Esteemed among physicians devoted to humanizing medical care, Brazelton's insistent focus has been on two figural relationships: pediatricians' relationships with children and parents, and the parent-child relationship. In his view, nurturing the former promotes the latter, and both promote the healthy development and functioning of children and families. Less heralded is the long reach that Brazelton has had in fields outside pediatrics; this chapter highlights the instantiation of his orientation within early care and education.
The Development of Brazelton's Approach to Early RelationshipsFor several decades, Brazelton has promoted a model of infant and family development that posits satisfying relationships as both a hallmark of thriving in infancy and early childhood and a vehicle for attaining developmental goals. Well situated with like-minded theoreticians and practitioners (e.g., Minuchin's Family Systems Theory [1974], Bronfenbrenner's Developmental Ecological Model [1979], and Sander's Organismic Perspective [1977] on infant development), Brazelton's approach is a model for relationshipsbased practice within pediatrics and beyond (Hulbert, 2003). Brazelton (2000) credits Louis Sander's "model of systems regulation" (1977) as a provocation for his reflection on the contributions of internal biological systems and "external" systems (family, cultural context) to infant development. The Touchpoints framework was developed partially to overcome the limitations of "stimulus-response" paradigms of development (Brazelton, 2000).
