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Mindful Parenting: a group approach to enhancing reflective capacity in parents and infants

Mindful Parenting: a group approach to enhancing reflective capacity in parents and infants
Journal of Child Psychotherapy
Short Title: Mindful Parenting
Format: Journal Article
Publication Year: 2003
Pages: 357-374
Sources ID: 21268
Visibility: Private
Abstract: (Show)

Fonagy ( 1998a ) has suggested that the core of prevention of psychopathology in early childhood should be the enhancement of mentalizing. To that end, this paper introduces Mindful Parenting, an innovative psychotherapeutic group designed to promote reflective functioning in parents and their infants/toddlers. The interdisciplinary underpinnings of this group work, including the utility of applied infant observation, is followed by exposition of the structural components of Mindful Parenting. Evocative moments from the group experience are interwoven, in an effort to make plain the ways that Mindful Parenting seeks to restore, cultivate, and sustain the most basic, verbal and nonverbal, affective contacts between parent and child. The paper concludes with clinical material on the birth of a thinking couple.

Subjects: 
Parenting & Childcare and Contemplation