ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on culture-sensitive adaptations of psychoanalytic concepts and methods. Many children that are participating in preventive developmental guidance programmes in the major towns of the Western world are growing up in cultural or subcultural environments that differ substantially from those of white middle class families. Studies on immigrant children starting elementary school, at age six, have shown that they lag behind in terms of language acquisition and cognitive development. The different sub-fields—education/development, parenting, language acquisition, and nutrition—serve equally well as windows on the early relational dynamics within which children develop. The preventive project of the First Steps is educational/developmental in nature and contains supplementary emphases on language acquisition, healthy nutrition, and feeding attitudes. Conflictive and unresolved early care and attachtment experiences with the grandparents can eclipse the potential richness of the relationship between the mother and her baby of the next generation.
