Who are the Ready to Relate cards suitable for and how to they work?

Who are the cards suitable for?

This cards are suitable for any professional working with families with infants, including health visitors, family support workers, midwives and practitioners working in early years, mental health and social care.

How do the cards work?

The cards aim to improve the parent‐infant relationship and promote infant attachment and optimal infant development by helping to develop the parent’s understanding of their infant and how they respond to interaction.  For example, the extent to which the parent responds in a timely and attuned manner; the child’s involvement and parent’s positive engagement, and the infant’s ability to seek and maintain closeness to the parent.

Secure infant attachment leads to positive outcomes; the infant can be comforted when distressed and will use the parent as a secure base from which to explore the environment.

Practitioners can use the resource cards to work directly with the parent and infant in the home to identify unconscious patterns of relating and behaving.

The pictorial cards help to embed parent infant relationship training into practice. For example:

• Pictures allow discussion, time to wonder and think.
• Information on the back of the cards can be used as a prompt for health professionals or early years practitioners to discuss key pieces of information around specific aspects of the parent infant relationship with the parents so they can understand their baby.
• Cards can be used to reinforce key messages as well as intervention when professionals identify a need or mismatch of response from parents to baby.

The cards are on a keyring, so they can be used individually or as a pack.

Contents

The cards include sections on:

• Pregnancy
• Parenting and family relationships
• Neurodevelopment
• Building a relationship with your baby
• Infant cues and responses