It was a day that promised, in the words of Leslie Ironside, Director of the Centre for Emotional Development, ‘plenty of manure for your garden’. The less green fingered among us, or indeed those more ambivalent about life story work should, nonetheless, bear in mind Adam Phillips’s Winnicottian caution: ‘You never know what the unconscious will make use of.’

This important and timely conference, organised by Leslie Ironside, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist and Director of the Centre for Emotional Development, addressed some of the difficulties raised in trying to understand the complex pattern of emotional and developmental difficulties children who have been in care present.

The number of teenage pregnancies in the UK is the highest in Europe. Terminations are also high and those who have their babies often are involved with Social Services. This fifth annual conference on the early years of life, staged and organized by the Centre for Emotional Development in Brighton, was as, “ a study day…looking at what it means to be a teenage mother or young father...

Dr. Leslie Ironside, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist and Director CfED, spoke first on ‘Keeping Multiple Families in Mind.’   He evoked feelings of empathy in the audience as we heard a child’s perspective on being fostered and thought about Fairbairn’s quotation on the greatest need of a child being to feel genuinely loved by his parents...