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Recent research has indicated that parental reflective functioning or mentalization plays a crucial role in the development of a range of healthy adaptations in both parent and child. While many parenting interventions developed over the course of the last 20 years have implicitly attempted to enhance mentalization in parents, this article describes an effort to directly intervene with parents to enhance or encourage the development of reflective capacities. In this article, the broad outlines of a reflective parenting approach are described. Two reflective parenting programs are then considered, one a group intervention designed for low-risk parents, the other a home visiting intervention designed for high-risk parents and children.
OVER THE COURSE OF THE LAST FOUR YEARS, A GROUP OF US AT THE Yale Child Study Center have been engaged in developing psychoanalytically informed programs for parents and younger children in both highand low-risk settings (Goyette-Ewing et al., 2003; Slade, 2002; Slade et al., in press; Slade, Sadler, and Mayes, in press). While we began this work with the general aim of improving parent-child relationships along a range of dimensions, we believed, from the outset, that facilitating change in parents and in parent-child relationships would depend, in large part, on our success in engaging and enhancing parental reflective functioning. In the following article, I will begin by outlining why it made particular sense to us to organize our programmatic efforts around the construct of parental reflective functioning. I will then describe what we have come to see as the general and guiding principles of a reflective parenting approach. Finally, I will briefly describe two reflective parenting programs we have developed at the Yale Child Study Center.1
Parental Reflective Functioning
The construct of reflective functioning was introduced by Peter Fonagy, Miriam Steele, Howard Steele, and Mary Target just over 10 years ago (Fonagy et al., 1995). The last decade's elaboration of these seminal ideas is described in Fonagy et al. (2002). Fonagy and his colleagues define the reflective function as an individual's capacity to mentalize, that is, to envision mental states in the self or the other. The term mental state is meant to describe all mental experience: thoughts, feelings, desires, beliefs, and intentions. The capacity to think reflectively means not only that an individual acknowledges...