ABSTRACT
We have come a full circle since the start of the book. This will be a long chapter about a complex subject. We return to pregnancy and the early years of childhood, but this time we will be mainly identifying with the parents. Of course, grown-ups still carry their childhood with them in memory; but they are now due to be responsible for bringing up a new generation. It might be useful to browse through this book’s early chapters to recall what is involved in parental responsibility. A central theme here is that: as a child grows, so a parent needs to grow in sympathetic responsiveness, or attunement with their childremember Stern’s (1995) pioneering work about this. This requires not only being intuitively aware of oneself at the same ages as one’s child; but also, vitally, the recognition that our children’s lives are different from our own, and that they will have different problems.
