We were delighted to adopt the third of Debi Maskell-Graham’s suite of Attachment Play courses at the end of last year, to join our family of specialist CPD courses for family practitioners. Baby Bonding has been successfully delivered around the world as part of Debi’s ‘bigtoeslittletoes’ organisation, which Debi passed over to Clear Sky upon her retirement in 2019.

So popular is the Baby Bonding course, we delivered two sell-out events in Oxfordshire at the start of 2020, ahead of lockdown – with the third sadly postponed. Such is demand from further afield for this recognised and effective early intervention approach, we have taken the decision to develop this course, with Debi’s help, into an online learning experience, accessible to all family practitioners, in partnership with our Clear Sky associate in Dorset, Sophia O’Neill.

Debi said:

“The experience of nurturing touch for infants is known to be an essential requirement for the subsequent development of secure attachment.

“Touch is only one aspect of a set of mechanisms operating within the context of the parent-baby relationship. Rather than teaching touch, it is more helpful to see touch as part of the expression of a healthy and happy early relationship.

“Touch needs to be part of a holistic and playful approach to supporting the earliest parent-baby relationship for ALL new parents and carers. This is because of the well-established link between the nature of this relationship to lifelong outcomes for babies.”

Baby bonding is currently delivered as  2-day training using simple attachment approach and has been developed around the very latest research. The programme is designed to intervene early when attachment and internal working models are being formed or are most likely to change.

Practitioners who attend training will learn how to use this flexible programme for group and individual work and how to use a suite of validated measures to evaluate impact.

The training is ideal for all practitioners working with families who may wish to extend their work to babies and their carers.

Play Therapists, social workers, teaching staff, midwives, nurses, charity workers, family outreach workers, nursery staff, health educators, children’s centre staff -and others.

‘This is the best training course I have ever been on.’ – Play Therapist, UK

We hope to launch our online courses early in 2021 and will continue to deliver these face to face here both in the UK and in Ireland through our partners Linsey and Ruth at ‘bigtoeslittletoesireland’

For information about all of our Attachment Play courses, please see here: https://www.clear-sky.org.uk/courses/