Keeping the Baby in Mind: Infant Mental Health in Practice - Softcover

"This well researched book will be of interest to many involved with infant mental health. Those engaged in direct work with families, academics concerned with infant development or social provision and those organising or making policy about the provision of services for Under 5s will find much to inspire them in these accessibly written chapters." - Dr. Janine Sternberg, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, Tavistock & Portman NHS Trust, UK

"There has been in the UK a lack of a clear, conceptual framework concerning the processes involved in helping families, particularly during the transition to parenthood and the first few years of life. This coherently edited book adds to the development of such a framework, as well as providing stimulating examples of how it can be realised in practise." – Dilys Daws, From the Foreword

Keeping the Baby in Mind builds on the expanding evidence pointing to the crucial importance of parents in facilitating their baby’s development, and brings together expert contributors to examine a range of innovative psychological and psychotherapeutic interventions that are currently being used to support parents and their infants. It not only provides an overview of the many projects that are now available but also makes recommendations for future practice and the way in which children’s services are organised.

The book brings together interventions and ways of working that can be used both universally to support parents during the transition to parenthood, and with high-risk groups of parents where for example there may be child protection concerns or parents experience severe mental health problems. Each chapter describes the evidence supporting the need for such interventions and the approach being developed, and concludes with a description of its evaluation.

Keeping the Baby in Mind marks a new and exciting phase in the development of interventions to support infant mental health and will be of interest across a wide range of disciplines from primary and community care to early years and Children’s Centre settings.