Working 50 years for babies and families: Child Psychotherapist Dilys Daws legacy interview

MINDinMIND

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Dilys Daws’ contribution to the field of child mental health and child psychotherapy has been immense. Spanning over five decades, her career as a Child & Adolescent Psychotherapist is notable in many respects as a clinician and shaping public opinion and government policy about the importance of infant mental health.

In the 1980’s Dilys began speaking to the public and government about the work of child psychotherapists with their patients, raising awareness of the profession and the difficulties babies and parents experience in a way that had never been done before.

Her books, such as Through the Night, which focus on the difficulties infants and parents experience , have become classics for therapists and new parents alike. Their popularity is perhaps due to the fact that they are based on fifty years of careful observation of babies and their families, many of them spent in the same baby clinic.

It is Dilys’ ability to influence government policy and collaborate with different child professions, as well as her extraordinary clinical work which is really quite remarkable which mark her out as one of the most important child psychotherapists of her generation. Because since 1976, Dilys has been transforming the lives of children and parents in what might be to some an unconventional setting for psychotherapeutic work. Each week she has been going to the James Wigg GP Practice, in Kentish Town, London to stand by the weighing scales, observing what takes place as parents bring in their babies to be checked. In this interview with Jane O’Rourke, hear Dilys discuss:

Highlights:

3’00: Parent-infant work in the community setting of a baby clinic

5’00: The importance of child therapists being brave in their clinical work

7’40 How experiencing difficulty herself, as a young mother, led Dilys to become a child psychotherapist

13’05 How Dilys broke the taboo of child psychotherapists speaking to the media about child mental health in the early 1980’s

13’55 The importance of acknowledging the emotional turmoil which having a new baby can provoke in parents.

17’00 The discoveries parents can make by observing their babies

18’00 The importance of helping new fathers who are struggling

21’13 Ghosts in the nursery: connections between a baby’s problems and their parents’ childhood traumas

24’25 The taboos of breastfeeding, such as the sensuality of it

30’00 A child psychotherapist’s advice for others after nearly 60 years of clinical work

Dilys Daws’ writings and activities in promoting child psychotherapy are significant. In 1996 she set up the Association for Infant Mental Health UK, a networking body for professionals working with infants.

Dilys cofounded the Child Psychotherapy Trust in 1989 and had a significant role in developing awareness of child psychotherapy in the UK among the public and the government. Following this, the training for child psychotherapy was negotiated by the Association for Child Psychotherapy within the NHS. It was during this time under her tenure in the early 1990’s, that she encouraged fellow child psychotherapists to speak to the media about child mental health and the difficulties their patients were experiencing - and perhaps broke a taboo that had existed until then.