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In Touch® Parenting
A Meeting of Minds
A Mystery, Man’s Best Friend, Maltreatment of Children, and
“Mentalization”
A Mystery: The Transmission Gap
How attachment security is passed on from one
generation to the next. From mother to child.
Maternal sensitivity accounts for only 23%.
Acceptance, pleasant affect (warmth), responding
contingently (spot on), and cooperation.
The Mystery: What accounts for the 77%?
Maltreatment: Neglected
Children • In 2010, 78% of the 750,000 cases of substantiated child maltreatment in
the U.S. involved neglect.
• Currently, there are 436,000 children in foster care, a majority of which are
neglected.
• Neglectful parents often exhibit “mind-blindedness” in which they are fixated
on their child’s external behavior problem and resort to coercive parenting.
• Parents who neglect their children are often affected by their own history of
trauma and attachment insecurity, and are steeled against their internal
states and by extension those of their child.
• The capacity to mentalize suffers.
Mentalization: A Reflective
Parent… • Is Keenly aware of low-intensity emotions in herself and
her child
• Views the child’s negative emotion as an unthreatening
teachable moment and, moreover, as an opportunity for
intimacy
• Validates and assists the child in verbally labeling
emotions
• Forges positive dyadic strategies for dealing with the
situation that elicited the negative emotion
Informal MQ(Mentalization) Test
1. Sometimes I don’t understand why my child acts like he
does. T F
2. I try to understand how my child thinks and feels. T F
3. It doesn’t help to try to understand why children act like
they do. T F
4. I talk about feelings a lot with my child. T F
5. I don’t understand why my child and I don’t click. T F
6. I try to get my child to tell me how he sees things. T F
7. I am curious about how others think and feel. T F
MQ Test (continued)
8. I try to guess the thoughts that run through my child’s
mind. T F
9. I have given up trying to explain to my child how I think
and feel. T F
10. I understand exactly how my child feels. T F
11. My child seems to react to how I’m feeling at any given
moment. T F
The Mind of the Caregiver
Brain Science and Mind
Science
Spurring Brain Development
• IQ scores increased in children removed from institutions
and placed into foster homes over the early childhood
and into the time of entry into elementary school.
• Young preschool aged children in foster care showed
more joy than their age mates who remained in the
institution.
Using Our Minds to Help Children Organize Their Minds
• Caregivers, therefore, face the dual tasks, firstly of making sense of the
children and then of helping the children to make sense of themselves
and others.
• They must attempt to understand the contents of their children’s minds
and then help them to express their needs and feelings, to contain and
contextualize chaotic thoughts and emotions.
• They must reflect a more ordered and manageable version of the world
back to the child. There is a need to provide cognitive scaffolding that
gives shape to experience.
• Beyond this, the child learns, through gaining access to the mind of the
caregiver, how to understand and think about the feelings, goals, and
intentions of others.
In Touch Parenting
In Touch parenting is the ability to interpret
the behavior of others and oneself in terms
of underlying mental states like feelings,
thoughts, beliefs and desires.
It is NOT mind-reading. W never know
exactly how others think or feel but can
make reasonably accurate guesses.
Thoughts, feelings, intentions
Thoughts, Feelings, Intentions
and Behaviors
Discipline and Compliance
Parenting practices are important for
children’s psychosocial adjustment and
development
Typical focus is on obtaining and
maintaining discipline
A shift has occurred in the last 0-15 years to
focus on parents’ capacity to treat the child
as a psychological agent.
Psychological Agent
A psychological agent can be defined as a
system which can reason about either their
own or other people’s explicit goals,
intentions and beliefs.
Children should be acknowledged as
psychological agents.
Suggested Questions to Ponder or Reflect
on As A Parent With A Child Who Struggles
1. What impact did his behavior have on
you?
2. What do you think he was feeling?
3. What were you feeling?
4. What do you think she meant to
communicate?
