The Infant-Parent Psychotherapy Program at The Samaritan Counseling Center of the Mohawk Valley

Gregory A. Kovacs, LMFT Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist 1643 Genesee Street Utica, New York 13502 (315) 724-5173 (315) 724-5323 fax

What is Infant-Parent Psychotherapy?

Our earliest relationships—the ones we were too young to remember—are the blocks upon which we build all future relationships. This is easy to forget, even for therapists trained to understand the effect of past relationships on current functioning. Yet the first three years is when our social environments have the greatest impact on the developing brain; that is, we have a window—one that is open only 4% of our lives—in which we can have a profound impact on the way our children experience their remaining 80 years!!

When we accurately interpret our infants’ non-verbal communications—their cries, their postures, their eye movements—and then respond to them in ways that show that we understand, the brains of our infants and toddlers will begin to form neural connections—cognitive rules that transform into social rules—about what to expect from future social experiences. So when your infant averts his eyes from your silly, loud, dancing face, and when you understand that you’re silly gestures and voice level are too stimulating, causing you to calmly re-orient your face, body gestures, and tone of voice to your infant’s needs, your infant will learn a whole bunch of things: He’ll trust that you understand what he is trying to communicate, that you will provide him with the need he is trying to communicate, and he’ll develop a sense that he can influence the world around him—sorta’ like baby-sized self-esteem!

Similarly, if your infant startles and cries when a frying pan crashes to the floor, and you respond with wide eyes, pursed lips, and raised eyebrows, followed by a fleeting smile and a sing-songy, “you’re okayyyy,” then you have effectively communicated to your infant, “you’ve done a great job interpreting and responding to a scary situation, and I’m here to protect you, but your fear-reaction doesn’t need to be there anymore.” You have validated your infant’s reaction (more baby-sized self-esteem), modeled for him how to respond in the future, and showed him that those around him can be trusted to keep him safe. You have begun teaching your child the sought-after skill of emotional self-regulation!! That’s a skill he’ll use to survive kindergarten and beyond.

So, the simplified formula for helping your infant develop good self-regulation:

1.Respect the role of genes (sorry, it’s part of the equation); 2.When her reaction is right on, join her; when she laughs at your silly face, laugh with her; 3.When her emotional reaction is reasonable, but not needed (she cries at a dropped frying pan), very briefly join her emotion with facial expressions and gestures, and then quickly shift to a gentle, comforting, sing-songy interaction—remember, validate her reaction, then model a new, more reasonable emotion (“whew, that was a bit scary, but you’re okay now.”)

So, if this is done rather consistently over the first three years (don’t sprint across the room every forty seconds just to model an appropriate reaction—that would be tiring and weird!), then this sense of trust and self-efficacy grows, and grows, until your child develops trust that you, and others, will be there for them when they need it; and when we trust those around us, we tend to be a lot more pleasant toward them! This pattern feeds the buds of temperament—those life-long personality characteristics that can make or break our relationships and life successes.

Mismatch Between Infant Needs and Parent Behavior

Many parents do interact appropriately and effectively with their infants, as if they “just know” how to be parents—“she’s a natural.” It’s true that parents are hard-wired, in a sense, to respond to their infant’s needs. However, parents’ thought patterns, learned either from their own parents or environments, or incited by maladaptive mood fluctuations, can cause them to misinterpret their baby’s “intentions”; such misinterpretations often lead to a mis-match between infant needs and parent behavior.

When parents are experiencing disorders of mood (post-partum depression or anxiety) or perception (schizophrenia), or when their own parents or environments have taught them maladaptive social rules when they were infants, they may maintain those maladaptive cognitive rules and look for social behaviors that reinforce them (for example, “I expect other people to try taking advantage of me” and “most people will not like me” are maladaptive cognitive rules). Parents may filter their daily experiences through that cognitive rule causing social interactions to be flavored with that biased interpretation. The more they “think” the rule, and the more they find it to be reinforced (if you look through orange lenses, you’re going to see orange!), the more likely it becomes that they will continue to think the cognitive rule. When the same neurons fire (causing a thought) again and again, it becomes much more likely that the next time an interpretation is required, that same set of neurons (the same thought) will fire. This is kind of like a song getting stuck in our heads: the more we sing it, the more likely we’ll be singing it again the next chance our brain has to squeeze it in! These ruminating thoughts, when they’re negative and hurtful, are at the heart of depression and anxiety, and they are often culprits in the infant-parent relationship.