Parent & Baby Services

Mental health support for new and expectant parents 

Our Parent & Baby Service helps parents and carers in Liverpool develop strong and healthy relationships with their babies. We’re focusing on keeping babies safe and helping parents, carers and babies enjoy each other’s company and form good relationships, so that babies develop to their full potential.

How can our Parent & Baby Service support people?

We help parents and carers see and respond to their baby’s present needs. We do this by supporting them to overcome blocks; for example, to reprocess early trauma or birth trauma, recognise their baby as a unique individual, understand the baby’s developmental needs and practical issues like housing and money.

We help with planning around the baby’s needs, and in some cases, we offer therapy either in groups or with individual families, like:

• parent and infant psychotherapy;

• family therapy;

• video guidance; and/or

• rewind therapy.

We work in combination with the other professionals supporting the family, like midwives, health visitors, children’s centre staff, early help staff and social workers.

We can work with families from conception through to 3 years old, but the younger the babies are when we start to work with the family, the better. The best results come from working with families ante-natally.

The benefits of using our Parent & Baby Service

• Work with a specialist team of parent and baby specialists, led by a clinical psychologist.

• Get support with assessing parent and baby services.

• We can support the emotional connection between babies and their caregivers (the attachment and the bond), really focusing on family strengths.

• We can help understand the baby’s needs in a developmental way, asking ‘what would this baby be asking for at this point if she or he could talk with words?’

• We provide space for parents to reflect and reconsider (sometimes for the first time) how their experiences have affected the way they parent.

How do we assess what type of support families need?

We use something called keys to interactive parenting (KIPS) to make our assessments. By filming how a parent/carer interacts with their baby, we can watch for 12 key facets of parenting (KIPS) and make our assessments. We can then use our observations to work in partnership with families to promote parent and baby relationships, promote learning and support confidence.

KIPS helps us to:

• understand and build on the positive behaviours a parent shows which can bring balance to the ‘problems’ a child/parent might be getting help for;

• provide a framework to work from in identifying relational goals; and

• find ways to support a parent in being more responsive to their child.