Let’s Grow Together’s core work consists of four interconnected strategies: Infant Mental Health & Wellbeing; Speech, Language, Communication & Literacy; Early Years Care & Education; and the Schools Community. These areas of focus are supported by an integrated monitoring and evaluation process. The strategies are underpinned by an Infant & Early Childhood Mental Health framework and connected by their common approaches of capacity building, integration, and quality improvement, to get every child’s life off to the best possible start.
Prevention, Promotion & Early Intervention
Let’s Grow Together is an organisation rooted in area-based prevention, promotion, and early intervention. Our work seeks to empower families, caregivers, communities, services, systems, and polices in supporting all children to have happy, healthy, thriving lives. A particular focus of the organisation is to promote, build, and strengthen relationships and environments in order to enhance healthy child development and reduce the long-term effects of adverse childhood experiences.
Prevention is the act of providing protective support to families and communities to stop issues before they start or to stop them getting worse. Promotion is enabling families to support their child’s lifelong health and wellbeing, through both universal and targeted services. Early intervention means providing support and help as early as possible when an issue or concern starts.
Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health
All our work, programmes, and activities are guided by the principles and practice of Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health. We work with everyone important in a child’s life, ensuring every child is able to form close and secure relationships. Key building blocks to supporting a secure parent/caregiver-child relationship include: attunement; serve and return; and rupture and repair.
Having an initial strong relationship and a secure attachment with a parent or caregiver is important for laying the foundation of a young child’s development. It is important for: developing a sense of self and of others; developing the capacity to learn, play, and understand the world; being able to form other relationships in the future; and developing the ability to regulate and manage thoughts, emotions, feelings, and stress.
Attunement
The ability of caregivers to be aware of and respond positively to a child’s needs, which can be communicated using verbal or non-verbal signals or cues such as eye contact, facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, and touch. It involves a parent or caregiver “tuning in” to their child, and responding appropriately.
Serve & Return
Like a game of tennis, a baby serves by reaching out for an interaction (by babbling, making eye contact, or touch), and their caregiver returns and acknowledges by responding positively (talking back, smiling, or touching). We strive for predictable and consistent returns to support children’s optimal brain development.
Rupture & Repair
Ruptures, breaks, or negative interactions in a relationship happen to everyone, but how an adult responds after this occurs is very important. Repairing the relationship afterwards, by acknowledging what happened or what went wrong, is key to restoring trust and security in the relationship.
