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In the preceding article, I described my work in the Baby Clinic of a General Practice. Some of my time there is spent in consulting with the G.P.s and Health Visitors who run the baby clinic about the emotional aspect of the problems they are concerned with in the babies they see.
In the actual clinical work I undertake myself I see families where there is a feeling of not being able to manage a particular state of a baby's or small child's development. The most pressing of these are often presented as sleeping problems. I have seen a number of these and found that about half can be noticeably helped in a short time. One or two consultations allow some change in the parents' approach to the baby that breaks the deadlock between them.
My technique is to combine a structured questioning about the details of the baby's time-table — taking the mother through the minutiae of both day and night — with a free-ranging look at the history of the pregnancy and birth, with the mother's relationship with the father and with her own parents. My impression is that if there is a good marriage or stable relationship, this work is effective if carried out either with the mother alone, or with both parents. With an unsatisfactory relationship the mother alone can be helped, but with this particular technique taking on two disharmonious parents is not usually effective in the short-term. It can however be a focus and starting-off point for parents who are looking for marital help. At times, sleeping problems in their baby appear to expose a lack of real commitment to a long-term relationship in two young unmarried parents.
What strikes me in this work is that by offering a free-floating attention, a particular arresting theme often emerges — a connection that has a compulsive attraction. I am never sure that this is what the problem is “really” about, but pin-pointing it seems to be of significance both for the mother and myself at the time. This is possibly more likely to happen if I s