Mentalization-Based Interventions for Children Aged 6-12 and Their Carers: A Narrative Systematic Review

Safe haven in adolescence: Improving parental reflective functioning and youth attachment and mental health with the Connecting and Reflecting Experience

“…Though an exploratory analysis of a subgroup of caregiver‐teen dyads, our small study is marked by strengths in its inclusion of a diverse sample reflective of the local community. The current study has also built upon prior intervention work by obtaining collateral data from adolescents (Barone et al., 2021; Midgley et al., 2021), with patterns of change converging across caregivers’ and adolescents’ perspectives in terms of attachment‐related outcomes and youth mental health improvements. However, the following findings should be considered preliminary evidence for benefits associated with CARE given the current study's lack of a comparison condition.…”

“…A number of mentalizing‐focused parenting interventions have been developed to promote parental mentalizing, operationalized as parental reflective functioning (RF), among caregivers of young children (Camoirano, 2017) and school‐aged youth (Midgley et al., 2021). These programs are designed to support families most at risk of struggling within the parent‐child attachment relationship, by virtue of their children's psychiatric needs, engagement with child welfare systems, or caregivers’ own childhood adversities and current mental health or substance‐dependency challenges.…”

Mentalization in Typically and Atypically Developing Iranian Children and Its Associations with Age, Sex, and Externalizing/Internalizing Symptoms

“…Most critically, in reflective individuals, mental states are recognized as the key to understanding behavior in oneself or another, and as a result, internal working models of emotion and intentions emerge [ 4 ]. In contrast, RF impairment is characterized by a low understanding of internal states underlying behavior, as well as an unintegrated and base understanding of how emotions are dynamic aspects of experiences and relationships [ 5 ], and are thus associated with psychopathology and interpersonal and behavioral difficulties [ 6 , 7 ].…”

“…For example, the latest version of the ICD-11 [ 27 ] describes maladaptive self and interpersonal functioning as the entry criterion for personality disorder and the common feature shared across all manifestations of personality pathology, and may represent a general severity criterion that indicates high levels of psychopathology regardless of specific disorder [ 29 ]. As such, imbalanced mentalizing is thought to be associated with challenges in maladaptive self and interpersonal functioning that are specific to personality disorder, but may also be indicative of a wide variety of other psychopathologies [ 6 ]. At the same time, it is thought that different psychopathologies reflect different imbalances along these dimensions, resulting in various mentalizing profiles that are characteristic of specific disorders [ 2 ].…”

Special issue: <em>Research in child and adolescent psychotherapy</em>

“…We are now in a new phase in which attention has been paid to the empirical evidence of psychological treatment: impressive contemporary studies on the impact of early interventions concerning at-risk parenting and child development has allowed the application of manualized therapeutic models to vulnerable families by focusing treatment on attachment and reflective function (Steele & Steele, 2018 ). At the same time, manualized interventions such as Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT) have also begun to be applied to children in the 6-12 year group (Midgley et al ., 2021 ) - as well as to adolescents (Russouw et al ., 2021) - and to bring evidence of their effectiveness. Especially in childhood, new conceptualizations of child functioning have promoted new methodologies for studying the effectiveness of therapeutic processes (PDM-2, Lingiardi & McWilliams, 2017 ).…”