Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health: Core Concepts and Clinical Practice

This ambitious volume brings together some of the most outspoken theorists, researchers and practitioners building the field of infant mental health from overlapping frameworks, models and disciplines. It reveals the challenges and excitement of this time, as this field sorts through the psychoanalytic and attachment theories of its origins, integrates emerging neuroscience and epigenetic theories whose applications to practice are still being worked out, to stake out its territory, tests its boundaries, and develops its own identity. More than that, this collection suggests a truly transdisciplinary path for a whole new kind of field, born from a range of others, that is creating new meanings and possibilities at their intersections for babies, families, clinicians, systems of care, researchers and policy-makers. --Joshua Sparrow, M.D., Harvard Medical School, Boston Children's Hospital

For those of us who work daily with parents who never smile at their baby and have no idea how to play, this book explains the reasons for their parenting deficits, the effects of those deficits on the baby, and the interventions that we need to implement to help them become good enough parents. The giants in the field of infant mental health have created this comprehensive volume that so vividly brings the research to life in a way that practitioners can understand and appreciate. I know I will make better decisions for the families in my courtroom as a result of reading this book. --Cindy S. Lederman, J.D., Circuit Court Judge, Eleventh Judicial Circuit Juvenile Justice Center

There has been an urgent need for a practically oriented book that integrates the modern understanding of mind with a hands-on guide to early childhood interventions. This is the book to bring about this integration. It is simply the best book that provides a pragmatic approach to support frontline clinicians at the same time as conveying the complexity of ideas that must guide such interventions. It is a beautifully written, comprehensive, user-friendly guide that will run into many reprints and editions. --Peter Fonagy, Ph.D., FBA, Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis and Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London; Chief Executive, The Anna Freud Centre

Drawing from and grounded in their long-standing involvement in pioneering work on infant-parent mental health, the editors of Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health: Core Concepts and Clinical Practice have assembled a comprehensive, theoretically insightful, and clinically useful volume for psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, pediatricians, social workers, psychotherapists, and all other providers serving children and families from pregnancy through age 5. In 20 engaging chapters by renowned practitioners and researchers in the field, the book covers concepts from the nature of infant emotional and brain development to the practice of neurologically and relationally based therapies, and explores topics from child trauma to autism spectrum disorders.

The authors weave related core concepts throughout multiple chapters to parallel the multifaceted, multilayered, and interwoven complexity that resembles both the real lives of families and the real work of clinicians. Beautifully written, thought-provoking, and rigorous, Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health: Core Concepts and Clinical Practice will serve as the benchmark for the field -- for both researchers and practitioners -- for years to come.