Overview

We are amid an ever-escalating mental health crisis for young people. Mental health problems for children and young people have increased over the past few years to nearly 1 in 4. What can parents do to help support children and young people when services have limited capacity?

The word 'mentalizing' has been in the English language since the 16th century, but the concept in the field of children and families mental health came into use in the mid-1980s when psychoanalytic researchers, together with neuroscientist colleagues, used it to describe the effort that individuals make to understand other people in relation to their thoughts, beliefs, desires, and to generally understand behaviour in terms of the thoughts and feelings that are behind it so they can then give meaning to behaviour. Neuroscience progressed and we realised that parts of the brain were devoted to this function; to understanding mental states. This notion was then applied by the psychoanalytic research group at UCL to discover how parents understand their children. After extensive clinical work and completing her PhD, Dr Sheila Redfern developed a model of parental mentalizing, known as Reflective Parenting, to help parents learn how to mentalize themselves and their children and young people. In this talk, Dr Redfern talks about how this model brings together the theories of attachment, social cognition (including Theory of Mind) and neuroscience to give parents the tools needed for helping them to mentalize themselves (to help them reflect on their own state of mind) and to arrive at the solutions they need to understand their child or teenager. Dr Redfern talks about her latest book, How Do you Hug a Cactus? and discusses how this Reflective Parenting approach has been adapted further to help parents mentalize and connect with their teenager and young adult during this turbulent period of their development.