Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy

01273 921 355
Online therapy In the press
  • Home
  • Therapy services
    • Fees
    • How psychotherapy works
    • Who is it for?
    • Individual psychotherapy
    • Child therapy
    • Couples counselling and therapy in Brighton
    • Marriage counselling
    • Family therapy and counselling
    • Group psychotherapy
    • Corporate services
    • Leadership coaching and consultancy
    • Clinical supervision for individuals and organisations
    • FAQs
  • Types of therapy
    • Acceptance commitment therapy (ACT)
    • Analytic psychotherapy
    • Body-orientated psychotherapy
    • Private clinical psychology
    • Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)
    • Compassion focused therapy (CFT)
    • Cult Recovery
    • Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT)
    • Therapy for divorce or separation
    • Eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR)
    • Existential therapy
    • Group analytic psychotherapy
    • Integrative therapy
    • Interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT)
    • Non-violent resistance (NVR)
    • Family and systemic psychotherapy
    • Schema therapy
    • Transactional analysis (TA)
    • Trauma psychotherapy
  • Types of issues
    • Abuse
    • Addiction counselling Brighton
      • Gambling addiction therapy
      • Porn addiction help
    • Affairs
    • Anger management counselling in Brighton
    • Anxiety
    • Bereavement counselling
    • Cross-cultural issues
    • Depression
    • Family issues
    • LGBT+ issues and therapy
    • Low self-esteem
    • Relationship issues
    • Sexual issues
    • Stress
  • Online therapy
    • Online anger management therapy
    • Online anxiety therapy
    • Online therapy for bereavement
    • Online therapy for depression
    • Online relationship counselling
  • Find my therapist
    • Our practitioners
  • Blog
    • Ageing
    • Attachment
    • Child development
    • Families
    • Gender
    • Groups
    • Loss
    • Mental health
    • Neuroscience
    • Parenting
    • Psychotherapy
    • Relationships
    • Sexuality
    • Sleep
    • Society
    • Spirituality
    • Work
  • About us
    • Sustainability
    • Work with us
    • Press
  • Contact us
    • Contact us – Brighton and Hove practice
    • Contact us – Lewes practice
    • Contact us – online therapy
    • Contact us – press
    • Privacy policy

March 4, 2019 by Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Leave a Comment

The role of ‘attunement’ in relationships with babies and young children

Babies are not born with the neurological capacity to understand distress, or even to differentiate between discomfort and mortal danger. To ensure their survival therefore, babies are biologically programmed to communicate all forms of distress to their primary caregivers through very primitive means (e.g. crying, screaming and reaching out).

Under ideal circumstances, these ‘signals’ from the baby will elicit a sensitive (‘attuned’) response from their caregiver, whereby their caregiver will utilise their more developed brain in order to empathise with the infant’s distress, to soothe them and overtime, to give them words to better understand and communicate their distress. Repetition of this pattern over time, coupled with a deepening joy of the relationship, is not only the foundation for a secure attachment relationship, but the building blocks for other important skills such as developing empathy and emotional regulation.

When working well, attunement enables a child to feel truly understood, accepted and ‘felt’ by their caregiver. Inevitably however, “getting it right” all the time is not possible and sometimes signals will be missed or responded to incorrectly (‘mis-attunement’) – also known as a ‘relationship rupture’. Ruptures are normal and actually present opportunities for a child-carer relationship if the carer is able to repair the relationship appropriately. Indeed, it is estimated that for a secure attachment to develop, carers need to attune correctly around one third of the time (Hoghughi & Speight, 1998), which is reassuring!

Over the years, researchers have examined the importance of attunement on an infant’s mental health. This includes Ed Tronick’s (2007), ‘still face experiment’, which illustrates the distressing disintegration of a young child, whose parent temporarily stops responding to their cues (Youtube link). It also includes the work of Lynne Murray, who demonstrated that even warm responses to infants are not regulating unless they are exactly timed with their cues. This is important as for some parent-infant dyads, ruptures can be severe and chronically prevent the carer from being able to sensitively attune to their infant – ‘toxic mis-attunement’. This might occur when factors specific to the child get in the way of them being able to communicate their needs effectively (e.g. speech and language difficulties or neurodevelopmental difficulties), or when factors specific to the parent stop them being able to receive and process the child’s distress signals appropriately (e.g. mental health difficulties or substance misuse problems). There may also be external stressors impacting on the relationship (e.g. domestic violence or poverty). In these cases, it is imperative that mental health and social support services are proactively mobilised to offer early support to both the child and the carer.

Hoghughi, M. & Speight, A. (1998). Good enough parenting for all children – A strategy for a healthier society. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 78, 4, 293-296.

Murray, L. & Trevarthen, C. (1985). Emotional regulations of interactions between two-month-olds and their mothers. In T. M. Field & N. A. Fox (Eds.),Social perception in infants (pp. 177-197). Norwood,NJ: Ablex.

 

Please follow the links to find out more about about our therapists and the types of therapy services we offer.  We have practices in Hove and Lewes.  Online therapy is also available.

Face to Face and Online Therapy Help Available Now

Click Here to Enquire

Filed Under: Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy, Child development, Families, Parenting, Relationships Tagged With: child therapy, family therapy, Mental Health, Relationship Counselling

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Find your practitioner

loader
Meta Data and Taxonomies Filter

Locations -

  • Brighton
  • Lewes
  • Online
loader
loader
loader
loader
loader

Search for your practitioner by location

Brighton
Lewes

Therapy services +

Therapy services: 

Therapy types

Therapy types: 

Our practitioners

  • Sam Jahara
  • Mark Vahrmeyer
  • Gerry Gilmartin
  • Dr Simon Cassar
  • Claire Barnes
  • David Work
  • Shiraz El Showk
  • Thad Hickman
  • Susanna Petitpierre
  • David Keighley
  • Kirsty Toal
  • Joseph Bailey
  • Lucie Ramet
  • Georgie Leake

Search our blog

Work with us

Find out more….

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Charities we support

One Earth Logo

Hove clinic
49 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex, BN3 2BE

Lewes clinic
Star Brewery, Studio 22, 1 Castle Ditch Lane, Lewes, BN7 1YJ

Copyright © 2025
Press enquiries
Privacy policy
Resources
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.AcceptReject Privacy Policy
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT