Getting to Know You: Lessons in Early Relational Health from Infants and Caregivers - Softcover

Gold, Claudia M

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807786535 ISBN 13: 9780807786536

Publisher: Teachers College Press, 2025

Synopsis

Utilizing narrative storytelling, this user-friendly guide describes the principles of early relational health with direct application to day-to-day work with infants and parents. Practitioners on the front lines with young children and families often feel great pressure to know “what to do” in a broad variety 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. This resource will be important reading for a broad variety of practitioners including early childhood educators, home visitors, pediatricians, doulas, and mental health clinicians, as well as policymakers, parents, and other caregivers of young children. 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.

About this title

About the Author

Claudia M. Gold, MD, is a pediatrician and writer who practiced general pediatrics for over 2 years and now specializes in early relational health. She has clinical experience working in many different communities and speaks frequently to audiences of both parents and professionals.

Edition details

• Publisher: Teachers College Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807786535
• ISBN 13: 9780807786536
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240