ABSTRACT
The title of the book has a double meaning. While it is about connecting with infants, it is also a recognition that as therapists, free enough to become engaged with infants, we usually find them engaging, and their parents seeing that, usually also connect. The approach of engaging infants assists them and their parents to find self-definition within relatedness, or even, imagining in the words of an infant, “You gave me the space to play with who I am.” Infants quickly remember the encounters as highly significant, with a therapist offering as Anne Alvarez said “a more intensive, vitalizing insistence on meaning” (Boulter, 2016, p. 22), they find the new ways of being very influential. Profound levels of connectedness may happen very quickly and they utilise them. Responding to the infant promotes reflectiveness, a way of engaging that may open new moments.
