Framing the work: A coparenting model for guiding infant mental health engagement with families

Abstract

When working with families of infants and toddlers, intentionally looking beyond dyadic child‐parent relationship functioning to conceptualize the child's socioemotional adaptation within their broader family collective can enhance the likelihood that clinical gains will be supported and sustained. However, there has been little expert guidance regarding how best to frame infant‐family mental health therapeutic encounters for the adults responsible for the child's care and upbringing in a manner that elevates their mindfulness about and their resolve to strengthen the impact of their coparenting collective. This article describes a new collaborative initiative organized by family‐oriented infant mental health professionals across several different countries, all of whom bring expansive expertise assessing and working with coparenting and triangular family dynamics. The Collaborative's aims are to identify a means for framing initial infant mental health encounters and intakes with families with the goal of assessing and raising family consciousness about the relevance of coparenting. Initial points of convergence and growing points identified by the Collaborative for subsequent field study are addressed.

Thinking three, revisited: infants, coparents, gender roles, and cultural contexts

“…Their objectives are to offer guidelines to practitioners for infant-family intake assessments that can reliably and validly capture core coparenting features of engagement, teamwork, conflict, and child focus. Central to this work is guidance for the use of ecomaps to chart the functional members of the infant or toddler's coparenting system, observational assessments centred by the LTP, self-reflections of coparenting using a coparenting scale and separate evaluations of the child and their symptomatology provided by each coparent (McHale et al, 2023).…”

The Lausanne Trilogue Play: bringing together developmental and systemic perspectives in clinical settings

“…The idea was to propose a set of guidelines, including procedures, that any clinician, regardless of training, experience, therapeutic orientation or work habits, could use in their practice with families and young children, in addition to what they usually do with families, whether it be individual or dyadic work. Dubbed 'framing the work' (FTW; McHale et al, 2023), this set of guidelines comprises assessment, monitoring, and brief intervention procedures targeting coparenting and whole family relationships. An ideal application of the protocol would be to dedicate a couple of sessions to the thematic of coparenting at intake, as well as near the end of therapy.…”

How Coparenting Is Linked to Depression among Chinese Young Girls and Boys: Evidence from a Network Analysis

“…In family life, the quality of coparenting serves as a critical cornerstone influencing the socialization process of young adolescents [27,41,42]. Existing research has demonstrated that parental coordination, open communication and conflict resolution positively contribute to adolescents internalizing behavioral guidelines both at home and in school [43]. This, in turn, enhances the adaptive emotional regulation capacities of adolescents [41,44], bringing about a decline in adolescent depression [45,46].…”