Nursery World - Positive Relationships: Working with Parents

When parents separate, caregivers outside the family can provide
essential protection, love and stability to the children affected. Dr
Penelope Leach explains how.

It was the great child psychiatrist Donald Winnicott who famously remarked that, 'There is no such thing as a baby'. By this he meant that babies cannot meaningfully exist alone, without an adult 'completing half'. And he was more right than he could then have known.

He meant that a new baby is not a fully functional individual and we know now that they are not fully formed either. It is not only their body that must grow and develop - their brain must too.

At birth, the left side, the uniquely human 'thinking part' of their brain, has only just begun to grow. Over the next three years, the brain's structure will unfold, but how it functions - how the mind develops - will depend on its interaction with the environment in which it finds itself. For an infant, the environment mostly consists of relationships with people. Parents literally build babies' brains.

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