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About Us
Well Baby Center, 12316 Venice Blvd., Mar Vista, CA 90066
Phone # 310-402-BABY (2229) Fax # 310-390-3955
info@wellbabycenter.org
Our Mission
Through this website and our community center in Mar Vista, California, we strive to support families from the very beginning—and to help parents to be curious about the meaning of their own and their children’s behavior. By fostering security within their primary relationships, parents help children become more resilient and flexible in the face of life’s many inevitable challenges.
Our Vision
Well Baby’s integrative, pan-disciplinary perspective is drawn from psychoanalytic family systems, developmental psychology and attachment theories, which has shown that when we as parents are able to reflect on our interactions with our children -- including how they are feeling as well as how one's past might affect the way in which we interact with them, three things occur: we don't burden them with our unresolved conflicts, we help them to reach their developmental potential, and we help them to build satisfying relationships with others. In addition, we are informed by cutting-edge infant brain research. Together, Well Baby Center and WellBabyCenter.org form a new model that combines the physical and the virtual, the individual and the group, and the theoretical and the practical. Well Baby Center relies on the interplay between the expert, the community, and the individual parent for its strength, growth, and vitality.
Our Philosophy
Well Baby’s philosophy is rooted in the emerging field of infant-family mental health. We believe that healthy early relationships are the cornerstones of an infant’s emotional, cognitive, and physical growth and development. Infants and toddlers rely on their parents to make sense of their world/primary relationship — where a parent mindfully attends to a child’s emotional needs—is crucial to normal growth and development. But parents need support for such an awesome task. Social support for new parents has found to be the single most important protective factor available to prevent and eradicate entrenched, multi-generational family problems and to alleviate feelings of "overwhelm" in new parents who are constantly giving to their children, their bosses, their spouses -- and ending up feeling completely depleted. Our parenting center is providing what parents seem to need most – a like-minded community where they can truly belong.
The mother-infant relationship is the template for all future relationships a child will encounter. This first relationship (whether with mother or other maternal caregiver) is co-created, where the child influences the relationship as much as the mother does. Research has shown that this initial bond impacts a child’s brain development in fundamental ways. When there’s a good fit, the parent easily helps the child co-regulate emotional states (the precurser to the child having internalized self-control which enables social-emotional and cognitive health, assuring that the child will have future success in school. When the relationship experiences struggles, however, either because the fit between the parent's and the child's temperment is problematic, or because there are emotional or physical vulnerabilities within the mother or developmental/neurological disabilities within the infant. There might also be impinging environmental stressors such as financial difficulties, marital issues, mourning the death of a loved one, birth of second child, and so on that could be interfering with the mother-infant bond. Finding professional support and the support of other parents within one's community can make all the difference in the world for the parent, the child and the family by preventing more serious, long-term problems from developing.