Family Therapy and Infant Mental Health: Natural Partners

Abstract

As science identifies the importance of interplay between an infant's innate potential and the experiences of the first two years of life for life‐long brain development, infant mental health as a discipline in its own right is burgeoning. Family therapists with their knowledge of systems theory are well‐placed to become specialised in this field. In this article, following discussion of definitions and ‘territories’, brief descriptions of the history of attachment theory and attachment behaviours lead to summaries of current work where family therapy and infant mental health overlap. Although definitive evidence of effectiveness of family interventions remains sparse, the vital benefits of ensuring appropriate home and cultural environments for our infants through family and community interventions is likely to be demonstrated in the next decades. Earliest intervention and preventive interventions are likely to be the most rapid and the most potent.

Family therapy and infant mental health: exploring the potential space

“…One way of doing this was to capture live conversations between practitioners who have given much of their life to the task of helping parents meet their babies in a safe intergenerational space (see Elliott, Slater, et al., 2023; McIntosh et al., 2023). The trialogue approach – imagined and real – captures the freshness of new thinking about the new father in family therapy (see Lim et al., 2023) and the challenge of bringing infant mental health training into academic teaching of next‐generation family therapists (see Elliott, Cousins, et al., 2023). We also hoped to shine a light on emerging evidence‐based infant–family interventions (see Philipp et al., 2023; Tissot & Favez, 2023).…”

The Baby as Subject: The Hospitalised Infant and the Family Therapist

“…Those of us trained in systemic practice and in the field of Infant Mental Health could actively promote therapeutic work with the zero to three population. After Sved-Williams' (2003) introduction to infant-parent work for family therapists in this journal, two further publications have demonstrated family therapists' emerging interest in infants and attachment, namely Kozlowska and Foley's (2006) paper on family work with a hospitalised maltreated infant and O'Gorman's article (2007) using singing interventions with neonatal intensive care infants to restore disrupted attachment.…”

The ANZJFT: Snapshots From the History of an Evolving Journal

“…Some of the psychiatrists who were active in the earlier years of the journal's life no longer describe themselves as 'family therapists'. Some have married their earlier passion for family work with newer modalities, such as parent-infant psychotherapy and attachment theory (see Sved-Williams, 2003;MacKenzie, 2003). Others have reminded fellow professionals of what the systemic paradigm still has to offer, for example, in the highly controversial area of psychosis (Achimovich, 2005).…”