![]() ![]() “It’s a really strong nurturing way of parenting children, make them feel safe,” she explains. As a child raised with therapeutic parenting and now a parent herself, Jefferies is in a better position than most to see how all parents could learn from this approach. She works with the Inspire Training Group in the UK for therapeutic parents, is happily married and has a two-year-old son, Arthur, “who is securely attached and thriving”. Now some of us are a bit more healed than others.” “But essentially therapeutic parenting followed us all the way through and helped us all to build a safe base with my mum, so that we could trust adults. Jefferies and her siblings all had different struggles. But early experience of food being withheld was still determining their behavioural responses. It might sound quite odd, she acknowledges, that it couldn’t just be explained to them that dinner was coming later. “Coming from a place where food may not have been there, if dinner-time was delayed it would send us all into this freefall, we would be so dysregulated.” Strong, nurturing boundaries was the better approach to helping us feel safe.”įor example, they had dinner at 5pm every single day, no matter where they were. Jefferies says her adoptive mother learnt very quickly that standard parenting was not the way forward with her and her siblings “and actually made us worse. The traumatised child’s brain is preoccupied with survival, to the detriment of the rest of its development. However, the one part of their brain that is most lit up is their amygdala, which is their “fight or flight” response. Whereas a scan of a child who is not securely attached is quite dark, with not many parts of the brain lit up. It is well worth watching Tronick's experiment in action on YouTube as a reminder of just how much babies crave and need a responsive human connection.īrain scans of children who have been brought up normally and are securely attached show different parts of the brain lit up through nurturing, teaching and parenting, says Jefferies. In this age of smartphone pre-occupation, trying to avoid being a "still face" is something all parents need to be aware of. But for a neglected child that "still face" will last a lot longer. In 1975, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Ed Tronick, devised the famous "still face" experiment, which shows the distress of a baby when confronted with a caregiver who stops responding for two minutes. The first weeks, months and years of life is a period of rapid neurological development for which babies need a loving, responsive primary care-giver. No small child is a slate that can be wiped clean experiences since birth are imprinted on the brain. “It’s not coming from their genes,” she says. Not only adoptive parents but other people in these children’s lives, such as teachers, have to understand the behaviour comes from early trauma. No small child is a slate that can be wiped clean About three-quarters of these children have been adopted from very poorly run orphanages or children’s homes all over the world – but particularly from eastern Europe where children would have had very challenging experiences, says Hennessey. She is project leader of the Barnardos post-adoption service, which works primarily with families of inter-country adopted children. In essence, it’s about trying to understand what is driving a child’s behaviour and responding empathetically, rather than just punishing or rewarding it.Ĭhristine Hennessey of Barnardos Ireland defines it as "a parenting approach that is geared to the needs of the individual child and requires the parent to develop a detailed understanding of how the child's early experiences are impacting even on present behaviour". However, it is a process from which all parents could learn. Therapeutic parenting is a highly nurturing and structured approach needed by children who have severe attachment and developmental problems due to early neglect and trauma. Naish has written a range of books on the topic, such as, The A to Z of Therapeutic Parenting, and storybooks for children, including ones that Jefferies collaborated on, and two of which feature "Rosie Rudey". “Between us, there were many different behaviours she could practise on.” “We gave her lots and lots of practice,” Jefferies says wryly. It’s no wonder Naish has become a leading authority on the practicalities of therapeutic parenting. ![]()
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