How many babies who experience serious hardships in their first year of life have delayed communication skills?
The Berry Street Take Two team based in Bendigo in the Loddon region of Victoria were worried about this. They welcomed a speech pathologist to work with them for more than a year, as part of Take Two’s Communication Project to help understand the scale of the problem.
Continue reading “Childhood communications delays – a pilot project”
By Dr. Nicole Milburn, Clinical Psychologist and Internal Consultant for Infant Mental Health at Berry Street Take Two
The Berry Street Childhood Institute has a primary task of helping the community think about what makes a good childhood. In health and welfare work, we are so often required to focus on what is not good enough and what requires improvement. To have an institute in our field that is dedicated to sharing a conversation about what makes a good childhood is a really wonderful addition.
I am a Clinical Psychologist and Infant Mental Health Specialist. The field of infant mental health has been burgeoning over the last 50 years and has much to say about what constitutes a good childhood. Infant mental health has particular strengths in this area, having come from the fields of both psychoanalytic theory and developmental psychology.
Psychoanalysis has a long history of thinking about what lies inside people’s heads; what conscious and unconscious drives and motivations are acted out in behavior, and how people see themselves in relation to one another. Continue reading “What makes a good childhood?”
Berry Street has always worked with children and young people at the most complex end of the continuum of risk and vulnerability, as a consequence of their experiences of child abuse and neglect.
As part of a commitment to prevent the harm that disrupts healthy child development, we are mindful of the need to intervene sooner, critically during the early years.
In keeping with this commitment, we are delighted to welcome back to Australia Dr Kristie Brandt, internationally renowned teacher, clinician, consultant, Assistant Clinical Professor of Paediatrics at the University of California Davis School of Medicine and Director of the Parent-Infant & child Institute in Napa, USA.
We are proudly sponsoring Dr Brandt’s 4th September workshop on Professional Roles in Supporting Infant-Parent Mental Health as part of the Early Childhood Australia conference. We appreciate Dr Brandt’s contribution to understanding: the importance of the quality of the infant-parent and child-parent relationship; how infants shape and are shaped by relationships with their parents and other important adults in their lives; and the unique relationship between every parent and child and how it makes infant and early childhood mental health work both challenging and exciting.
We will also have an exhibition table at the Early Childhood Australia conference. If you are attending, please stop past and introduce yourself to Joanna Bock, our Statewide Manager of Early Learning is Fun program.
Post written by: Pam Miranda, Senior Manager Knowledge Development, Berry Street Childhood Institute
The Good Childhood Blog 