July 8-9, 2026, Alino Hotel, Quezon City, Philippines
“Bring the Baby’s Voice to the Heart of Your Care”
For the first time on Philippine soil – learning to see every newborn the way they deserve to be seen.
ABOUT THE TRAINING
When a Newborn Reaches Out – Are We Ready to Reach Back?
Your newborn is already reaching out. Are you ready to reach back? The way you hold, speak to, and respond to your newborn matters more than you know.
Welcoming a new baby brings immense joy, but it also introduces a completely new language of fussiness, crying, and sleepless nights that can leave any parent feeling overwhelmed. It is easy to wish your infant came with an instruction manual, but the truth is they are already communicating exactly what they need—you just have to learn how to read the cues.
Newborn Behavioral Observations (NBO) bridge this gap by helping you with a personalized roadmap to understand your baby’s unique personality and build a deep, stress-free connection from day one. Click here to book a session with an NBO-trained pediatrician.
On July 8 and 9, 2026, the Philippine Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics (PSDBP) hosted the Newborn Behavioral Observations (NBO) Training Philippines 2026 at Alino Hotel in Quezon City — marking the first time this internationally recognized framework was formally brought to Philippine shores.
The Newborn Behavioral Observation System (NBO), developed at The Brazelton Institute at Boston Children’s Hospital, is a relationship-based clinical tool that enables clinicians to observe, understand, and respond to the behavioral capacities of the newborn — and to use that shared observation to strengthen the family’s connection with their baby from the very first days of life.
AT A GLANCE
Over two intensive days, 103 clinicians from across the Philippine archipelago gathered not merely to learn a skill, but to encounter a new way of seeing — one that will change how they enter a room, hold a newborn, and sit with a family in their most vulnerable moment.
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
The Pioneer Who Carried NBO Home
The training opened with a keynote address by Dr. Alexis Socorro de Leon Reyes — a pillar of Philippine developmental and behavioral pediatrics, and widely regarded as the country’s first Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrician.
For over two decades, she had carried the Brazelton legacy on Philippine soil, quietly and patiently passing the advocacy forward — to her trainees, her colleagues, and anyone willing to listen — never losing faith that the Philippines would one day have its own NBO training.
That faith had deep roots. Dr. Reyes became a certified user of the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (NBAS) in 2000, forging a sustained connection with the Brazelton Institute at Boston Children’s Hospital that would shape the rest of her career. As Past President of PSDBP, she laid the institutional groundwork for what she always believed was possible: official NBO certification training, on Philippine soil, for Filipino clinicians.
In her keynote, she traced that long journey — from her earliest encounters with the NBAS in Boston to this room in Quezon City — and in doing so, she reminded everyone present of what this training was really about. Not assessment. Not testing. Something more urgent and more human: early intervention, through the relationship between parent and child, built on the simple and transformative act of truly understanding a newborn.
The seed had been planted. What it needed was someone to grow it.
That someone was Dr. Ma. Florita “Phoi” Yambao-Dela Cruz.
Mentored by Dr. Reyes and shaped early in her career by a deep commitment to the high-risk infant, Dr. Phoi’s path toward NBO was not a straight line — it was a journey, accumulated over years of clinical practice and quiet formation.
A turning point came through her exposure to infant mental health, in the form of Friday morning small group discussions with Dr. Mary Beth Steinfeld and the infant mental health team at the UC Davis MIND Institute in Sacramento, California. Dr. Steinfeld — a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics and Developmental Behavioral Pediatrician with over 22 years at the intersection of infant mental health, feeding medicine, and early relational science — became a formative influence.
Those conversations, reflective and unhurried, opened something in Dr. Phoi. They deepened her conviction that the earliest moments of a child’s life were not simply clinical events to be managed, but relational encounters to be understood.
That conviction led her to Boston.
There, she immersed herself in the NBO system, and pursued mentorship with Dr. Kevin Nugent — not as a passive learner, but as someone who arrived already knowing what she was going to do with it.
When the Brazelton Institute first extended the idea of bringing the training to the Philippines, Dr. Phoi did not let it remain an idea. She built the partnerships. She navigated the logistics. She held the vision together through a typhoon, a national political event, and every quiet obstacle that stood between a dream and a done thing.
NBO Training Philippines 2026 was not an event that happened to PSDBP. It was a dream, decades in the making, that Dr. Phoi — through the full support of PSDBP and its affiliate hospitals — helped bring to life. For the field. For the 103 clinicians who filled that room. And for Dr. Alexis Reyes, whose lifelong hope finally, on these two days in July, came full circle.
INTERNATIONAL TRAINERS
Two of the World’s Foremost Voices in Newborn Care
PSDBP welcomed two distinguished international trainers whose combined decades of work represent some of the most significant contributions to newborn and family care in the world.
Dr. Lise C. Johnson, Director of The Brazelton Institute at Boston Children’s Hospital and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, has dedicated more than three decades to newborn care, clinical training, and the advancement of family-centered practice. She joined the Brazelton Institute faculty in 2001 and has served as its Director since 2022 — carrying forward the legacy of one of the most transformative frameworks in modern neonatal care.
