Specialised Parent-Infant Relationship Teams
Specialised parent-infant relationship teams (parent-infant teams) are multi-disciplinary mental health teams.
Parent-infant teams support babies who are living in fear, confusion and distress because of disrupted relationships with their parent or primary caregiver.
Parent-Infant Teams Support Families by:
- Providing direct therapeutic support to babies and their parents/caregivers.
- Being expert advisors and champions for parent-infant relationships across the wider early years, health and social care system. This strengthens the workforce’s ability to identify concerns early and provide timely and appropriate support or referral.
Other Parent-Infant Services
The Parent–Infant Foundation recognises specialised parent-infant relationship teams as the most effective approach to supporting disrupted parent-infant relationships and improving infant mental health.
Parent-infant teams are not yet available in all areas, however there are other services who provide support for babies and their families. See our Map of teams and services for details.
How do you define a specialised parent-infant relationship team?
They are ideally multidisciplinary teams, which include highly skilled mental health professionals such as clinical psychologists and child psychotherapists, with expertise in infant and parent mental health and in supporting and strengthening the important relationships between babies and their parents or carers.
They are experts and champions. They use their expertise to help the local workforce to understand and support all parent-infant relationships, to identify issues where they occur and take the appropriate action. This happens through offering training, consultation and/or supervision to other professionals and advice to system leaders and commissioners.
They offer direct support for families who need specialised help. This includes targeted work with families experiencing early difficulties whose needs cannot be met by universal services alone, and specialist therapeutic work with families experiencing severe, complex and/or enduring difficulties in their early relationships, where babies’ emotional wellbeing and development is particularly at risk.
They assess families and offer individualised programmes of support to meet their needs drawing on a toolkit of both professional practice and evidence-based programmes.
Their focus is on the parent-infant relationship. They do not work only with an individual child or parent(s) but with the dyad or triad (although there may be particular sessions in which parents see a therapist on their own).
There is a clear referral pathway to enable families who need support to access the service. Families are referred because of concerns about difficulties in their early relationships, which is putting or could put babies’ emotional wellbeing and development at risk. Unlike other mental health services there does not need to be a clinical diagnosis in the adult or child for families to be eligible for the service.
They accept referrals for children aged two and under and their parent(s). Some work from pregnancy, others from birth. (Some services see older children too, and some are currently expanding to reach other preschool children, up to the age of four).
What makes specialised parent-infant teams different from other services?
Many professionals in the public, private and voluntary sector have developed a specialist expertise in babies’ emotional wellbeing and offer interventions, including evidence-based programmes, to support parent-infant relationships.
For example:
- Health visitors can play a particularly important role as they work with every family during this important period. Some health visiting services have specialist infant mental health visitors who offer interventions to support families who need additional help.
- Some CAMHS services have time dedicated to working with children under two, although not all of these focus on the parent-infant relationship.
- Other services may have professionals who have the expertise but not the time or mandate to offer families’ therapeutic support.
These are all important parts of the ecosystem that supports babies’ emotional wellbeing but they are insufficient on their own to provide the same therapeutic intensity of specialised, multi-disciplinary teams and often don’t have capacity to support system-wide change.
Why do we need specialised parent-infant relationship teams?
The first 1001 days of life, from pregnancy to age two, is a time of unique opportunity and vulnerability. It is a period of particularly rapid growth, when the foundations for later development are laid.
During this time, babies’ brains are shaped by the interactions they have with their parents. The evidence is clear: at least one secure, responsive relationship with a consistent adult is a vital ingredient in babies’ healthy brain development.
Persistent difficulties in early relationships can have pervasive effects on many aspects of child development, with long term costs to individuals, families, communities and society.
During this period, babies are unable to talk about their feelings and needs, but communicate these in different ways. They are completely dependent on adults to survive. Therefore, work with babies in the 1001 days is different from work with older children and requires a specific set of competencies: practitioners must have a deep understanding of child development and have the ability to read babies’ pre-verbal cues.
They need the ability to work with parents, babies and their relationships. This is skilled work that requires specialist expertise. It is also true preventative work: acting early to prevent potential harm to babies’ emotional wellbeing and later mental health.
The unique opportunities and challenges during the first 1001 days, and the need for practitioners to have specific expertise to work effectively with families during this period, create a strong case for the existence of specialised parent-infant relationship teams.