2. Understanding your baby

About this course

Your baby’s brain is making millions of connections every second, learning and establishing patterns that will set them up for a lifetime. No matter your family set-up, the important relationships in your child’s life help shape their emotional health and wellbeing, with their first three years being the most important period of their brain development.

Understanding your baby is for all parents, grandparents and carers welcoming a new baby and has been designed to include all the practical information and advice you might hope for from a traditional baby group, with the additional benefit of support around emotional and mental wellbeing for you and your baby. The resources and information included are focused on the first year of your baby’s life. You might find our course on Understanding your child: from toddler to teenager more helpful if your baby is over one.

Understanding your baby has been developed by a team of Clinical Psychologists, Child Psychotherapists, Health Visitors, Child and Family Practitioners, and, importantly, parents. Everything you will follow and learn in the course has been informed by experience and is designed to be practical; to help you and your family in your everyday experiences and emotions. You’ll also learn about the foundations of wellbeing and mental health, as well as how our brains develop in infancy and what this means for the way babies communicate and connect with their carers and their environment.

The course follows 11 Modules, each taking around 20 minutes and broken up into manageable chunks called Units. You’ll find a range of practical tools as well as emotional support and guidance for sleeping, feeding, playing, soothing and connecting with your baby, and some specialist material for fathers too.

The first few Modules look at your and your baby’s feelings and understanding your baby’s brain, which will help shape the approaches and ideas around the later sections. So, this means it needs to be followed in order, one Module at a time. You don’t need to do it all in one go, and our advice is to take breaks and spread out your learning.

Understanding your baby is designed for all parents in any situation, but you might find that perhaps you begin to feel you would benefit from more personalised or specialist support, and so there are some additional resources signposted throughout to guide you.

We know that there are many different families, with different backgrounds and shapes and sizes. We have tried to consider some of the different needs of families in this course, but it hasn't been possible to account for all backgrounds. If your personal situation isn’t reflected, we still hope that you find something helpful in the main ideas about developing close, connected relationships between parents and children and welcome your feedback to improve its relevance.