Child Psychology

Child Psychology is a nine-week foundational programme designed for practitioners who encounter children in their professional life — teachers, school counsellors, paediatric nurses, social workers, early-career psychologists — but who have not had the opportunity to study developmental psychology in depth. It is also a natural starting point for those who later intend to proceed to our Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology specialist programme.

The programme takes seriously the observation, repeated across research traditions from Bowlby to Fonagy, that children do not simply express adult psychopathology in miniature. Their symptoms have a developmental grammar; a fear or a withdrawal means something different at three, at seven and at eleven. A practitioner who does not understand the expected milestones cannot distinguish a transient difficulty from a worrying deviation.

The curriculum begins in infancy, with the formation of the attachment bond, the role of primary caregiving, and the earliest foundations of affect regulation. We draw on classic attachment research — Ainsworth, Main, Sroufe — and on the contemporary neuro-affective literature. From there we move through the pre-school years (the rise of symbolic play and theory of mind), the early school years (peer relations, self-concept, the transition to formal learning) and early adolescence (identity, puberty, the renegotiation of the parental relationship).

Each week combines a ninety-minute pre-recorded lecture, a required reading package of approximately forty pages, and a live seventy-five-minute discussion seminar by video-conference. Participants are encouraged to bring observational material from their own professional settings — a classroom, a family case, a clinical interview — and to discuss it in the group. Confidentiality protocols are taught in week one and adhered to throughout.

Assessment consists of weekly reflective posts on the learning platform and a final four-thousand-word developmental profile of a single child (anonymised, with supervisor approval). The profile integrates attachment history, cognitive milestones, emotional regulation, peer relations and family context. Graduates receive the IPAS Certificate in Child Psychology (Foundational), signed by the President of the Council.