Developing the Receptive Heart and Mind Through Infant Observation*

This article indicates how important it is to carry out preventative work with young people and parents to enable them to become more understanding of the emotional and mental life of the infant. The author proposes a model of preventative work piloted in 2023 in China, via Zoom, which includes showing videos of parent-infant interaction during the first eighteen months of the infant's life. The Chinese pilot project occurred with informal research through obtaining written feedback from forty participants. This Chinese observation of videoed parent-infant interaction illustrates how the project impacted the participants who engaged in twenty weeks of two-hour infant observation seminars. The large group then moved into an affective learning model group (Scharff, 2005) to consider their emotional experience of viewing the parent-infant interactions. The author suggests that it would be useful to propose this project in schools, universities, and hospitals in order that parents and professionals will be more adequately prepared to promote infants’ emotional, intellectual, and social development. She also suggests that the development of the receptive mind-observing parent-infant interaction (Houzel, 2010) is an important feature of this Chinese infant observation project. An Italian school video infant observation project, inspired by this article, is also described. (All names in the text are disguised.)