What is the New Beginnings Integrated Core Needs Approach?
A Core Needs Approach to Perinatal Mental Health and Wellbeing
Developed by Symon Oliveri, Founder of Contigo Child and Family and Accredited Mental Health Social Worker
What is the Integrated Core Needs Approach
The Integrated Core Needs Approach is a framework for understanding perinatal mental health and wellbeing through the lens of core emotional needs. It is informed by Circle of Security, Schema Therapy, and Attachment Theory.
The approach combines a clinical framework for perinatal practitioners with accessible parent-facing resources that support reflection, psychoeducation, formulation, and intervention across both face-to-face and telehealth settings.
The Integrated Core Needs Approach helps parents understand their mental health and wellbeing through the lens of core emotional needs.
By exploring emotional needs, attachment experiences, coping patterns, and relationships, parents can develop a deeper understanding of their current experiences and the factors that shape them.
As parents build insight into their own emotional world, they become better able to respond to their own needs while recognising and supporting the attachment and emotional needs of their child.
In this way, the framework supports responsive perinatal mental health care while creating opportunities for intergenerational healing and the development of secure attachment relationships.
SUPPORTS CLINICIANS TO
• Facilitate collaborative reflection on emotional wellbeing, relationships, attachment experiences, and parenting
• Understand perinatal mental health and wellbeing through a core needs lens
• Flexibly guide intervention according to the parent's presentation, practice setting, and available timeframe
• Connect parent wellbeing and children's attachment needs within a shared framework
Training provides access to the comprehensive New Beginnings parent resource suite, which can be used as an adjunct to therapy in both face-to-face and telehealth settings.
The Map of Wellbeing and the Cups of Wellbeing are the central visual frameworks within the New Beginnings Integrated Core Needs Framework. Together, they provide a practical and relational way of understanding emotional wellbeing, attachment, and intergenerational patterns during the perinatal period and early parenting.