Neurobiology for Clinical Social Work by Jeffrey S. Applegate

Author:Jeffrey S. Applegate
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

RELATIONSHIP BASED INTERVENTION WITH PARENTS AND INFANTS

Many different fields of practice are represented in the clinical specialty known as “infant mental health.” Working in multiple contexts, infant mental health practitioners focus on strengthening the relationship between infants, young children, and their caregivers. A holistic and strengths-oriented approach, infant mental health is relevant to multiple settings, such as community-based practice, medical social work, parent—infant psychotherapy, family advocacy, and child welfare. Infant mental health clinicians are trained to recognize the multiple factors that work either to support or impede the development of health parent-child relationships. These factors include (Carter, Osofsky, & Hann, 1992; Weatherston, 2000):

•The family’s need for concrete assistance and situational stability

•Parental needs for emotional support and treatment for recognized mental health issues and problems

•Parental needs for developmental guidance as to how to interpret infant behavior and anticipate the infant and young child’s shifting developmental needs over time

•Early and sophisticated assessment of infant neuropsychological competency and the quality of the parent-infant relationship

•Focused and supportive parent-infant psychotherapy in cases where factors such as parental trauma and unresolved losses are impeding the parents’ ability to form supportive attachment relationships with their infant

•Advocacy on behalf of vulnerable infants, children and their families

In her review of the infant mental health literature, Weatherston (2000) summarized the core skills and strategies associated with infant mental health practice. Many of these strategies were developed as the basis of relationship-focused home-visiting programs with at-risk parents and infants. It is important to remember that the clinical field of infant mental health emerged during a time of rapid progress in our understanding of the multiple competencies of the human infant and in our understanding of the processes by which infants and caregivers form stable relational bonds. The strategies associated with infant mental health reflect this vast body of research and, perhaps most importantly, focus attention on the emotional experience of parenthood, the psychological needs of parents, the internal world of the child, and how each of these factors influences the unfolding relationship between parent and infant in unique ways.

One of the most important contributions of infant mental health has been the commitment to a biopsychosocial view of the child in the context of the family. As a field of practice, infant mental health seeks to integrate the biopsychosocial assessment of the child “in the present” with past experiences of the caregivers, as these experiences are expressed in the parent-child relationship. Infant mental health specialists seek to connect with caregivers around current, “real-time” concerns in the parent-infant relationship and family context, while at the same time “listening for the past” as it may become represented in present-day conflicts over issues of closeness, dependency, and loss (Fraiberg, 1980; Fraiberg, Adelson, & Shapiro, 1975; Weatherston, & Buttman, 1995). This approach helps clinicians to address questions of the intergenerational transmission of family experience, itself an area of study being examined anew as researchers in the cognitive neurosciences begin to delineate the processes by which parental caretaking style and history become factors in the postnatal brain development of infants and young children (Schore, 1994).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.