Claudia Gold MD
Paediatrician, Author, Infant-Parent Mental Health Specialist
Claudia M. Gold, MD is a paediatrician and writer who practiced paediatrics for 20 years and now specializes in early relational health. She has over three decades of clinical experience in a wide variety of communities and currently works in a volunteer clinic for uninsured families and as a consultant to a program for pregnant and parenting women struggling with substance use. She was on the faculty of the UMass fellowship in Early Relational Health for ten years.
Dr. Gold has extensive experience with families hard hit by the opioid crisis in her community in rural Western Massachusetts, and currently works as a clinician with Volunteers in Medicine, Berkshires serving a primarily immigrant population.
Dr. Gold’s most recent book is Getting to Know You: Lessons in Early Relational Health from Infants and Caregivers ( Teachers College Press Spring 2025) She co-authored The Power of Discord: Why the Ups and downs of Relationships are the Secret to Building Intimacy, Resilience and Trust with infant researcher and psychologist Ed Tronick (Little, Brown Spark 2020) Her other books include The Developmental Science of Early Childhood (2017), The Silenced Child (2016), and Keeping Your Child in Mind (2011) Dr. Gold speaks frequently to a broad variety of audiences including both parents and professionals in the United States and around the world. She received her BA from the University of Chicago and MD from U of C Pritzker School of Medicine.
Listening In:
A model for making every contact with babies and caregiver’s count
Cultural humility and early relational health share a core common principle: the significance of the not-knowing stance. When human infant and caregiver meet, they get to know each other in a messy, moment-by-moment developmental process over time. In parallel, when clinicians meet and get to know families, a stance of not-knowing — with a willingness to make mistakes— guides the process of building a relationship of trust.
This presentation and workshop offer a unifying model of “listening in” listening with an intentional suspension of expectations and a willingness to be surprised. This model is rooted in core concepts from contemporary developmental science and applicable to broad variety of clinical encounters and situations in work with infants and families.
Drawing on my most recent books Getting to Know You: Lessons in Early Relational Health from Infants and Caregivers, we will address core early relational health principles that inform the model of Listening In including the repair theory of human development, parental reflective functioning, the healing power of safety, and the ways that relationships change the brain and body. Participants are invited to bring their own experience for in-depth discussion of the application of these principles to clinical work with infants and caregivers.
Lessons from stories of actual infant-caregiver relationships, will reveal the power of playing in the uncertainty. Reframing a deficit as an asset, the presentations will demonstrate how moments where we don’t know what’s going on, uncomfortable as they may be, are the ones that offer the most opportunity for connection, growth, and healing. When we can remain open to not-knowing we can better find our way into another person’s experience, in turn building a sense of connection and belonging.