Finding Your Way with Your Baby: The emotional life of parents and babies

by Dilys Daws, Alexandra De Rementeria

Finding Your Way with Your Baby explores the emotional experience of the baby in the first year, and that of the mother, father and other significant adults. It does so in a way that is deeply informed by psychoanalytic understandings, infant observation, developmental science and decades of clinical experience. Combining the wisdom of many years' work with the freshness of up-to-date knowledge, Dilys Daws and Alexandra de Rementeria engage with the most difficult emotional experiences that are often glossed over in parenting books – such as pregnancy, through birth into bonding, ambivalence about the baby, depression, and the emotional turmoil so often brought to the surface by being a new parent. Acknowledgement and understanding about this darker side of family life offers a sense of relief that can allow parents to harness the power of knowing, owning and sharing feelings to transform situations and break negative cycles and old ways of relating. With real-life examples, references to current thinking and a calm and simple writing style they also provide new insights into the more commonly covered issues such as weaning, sleeping and crying. Finding Your Way with Your Baby is primarily aimed at parents but it will be a helpful resource for all those working with parents and babies including health visitors, midwives, social workers, GPs, paediatricians and childcare workers . It will appeal to parents and professionals who are interested in ideas from psychoanalytic clinical practice and the latest research in developmental psychology and neuroscience.

Genres: Parenting, Psychology

246 pages, Paperback

First published February 20, 2015

Reviews

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book from the perspective of a therapist working with perinatal mothers and their babies rather than as a parent, and will be highly recommending this for parents to read. I adore the tone of this book and the comprehensive references to current research that illuminate just enough for the reader to understand the basis for the information offered. I found the psychoanalytic approach to be respectful of parents' innate intelligence and intuition for parenting their babies, and the recognition of maternal ambivalence to be refreshingly transparent and hopefully ultimately reassuring for parents. I recently viewed a live interview with authors Dilys and Alex and enjoyed hearing about their process of updating the book together, as well as incredible experiences of working as Child and Adolescent Psychotherapists in the UK. The way Dilys and Alex talk about parents and babies in their book is reflective of their warm yet no-nonsense way of sharing their knowledge in real life.