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

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Parent-infant group
• reflective functioning
• Mindful Parenting
• infant observation
• wonder

Keywords:

• Groupe parents-enfant
• fonction réflexive
• sollicitude attentive parentale
• observation de nourrissons
• s'interroger

Keywords:

• gruppo genitore-neonato
• funzione riflessiva
• Genitorialita’ Pensante
• osservazione del neonato
• stupore

Acknowledgements

This paper was originally presented at the James S. Grotstein Annual Conference: ‘New Perspectives on Infant and Child Development: A Psychoanalytic View of Attachment,’ UCLA, June 15, 2002. I would like to extend thanks to Dr. Shelley Alhanati, Dr. Julie McCaig, Dr. James Grotstein, and Dr. Anne Alvarez as well as to the staff, interns, and volunteers at The Maple Counseling Center who in so many ways helped grow this work.