| The delivery of mental health services to infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and their families involves a complex interweaving of skills that straddle disciplines and test boundaries. Provision of such services is a testament to the strength of practitioners who struggle to balance the necessary knowledge base, application strategies, and self-awareness required by the work. It is a fragile dance, with the practitioner often initiating a conversation that a caregiver does not want to have, testing and retesting boundaries as the work unfolds, and maintaining a steady, yet ever adapting, view of individual children and families. The practitioner must provide constancy in an ever changing world while remaining open to new possibilities in her own work and in the lives of the families served. The dance requires the clinician to adjust her tempo across time—sometimes it is a slow dreamy waltz, at other times a spinning, whirling motion accompanying the child and family on their precious journey of developing and becoming. |