Jaw tight. Googling what your mother would've known.
Support for the family around a new baby: built on well-evidenced caregiving science from across cultures, not just one version of it.
Held supports the relationships around a new baby, the parents, the co-parent, the grandmother or auntie doing daily care, the household adjusting to a new person in it. It draws onwell-evidenced, cross-cultural caregiving research: the cooperative breeding hypothesis (Hrdy, 2009), which shows humans evolved to raise children with multiple attachment figures, not one; and cross-cultural attachment studies, among the Dogon, the Efe, and other communal-caregiving societies, showing infants form genuine, secure attachments to several consistent caregivers at once, not a diluted version of attachment to one.
This page is deliberately scoped to what a family therapy and allied health team can offer well: the relational, developmental, and caregiving-structure side of pregnancy through the first three years. Where a perinatal presentation needs psychiatric input, that sits with our psychiatrist rather than being referred away. Where the line still falls is stated plainly further down this page.
Sarah Hrdy's cooperative breeding hypothesis (2009) argues humans evolved as a species that raises children with multiple "alloparents," not a single caregiver, communal infant care is the evolutionary norm, not an adaptation.
Studies among the Dogon (True, Pisani & Oumar, 2001) and Efe forager communities document infants forming multiple, genuinely secure attachments to consistently available caregivers, not a diffused or lesser version of attachment to one.
WHO Kangaroo Mother Care guidance and WHO/UNICEF breastfeeding recommendations (to two years or beyond) already sit closer to communal and extended-family caregiving norms than to the "early independence" model.
Bed-sharing and co-sleeping are the cultural default in many of the families we work with, and we don't start from the assumption that a practice is unsafe because it isn't the Western default. At the same time, the evidence on safe infant sleep is real and specific, and we don't soften it to avoid a cultural conversation.
Following Red Nose Australia's national safe sleep guidance, risk increases significantly when any of the following are present, regardless of the cultural context bed-sharing happens in:
Where bed-sharing is a family's practice, our role is to work through and reduce these specific risk factors directly with the family, not to override the practice, and not to leave it unaddressed either. For individualised safe sleep planning, we refer to Red Nose Australia's guidance and the family's GP or maternal child health nurse.
Perinatal mood and anxiety disorders are not simply "mental health for someone who recently had a baby." Diagnosis, medication decisions in pregnancy and lactation, and risk assessment are psychiatric work, not something a family therapy or OT service should be holding on its own.
That work is now held here. Where a clinical presentation is identified during sessions, our psychiatrist reviews it, including medication decisions in pregnancy and while breastfeeding, and the perinatal work holds both partners rather than only the person who gave birth. Where a presentation calls for subspecialist perinatal psychiatry, we still refer on. Postpartum psychosis in particular is a psychiatric emergency. It typically emerges within the first two weeks after birth and can involve confusion, hallucinations, delusions, or rapid mood swings, and requires immediate medical attention, not a scheduled therapy session.
If you or someone you know may be experiencing this, please contact one of the following directly:
Held hands off directly into Becoming's individual and family tracks, and draws on Roots vs Routes for the parents' own story.
"Most perinatal care assumes it's building the very first thing. For most of our families, it's walking into a room where the village already knows what to do."
Everything on this site is built on our published model. Read the full framework here.