ONE DAY CONFERENCE
Monday 8th December 2008 - Audrey Emerton Building, Brighton
This is our Third Annual Conference on the early years of life. Previous conferences have both been well attended and very well reviewed.
The focus of this conference is on helping professionals to identify vulnerable parents, promote a positive relationship between parents and their infants and safeguard susceptible children. The conference will aim towards helping professionals identify problematic situations as early as possible and prevent harmful situations escalating.
Becoming a parent is an important rite of passage and should be a major transformation in a person’s life. It is a time filled with a whole rainbow of emotions from immense joy and hope for the future, to trepidation, anxiety, ambivalence and even hatred and hostility towards the infant. It is a time of enormous change and learning, a window of opportunity and creativity - but it can also be a time of possible severe depression, conflict between a parental couple, hostility between generations and extreme loneliness either within a parental couple or as a single parent.
There is an ever increasing professional awareness of how essential a sound relationship between baby and his/her parent is for the development of a secure individual. If this relationship is not there, the future emotional well-being of the child is at risk. This can contribute to the development of more serious conditions in later childhood, adolescence and adulthood.
The existence of a harmonious and reflective relationship between parent(s) and babies can not be taken for granted, but, how, as professionals, can we best identify vulnerable parents and infants and be of help during this turbulent process?
This conference will be addressing these important questions with the aim of enabling practitioners to think about their working practice in the light of presentations from eminent speakers and practitioners.
The purpose of the conference is to enhance the ability to identify vulnerable parents and increase professional awareness of how to promote a positive relationship between parents and their infants. Attendees will gain a better clinical awareness and understanding of vulnerable parents and develop their clinical work and reflective practice.
This conference will be relevant to all professionals working with parents and parents-to-be and is intended to appeal to a multi-disciplinary audience. It will be of particular relevance to midwives, health visitors, early years workers, psychologists, paediatricians, G.Ps and social workers.
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Conference format:
There will be series of key note presentations by experts in the field. Following each presentation, a ‘discussant’, someone who is also a practitioner in this field of work, will reflect on key issues and add their own perspective to the subject matter. The audience will then be invited to join in the panel discussion.
