Infant Mental Health Awareness Week

Who is holding the baby?

Infant Mental Health Awareness Week 2025 - Who is holding the baby?

Infant Mental Health Awareness Week (IMHAW) 2025 took place from 9th-15th June 2025. The theme this year was, 'Who is holding the baby?'.

IMHAW Who is Holding the Baby logo

Why ‘Who is holding the baby?’

Not everyone bonds easily with their baby.  Parents who are overwhelmed by trauma, or struggling with mental or physical health difficulties, need support.  More than one in ten babies in the UK today, are living in fear, confusion and distress.

Infant Mental Health Awareness Week 2025 shone a light on gaps in services that support these vulnerable babies and their families. Our research shows a growing number of parent-infant relationship teams. But in many areas, help is still not available. During IMHAW we launched our 'Who is holding the baby?' report, highlighting new data and some of the excellent practice that is happening across the UK. The report urges commissioners, service planners and policymakers to make sure they know ‘who is holding the baby’.

IMHAW 2025 tried to highlight the crucial job that specialised teams and services do, both supporting families and helping local services to join-up.

Invite your local politician to visit your service

Although Infant Mental Health Awareness Week 2025 is over, we still encourage teams and services to invite their local politicians to visit their service. Although politicians can read policy papers and reports on the importance of the first 1001 days and the parent-infant relationship, nothing beats hearing it first-hand from the experts.

To help you with this process we've created some handy visit guides. Because health policy is a devolved issue, we have produced guides to help you lobby the most appropriate person in England, Scotland or Wales.

Who is holding the baby? Report launch webinar – Monday 9th June 1pm-2pm

We kickstarted IMHAW 2025 on Monday 9th June by launching our new report, ‘Who is holding the baby?’. See more on the report here.

At the webinar we heard from the authors at the Parent-Infant Foundation, as well as Maya Ellis MP, Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Babies (Pregnancy to Age 2).  You can watch this back on our YouTube channel here.

What is Infant Mental Health Awareness Week?

Infant mental health is an often overlooked and misunderstood subject. Infant Mental Health Awareness Week provides an annual opportunity to discuss the importance of supporting babies’ mental health and wellbeing.

The Parent-Infant Foundation has set the theme and co-ordinated Infant Mental Health Awareness Week since 2017, during which time it has grown into a global event.

For information on previous IMHAW activity, see below.

Previous Infant Mental Health Awareness Weeks