Before the dawn of the twenty-first century, T. Berry Brazelton had already pronounced the American healthcare system broken, provocatively recommending that it be "scrapped" altogether. Yet during this period, practice and service delivery models have emerged with promise for greater effectiveness and efficiency. Among these are preventive, developmental, relational, strengths-based, holistic, and family-and child-centered approaches that have been espoused in the field of nursing, and resonate with Brazelton's philosophy.
Brazelton's newborn research, developmental model, and relationshipbased approach to families have clearly influenced and will continue to influence nursing practice. Yet he would be the first to emphasize that many early adopters and champions of his and related approaches have been nurses and nurse practitioners. Many among them had also independently found their way to paradigms for care consistent with his. While different practitioners within the same discipline often subscribe to a range of practice models, earlier developments within the nursing field had readied many nurses for Brazelton's relational model of care. Compatible family-centered approaches had arisen simultaneously within nursing during times that were ripe for change.
A few years after the first edition of Touchpoints (Brazelton, 1992) was published, and just a year before the publication