Getting to Know You: Lessons in Early Relational Health From Infants and Caregivers

This user-friendly guide uses narrative storytelling to describes the principles of early relational health with direct application to day-to-day work with infants and parents. Practitioners on the front lines often feel great pressure to know “what to do” in a wide range of challenging situations. Drawing on both developmental science and extensive clinical experience, Dr. Gold provides evidence that the exact opposite—a stance of not-knowing—helps us find our way into another person’s experience, offering the greatest opportunity for connection, growth, and healing. Gold presents a model of “listening in” with an intentional suspension of expectations and a willingness to be surprised. The paradigm of listening in functions as a kind of superpower to enhance teacher–student, professional–parent, and parent–infant relationships. Getting to Know You is important reading for a broad variety of practitioners working with infants, including early childhood educators, home visitors, pediatricians, doulas, and mental health clinicians, as well as policymakers, parents, and other caregivers. Book Features: Summarizes the key advances in our understanding of brain science, child development, and infant-parent mental health. Emphasizes lessons from real-life interactions between infants and caregivers as communicated through detailed clinical vignettes. Offers practitioners a model for listening that is rooted in the concept of cultural humility and the idea that even in sameness there is difference.