This year marks the publication of "The newborn as a person: enabling healthy infant development worldwide", edited by myself, Bonnie Petrauskas and Berry Brazelton and published by John Wiley and Sons. This edited volume, which contains reports from our colleagues from around the world, is a testament to the impact of the NBAS on research and practice everywhere and is also a tribute to the powerful influence Berry Brazelton has had on our field and on our lives. The Newborn Behavioral Observations (NBO) system is part of that legacy and is being used extensively in clinical settings across the world. This issue contains one of the first studies to examine the effects of the NBO on parent-child interactions in the postnatal period. In this research report, Nurse researchers, Leslie Sanders and Ellen Buckner demonstrate that the NBO can increase first-time mother's understanding of their baby's competencies and can help them learn how to respond to and interact with their infants. Nurses who participated in this study overwhelmingly identified a need among their patient populations for interventions that enhance engagement and help mothers learn about their infants and unanimously believed the NBO would be effective in doing so. We are also very pleased to present the first results of an impressive longitudinal study being conducted at the University of Warsaw, Poland by research psychologists, Grazyna Kmita and Eliza Kiepura. The focus of this study is on the development of self-regulation in preterm infants and involves an examination of the relationship between patterns of interactive regulation in mother-child dyads and the child's self- regulatory competence.

Staying with the theme of the high-risk infant, we are especially fortunate to be able to present an interview with our colleague and one of the world's leading researchers - a person who has dedicated her life to the improvement of the lives of preterm infants and their families - Dr. Heidelise Als. It can be said that through her innovative research, Dr. Als has almost singlehandedly changed the care of high-risk infants in settings across the world. In this interview with Alejandra Viloria, Dr. Als describes how she became involved in this research in the first place and the struggles she faced in her career as she tried to humanize the environment of the preterm infant through the introduction of individualized relationship-based care. She describes the development of the Assessment of Premature Infant Behavior (APIB) and the Newborn Individualized Developmental Care and Assessment Program (NIDCAP) and finally, she shares her hopes for the future and her dream of establishing "individualized family "womb rooms"" in every NICU.

In our URBI et Orbi section, we present news from colleagues from across the world. From Ireland, there is a research report by Trinity College, Dublin researchers, Elizabeth Nixon, Sheila Greene, Imelda Coyne, along with J. Kevin Nugent, describing their study on Parental Ethnotheories among Immigrant and Irish Parents of Infants in Ireland. We have a report from the University of Coimbra in Portugal by Anabela ARAÚJO PEDROSA, Sofia GAMEIRO, Maria Cristina CANAVARRO describing their experiences in Working with families and their newborn babies in a Portuguese maternity hospital. Campbell Paul, who is one of the founding fathers of Infant Mental Health in Australia, announces that the National Conference of the Australian Association for Infant Mental Health and the Australasian Marce Society, will be held at the University of Melbourne on 1-3 October 2009. The focus is on applying expert knowledge about the serious problems parents experience and the interventions to promote healthy family relationships in the modern world. Belgian Psychiatrist Liliane Parisi is presenting the First International Congress on the Parent and Baby Unit at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Tivoli (University Center Tivoli), La Louviere, Belgium on November 19 and 20, 2009. In the UK, Joanna Hawthorne and Betty Hutchon, along with guest trainer, J. Kevin Nugent, will be offering NBO training at Clare College Cambridge University, UK on April 7th and 8th. Finally the Brazelton Touchpoints program will present the 12th Annual Touchpoints National Forum on April 24 - 25, at the Radisson Hotel Boston, USA.