OXPIP Training: Assessing Parent-Infant Relationships

Summary

Friday 11th and 18th July 2025

09.30 – 15.00

This two-day training looks at a baby’s early development and how it is impacted by their parents’ attachment histories and the parent-baby relationships. A particular focus will be on how a baby’s brain development is ‘experience dependent’ and thus moulded by the people with whom they live. Video clips will be central to the training and will help participants to become better observers and to increase their understanding of the impact of parental mental health difficulties, and their risky, neglectful, or abusive behaviour on the developing child.

Learning Outcomes

Participants’ confidence in assessing parent-infant relationships will be increased through developing their skills in identifying:

• non-verbal, embodied communication between infants and parents
• the links between primitive emotional states and behaviour in clients and themselves
• main stressors on the parent-infant relationship
• projective mechanisms in interactions
• parents’ capacity to change
• impact of their work on themselves