Hillside’s 2026 Community Psychoeducation Events offer thoughtful, accessible learning spaces for parents, caregivers, educators, and community members who want to better understand the emotional worlds of children and adolescents.

Through a mix of in-person panels and lunchtime webinars, experts and Hillside clinicians explore timely topics shaping family life today: connection and loneliness, digital culture, parenting with compassion, anxiety and school refusal, and broader mental health awareness.

Grounded in clinical expertise and real-world experience, these events are designed to reduce stigma, strengthen relationships, and help families feel less alone as they navigate complex developmental and mental health challenges.

All events are free to attend! Join the waitlists to stay up to date on event details. 

School refusal can feel overwhelming for families. Mornings become battlegrounds, anxiety escalates quickly, and well-intentioned accommodations can quietly make the problem harder to undo.

This lunch-time webinar helps parents understand why school refusal happens, how anxiety and family accommodation interact, and what actually helps children return to school safely and sustainably. This webinar is educational, practical, and compassionate—focused on understanding patterns, not assigning fault.

What Parents Will Learn:

• How anxiety drives avoidance and distress around school 
• What “family accommodation” means and why it’s so common 
• How accommodations can reduce distress short-term but reinforce anxiety long-term 
• Supportive strategies that promote courage, flexibility, and gradual return to school 
• When additional support or higher levels of care may be needed

Kids are growing up in an environment where screens, algorithms, and online communities shape nearly every aspect of development. Today’s parents are the first generation to raise children whose socialization, identity formation, and daily routines often unfold online. This digital landscape brings opportunities for learning and creativity, but it also accelerates emotion dysregulation, social comparison, impulsivity, cyberbullying, and exposure to adult content.

What This In-Person Panel Discussion Can Offer:
Through the combined perspectives of clinicians, youth-focused educators, and state leadership working to regulate the digital landscape, the panel will explore:

• How today’s technology environment is shaping children’s emotional development, including the roles of social media, algorithms, and AI driven interactions in anxiety, depression, isolation, and identity formation.
• What families and educators are seeing in real time from youth navigating digital spaces.
• How trauma-informed and DBT-aligned parenting strategies translate to the online world.
• What is happening at the policy level to protect children, including bipartisan legislative efforts.
• How families can move from feeling powerless to becoming informed, connected, and engaged, both inside their homes and in the broader systems shaping children’s lives.

More than information, this panel offers clarity, validation, and actionable direction. It helps caregivers strengthen their connection with their children while also understanding the larger cultural and legislative shifts working to safeguard youth mental wellbeing.

Join Hillside experts for a lunchtime webinar covering mental health topics!

Modern life is designed for efficiency. Groceries appear at the door. Broken items are replaced instead of repaired. Every want arrives with a tap on the touch screen. This in-person panel discusses the unintended cost of convenience: fewer opportunities for connection, patience, frustration-tolerance, community interdependence, and the shared tasks that once shaped children’s sense of competence and belonging.

Every child arrives with a unique blend of temperament, identity, neurobiology, and developmental needs. Parenting becomes especially complex when a child is LGBTQ+, navigating behavioral-health challenges, struggling socially, or healing from trauma. Too often, families try to parent the “version of the child they imagined”. This in-person panel discusses the importance of seeing your child clearly and how to practice validation, flexibility, and compassion.

Join Hillside experts for a lunchtime webinar covering mental health topics!

In a world marked by urgency, division, and burnout, compassion is sometimes misunderstood as a soft skill. In reality, it is a neurobiological powerhouse, lowering arousal, supporting emotional regulation, and strengthening connection. This panel discusses how compassionate communities reduce stigma and increase safety for struggling youth.