ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes, through an eighteen-month research and observational study from pregnancy to the earliest months of life, the complex interactions between mother and baby. Children struggle to assert themselves in an adult world that is often entirely deaf to their voices. A baby needs to be observed for what she is. The book acknowledges the impossibility of giving general guidelines to individual parents or of telling any mother how to look after her own baby. Any activity, whether it is lifting an arm, or walking, talking, going to sleep, learning something, thinking out a problem, or making a decision, involves an interrelationship between "mental" and "physical" processes and it is impossible to separate activities into either purely mental or purely physical. The mother - baby relationship is shaped during pre-natal life and is exquisitely bodily.
