Promoting Positive Early Relationships between Parents and Infants
Mary Claire Heffron, Consultant for Development Associates, Region IX Technical Assistance Support Center, and Staff Member, Child Development Center/Neontatal Follow-Up, Children's Hospital, Oakland, California
The quality of infant-parent relationships has been found to be of primary importance in all aspects of the development of infants, toddlers, and young children. Each year more is learned about the ways these early relationships influence children's emotional well-being, development, and learning capacity.
The intimate relationships which children form with parents and extended family members tend to shape patterns through which they develop self esteem, perceive the world around them, and learn to communicate. Expectations of trust and the ability to form later relationships are also formed through these early human connections.
The ways in which positive early relationships promote resiliency and act as a buffer for children growing up in poverty or in other kinds of adverse situations are also becoming understood.
Later in children's development, community and school environments assume more importance, but early on the parents and immediate family provide a unique kind of classroom through which the basics of loving and learning are formed.
A great deal is known about how a family's unique history shapes its ability to form sensitive and appropriate relationships with infants and the kinds of barriers that can put these early relationships and first learning opportunities in jeopardy.
Many barriers are known to early childhood practitioners and include things such as parental life stressors, unresolved conflicts, adversity in a parent's past, loss, substance use, and unrealistic expectations about the abilities of infants and young children. These barriers are not caused by poverty, but often exacerbates them.
The symptoms of early relationship difficulties are varied but include such things as failure to respond consistently to a baby's cues and signals, projections of negative emotions onto a baby, and/or unusual expectations of what an infant or toddler can do, feel, or understand.
A method, however, of working with families, infants, and toddlers that can address these issues has been developed. Broadly termed infant-parent psychotherapy, this method was originally used in mental health settings. It has now evolved and is being used more frequently in settings which deliver comprehensive services to infants, toddlers, young children, and their families. Services are usually delivered in a home with an emphasis on flexibility, and are based on the needs of the family. The strengths of the family and its cultural context are also emphasized. Caring interaction between the staff person and the family is essential for this approach to be effective.
This infant mental health approach provides ways to promote and extend the development of meaningful and supportive relationships among parents and children, and provides ways of approaching issues which are not easily addressed.
Other methods of integrating infant mental health approaches into programs include staff, use of adjunct mental health services, and inclusion of program staff trained as infant mental health practitioners.
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