Infant Mental Health Awareness Week (IMHAW) in Australia launched today with the Tweddle Foundation’s ‘Understanding Early Trauma’ Seminar at the Substation in Newport.

IMHAW has become a movement for change since it was started in 2016 by the Parent Infant Foundation UK. At today’s Seminar, over 150 health and community sector workers gathered to add their voices to the movement and to hear guest speakers Professor Louise Newman AM, Psychologist Colby Pearce, Gunditjmara Elder Annette Vickery and Dr Nicole Milburn.

Nicole delivered virtual presentations with Dr Julie Larrieu PhD and Dr Joy Osofsky PhD and facilitated a panel discussion. Both presentations were excellent and shared insights gained from traumatic events experienced by infants and their parents, including Hurricane Katrina.

Infant Mental Health Awareness Week highlights the need for a greater understanding about why giving every baby the best possible start is vital to their life chances.

Guest speakers explored the infant’s experience of early trauma and the importance of understanding parental trauma. Also discussed was the need for health workers to take the time to coach and help parents see themselves as parents, taking into consideration experiences of past trauma that may surface once a person becomes a parent. The importance of consistent, secure, attachment relationships was discussed, and the need to help parents ‘be with’ their infants and to help them to understand their child’s inner world.

Panelist Annette Vickery spoke about the importance of connection to Country, connection to Culture and connection to Community for supporting Aboriginal families, and that a broad community of kinship supports should be called upon to care for family.

Today’s theme of Understanding Early Trauma is intrinsically linked with inter-generational trauma and that includes generations of Aboriginal families who continue to experience trauma linked to colonisation and stolen generations.

During Infant Mental Health Awareness Week, Tweddle become even louder advocates for infants. We need to increase awareness of the baby blind-spot, a term that highlights that the focus on child mental health, often overlooks infancy.

This year Tweddle will be observing and celebrating NAIDOC Week (3rd-10th July 2022). The NAIDOC 2022 theme is Get Up! Stand Up! Show Up!

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have a proud history of getting up, standing up, and showing up. From the frontier wars and the earliest resistance fighters to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities fighting for change today.

To Get Up! Stand Up! Show Up! is a call for systemic change, whether it’s seeking proper environmental, cultural and heritage protections, Constitutional change, a comprehensive process of truth-telling, working towards treaties, or calling out racism—we must do it together.

It must be a genuine commitment by all of us to Get Up! Stand Up! Show Up! and support and secure institutional, structural, collaborative, and cooperative reforms.

It’s also time to celebrate the many who have driven and led change in Aboriginal communities over generations—they have been the heroes and champions of change, of equal rights and even basic human rights.

Getting Up, Standing Up, and Showing Up can take many forms. Together, we need to move beyond just acknowledgement, good intentions, empty words and promises, and hollow commitments.

The relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and non‑Indigenous Australians needs to be based on justice, equity, and the proper recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ rights.

Intergenerational ill-health has impacted generations of Aboriginal families who continue to experience trauma linked to colonisation, stolen generations, discrimination and healthcare delivered through a western lens.

Proud Gunditjmara woman and Tweddle Board Member Annette Vickery spoke on the Infant Mental Health Awareness Week event panel about the importance of connection to Country, connection to Culture and connection to Community for Aboriginal families and the services that care for them. A broad community of kinship supports should be called upon to care for family.

Tweddle has the privilege to work alongside Aboriginal health workers, mums, dads, babies and toddlers as part of our early parenting support programs.

Tweddle believes in the rights of Aboriginal People to have opportunities for self-determination. Tweddle believes in working in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities as we develop an understanding of transgenerational trauma.

We respect Aboriginal people by supporting them to stay connected to Country, to family, to language and to land.