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A New Generation of Baby Brain Science
At Babygro, we offer professional training grounded in the latest research in social neuroscience and predictive brain theory. Our approach moves beyond the traditional ‘triune brain’ and ‘polyvagal’ models to reflect what modern neuroscience tells us: that the brain works as an integrated network system, not as a hierarchy of separate parts.
Our courses are produced in partnership with the Social Neuroscience of Human Attachment Lab, at the University of Essex. This is a centre for brain development which collaborates with leading neuroscientists and psychologists around the globe to publish the latest academic research.
Our Courses for Professionals
From Parts to Networks
Most early years and mental health training describes the brain in terms of old versus new structures: the ‘reptilian,’ ‘emotional,’ and ‘thinking’ brains - which are thought to compete or override one another.
Modern neuroscience paints a different picture.
The brain operates through large-scale functional networks that continually communicate, predict, and balance one another. Rather than reacting to the world, the brain is anticipatory - constantly predicting future needs and using relationships, especially early ones, to stay regulated and in balance. These early predictions shape how these large-scale networks develop and ‘speak’ to each other, forming the foundation for lifelong resilience, empathy, and wellbeing.
What Makes our Training Different?
A Network Model of Attachment and Brain Development
At Babygro we introduce professionals to the Four Network model developed by Dr Pascal Vrticka and colleagues at the Social Neuroscience of Human Attachment Lab at the University of Essex, with whom we are proud to partner at Babygro.
Our professional courses help practitioners understand:
- How the baby brain develops as a predictive and connected system.
- How co-regulation and parent-infant synchrony shape functional connectivity.
- Why integration - not control – of large-scale networks, is the foundation of resilience.
- How this understanding informs everyday practice, therapeutic work, and support for families under stress.
Through interactive teaching, reflective discussion, and real-world application, participants gain a neuroscience-informed framework that aligns with modern evidence while remaining deeply relational.
Courses Produced in Partnership
The Social Neuroscience of Human Attachment Lab
Our professional training integrates the latest research from Dr Pascal Vrticka’s Social Neuroscience of Human Attachment Lab at the University of Essex with Babygro’s experience in early intervention, perinatal wellbeing, and community practice.
How the Four Networks Model Enhances Existing Practice
The Four Networks approach doesn’t ask practitioners to change what they do - it helps them understand why it works.
Many evidence-based interventions already centre around sensitivity, reflection, and repair. What this neuroscience adds is a clear, integrative framework showing how these moments of care are building and calibrating babies’ brain networks for connection, stress regulation, and social understanding.
By understanding these underlying processes, practitioners can:
- Frame familiar practices in updated, network-based neuroscience.
- Communicate to parents that their ordinary, imperfect moments of comfort and play are shaping the brain’s predictive models of safety.
- Explain resilience not as ‘self-control’ but as a flexible, relationship-based system of balance and recovery.
Why it Matters?
The Four Networks model offers a shared language that bridges developmental neuroscience, therapeutic practice, and everyday caregiving. It moves beyond older ‘layered brain’ or ‘polyvagal’ metaphors toward a more integrated, predictive view of human connection.
By rooting practice in this model, we can:
- Bring scientific coherence to existing attachment-based approaches.
- Reframe parental difficulties - such as anxiety, withdrawal, or over-vigilance - as adaptations of a sophisticated and predictive system, rather than as deficits.
- Offer practitioners and parents a hopeful narrative: that everyday responsive moments, however small, are opportunites to reshape the brain’s expectations of safety.
We invite practitioners, services, and researchers to collaborate with us - through training, reflective practice, and partnership projects - as we continue to explore how connection shapes resilience from the very beginning of life.
Online or In-person
Our courses can be provided online or delivered in-person, on-site, within your organisation.
Our in-person courses are held in the picturesque setting of the Potager Garden Studio, in Cornwall, overlooking beautiful gardens. Our full day in-person courses include an organic, homegrown lunch in the cafe's greenhouse, a short stroll from the studio.
The Social Neuroscience of Human Attachment Lab collaborates with leading neuroscientists and psychologists around the globe to publish the latest academic research on caregiving, attachment and brain-development.
Babygro acts as a mouthpiece for this research, translating it to parents and professionals in a visual, interactive, and jargon-free way.
Dr Pascal Vrticka - Director of the SoNeAt Lab -
Babygro Associate Trustee
'As we become more confident in our ability to explain how our bodies and brains orchestrate caregiving and attachment behaviours, it is important to translate our findings for the benefits of as many parents as possible.
Our Sleep Courses
Infant Sleep
Drawing on research from large-scale meta-analyses of sleep patterns around the world, as well as a biological and evolutionary understanding of ‘normal sleep’ for infants, this course examines the root of western expectations around infant sleep. The course also explores the relationships between breastfeeding, night-waking, and bed-sharing, as well as assessing the research evidence for practices involving limit-setting
and 'self-settling' in infants.