5. I wonder what kind of feelings would
make a child act that way?
Reflective Parent Training
Manual 6. What was she after?
7. What is she trying to get you to do or feel?
8. What did you do then?
9. How do you know when your child is sad,
angry, frustrated, etc.?
10. How do you think your own feelings affected
him?
11. Try to step back from this situation. What
were the events or interactions that led up to this
particular problem?
De-briefing Helps Us To Reflect
Better • Hindsight can become foresight
• What was I thinking before or during the
event?
• Behavior can be multiply determined and
the mind can be layered.
• We attempt to think clearly AND feel
clearly
Mentalizing or Reflection Is An Attitude As
Well As A Skill We Can Improve
• Use a curious stance
• Acknowledge that we aim for making
reasonably precise guesses about what is
going on in someone’s thoughts
• Stress can kill mentalization
• When we can’t influence someone
psychologically, we often resort to
coercion and so do children.
Case One: You Are an…Idiot, Mom!
Defiance and Disrespect
• Underlying Issue(s)
• The Child/Parent thoughts and intentions (and feelings)
Case Two: Kite String to the Rescue
Destruction of Property
Defiance and Disrespect
• Underlying Issue(s)
• The Child/Parent thoughts and intentions (and feelings)
Case Three: The Gecko with a Horse Hair Tie
Physical Aggression
Destruction of…..Creatures
• Underlying Issue(s)
• The Child/Parent thoughts and intentions (and feelings)
Case Four: The So-Called Happiest Day of My Life
Physical Aggression
Destruction of Property
• Underlying Issue(s)
• The Child/Parent thoughts and intentions (and feelings)
Case Five: Who Wants to Die?
Verbal and Physical Aggression
• Underlying Issue(s)
• The Child/Parent thoughts and intentions (and feelings)
Case Six: Snapping Fingers for More Pizza
Disrespect for Females
Expectation that others anticipate
his needs but are oblivious to his plans
• Underlying Issue(s)
• The Child/Parent thoughts and intentions (and feelings)
Indicators of Non-Mentalizing
1. Skimming
You've heard the expression: I know just enough to be
dangerous? This is skimming. It's about over-confidence
and being too certain for our own good and the good of our
children. We make snap judgments and presume we know
more than we really do. Skimming is judging a book by its
cover rather than reading the book.
• Example: "I know exactly how you feel!" Sounds nice but
may be off-putting and simply wrong.
2. Mind Blinded
Oblivious to the connection between thoughts,
feelings and intentions and our behavior and our
children's behavior. Relying on explanations for
behavior that related to external, visible reasons
without thinking of the person as having a mind.
Examples: "He does that because he is ADHD." or
"What do you expect, he is a RAD-kid?" Also, "he
did it because he is hot." Or “That’s just his
personality.”
3. Projecting Bad
This error is prone to jumping to negative
interpretations and falsely attributing motives
to children that are evil, deliberate.
Examples: "He does that to make me mad."
or "He acts that way just like his dad."
4. Dismissing.
Undermining, rejecting, shaming and belittling a child's
feelings or one's own is a common error of non-
mentalizing. It can occur when a parent is exhausted and
only responding to the child when behavior or bad behavior
is impossible to ignore.
Examples: "I don't care what you think!" "Don't go there
with me!" "Whatever!" "You are not the only kid around
here with problems." "Don't be a baby." "Look. I don't have
time for this right now!"
5. Psychobabble
This error in mind reading amounts to holding onto an
immature view of a child and not giving them credit for
having grown in how they think and expressing it. Or,
psychobabbling can be telling someone what they think,
feel and want.
Examples: "You are behaving this way because you feel x."
For more information
This slide presentation is based on the ground-breaking
work of the following researchers and clinicians:
Arietta Slade
Peter Fonagy
Carla Sharp
John Grienenberger
Mary Target
Alicia Lieberman
Kersten Soderstrom
John Gottman
