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.

This updated edition is informed by latest research in neuroscience, psychoanalysis and infant observation and decades of clinical experience. It also includes important new findings about how the mother’s brain undergoes massive restructuring during the transition to parenthood, a phenomenon that has been named ‘matrescence.’ The authors engage with the difficult emotional experiences that are often glossed over in parenting books – such as bonding, ambivalence about the baby, depression and the emotional turmoil of being a new parent. Acknowledgement and understanding of this darker side of family life offer 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, the book remains a helpful resource for parents, as well as professionals interested in ideas from psychoanalytic clinical practice including health visitors, midwives, social workers, general practitioners, paediatricians and childcare workers.

Genres: Parenting, Psychology

268 pages, Kindle Edition

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.