Infant mental health: Monitoring our movement into the twenty-first century
✍ Scribed by Michael Trout
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1988
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 733 KB
- Volume
- 9
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0163-9641
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
At a time when our guidance is increasingly sought by parents, courts, and social policy planners, it is critical that infant mental health professionals establish clearer standards for training, engage in more rigorous self-monitoring of our clinical and our research efforts, and recognize the extraordinary risks for bias in all of our work. It is not necessary that we speak with one voice. In fact, our field has been enriched by its transdisciplinary nature and by its many points of view. But it is critical that we offer assessments, engage in treatment, conduct our research, and do our teaching free of uncontrolled contamination by our own unresolved childhood experiences, our idealizations, our needs for control: in short, that we be truly open to the data and truly available to the families. Examples are offered of the risks if we fail, and a call is made for careful transdisciplinary training, supervision, individual psychotherapy, and collegial monitoring for infant mental health clinicians, researchers, and educators, alike.