Dr.Susan Jane Nicolson, Site Lead for NBO Australasia and Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, brings to this work a rare depth of formation — spanning obstetrics, general practice, infant-parent mental health, and attachment research. She completed her PhD in Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne in 2012, with examiners that included Professors Peter Fonagy and Marinus van IJzendoorn. As Site Lead for NBO Australasia, she has brought this approach to practitioners across Australia and New Zealand with the same warmth and rigour she brought to the Philippines.
The training also featured a deeply meaningful moment: an Inspirational Message delivered via Zoom by Dr. Kevin Nugent, Founder and Director Emeritus of the Brazelton Institute — the very architect of the NBO framework. His direct address to the Philippine cohort connected this room in Quezon City to his fondness for the country, and the origins of a movement that has quietly transformed newborn care across the world.
HOSPITAL VISIT
Seeing the Newborn and the Mother First
Before the formal training began, Dr. Lise Johnson and Dr. Susan Nicolson were brought into the heart of Philippine newborn care — not through a lecture hall, but through the wards and corridors of three of the country’s most respected institutions.
On July 7, the day before the workshop opened, the trainers visited the National Children’s Hospital, the Dr. Jose Fabella Memorial Medical Center, and the Philippine Children’s Medical Center — three institutions that together represent the full spectrum of newborn care in the Philippines, from the most vulnerable premature infant to the complex cases that arrive with histories already written before birth.
National Children’s Hospital, Section on Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics
Dr. Jose Fabella Memorial Medical Center
Philippine Children’s Medical Center (PCMC)
What they encountered in those rooms was a picture of Philippine medicine at its most collaborative and its most committed. In each institution, they were welcomed by consultants working in close partnership with perinatologists, neonatologists, and fetal surgeons — specialists who meet the newborn not at the beginning of life, but sometimes even before it. The breadth of that collaboration — across disciplines, across specialties, across the earliest hours and days of a child’s existence — was a quiet but powerful argument for everything NBO stands for: that the newborn is never alone, that the family is always in the room, and that the clinician who knows how to truly observe a newborn can change the trajectory of what comes next.
For Dr. Lise and Dr. Susan, it was a window into the world their training had already reached even before they arrived, and was about to enter for many more. For the Philippine clinicians who accompanied them, it was a reminder of why the work matters.
SCIENTIFIC PROGRAMME
Two Days. One Framework. A New Way of Seeing.
The opening of Day 1 brought together some of the most respected voices in Philippine developmental and behavioral pediatrics. Dr. Bernadette Benitez, President of PSDBP, delivered the Welcome Remarks. Dr. Alexis Socorro Reyes, Past President of PSDBP, delivered the Keynote Speech. Speakers and trainers were introduced by Dr. Ma. Florita Yambao-Dela Cruz, and the invocation was led by Dr. Charisse Zuñiga-Posio. Both days were expertly moderated by Dr. Charlotte Averill Tan.
The scientific program moved participants through a progressive learning arc — from foundational goals and step-by-step observation, through video cases and live demonstration, to hands-on role play with dolls, parent engagement sessions, and a final discussion on next steps. Day 2 culminated in the awarding of Certificates of Appreciation by Dr. Bernadette Benitez and Dr. Ma. Florita Yambao-Dela Cruz, and Closing Remarks by Dr. Lourdes Bernadette Tanchanco, Vice President of PSDBP.
WHO WAS IN THE ROOM
103 Clinicians. One Purpose.
The training drew 103 registrants representing a wide cross-section of clinical expertise — from PSDBP Fellows and Diplomates to Fellows-in-Training, Neonatologists, General Pediatricians, International Board Certified Lactation Specialists and Occupational Therapists. Fellows-in-Training formed the largest single group, a reflection of PSDBP’s enduring commitment to shaping the next generation of practitioners in developmental and behavioral pediatrics.
GEOGRAPHIC REACH
They Came From Across the Archipelago
NBO Training Philippines 2026 was not a Metro Manila event. Participants flew in and drove for hours from across the country — from the northern reaches of Luzon, to the islands of the Visayas, to the provinces of Mindanao. They came despite the forecast of Super Typhoon Inday bearing down on Luzon that same week. They came anyway.
Their presence was itself a statement: that every Filipino newborn, wherever they are born and whoever receives them, deserves a clinician who knows how to truly see them.
A special recognition went to Dr. Rutchil Gacasan-Adajar of Pagadian City, Mindanao — our farthest traveler — who received the first of three printed NBO Manuals awarded at the close of the training. The books were given not by raffle alone, but with intention: to the clinician who traveled farthest, to the clinician committed to training others, and to one chosen by chance — because sometimes, luck deserves a seat at the table too.
VOICES FROM THE ROOM
Reflections from Clinicians
At the 2nd day of the training, participants were invited to share what had shifted, what had stayed, and what they were bringing back to their patients and families.
Three clinicians spoke — and what they said captured, in different ways, everything this training was about.
The Philippines Will Carry NBO Forward
One hundred and three clinicians left this room with a new way of seeing the newborn.
Their patients — and the families who love them — will feel it.
This was only the beginning.
→ Find an NBO trained practitioner near you: www.psdbp.org.ph
#nboPH2026