
Beat the Odds® (BTO)
How can I order a copy of the curriculum?
The curriculum manual is available via the Curriculum Materials section of our website. You can choose from the manual alone or the manual with a DVD showing our LCSW co-developer delivering the program to a group of 4th grade students. The scripted curriculum is designed for delivery via the manual alone, although we also offer 1-day trainings here in LA and occasionally in other parts of the country. You can find information about our trainings in the Upcoming Program section of our website.