Minding the Child

What is 'mentalization'? How can this concept be applied to clinical work with children, young people and families? What will help therapists working with children and families to 'keep the mind in mind'? Why does it matter if a parent can 'see themselves from the outside, and their child from the inside'? Minding the Child considers the implications of the concept of mentalization for a range of therapeutic interventions with children and families. Mentalization, and the empirical research which has supported it, now plays a significant role in a range of psychotherapies for adults. In this book we see how these rich ideas about the development of the self and interpersonal relatedness can help to foster the emotional well-being of children and young people in clinical practice and a range of other settings. With contributions from a range of international experts, the three main sections of the book explore: * the concept of mentalization from a theoretical and research perspective * the value of mentalization-based interventions within child mental health services * the application of mentalizing ideas to work in community settings.Minding the Child will be of particular interest to clinicians and those working therapeutically with children and families, but it will also be of interest to academics and students interested in child and adolescent mental health, developmental psychology and the study of social cognition.

"This book, which is well argued and illustrated with coherent clinical material, will give readers new to the field a good insight into a developing body of work." - Eileen Aird, Therapy Today, July 2012 "There is much of interest here to the child psychotherapist working with children and adolescents whose limited capacity to tolerate anxiety and frustration gets in the way of thinking and relating... The book is well edited by Nick Midgley and Ioanna Vrouva, with individual chapters referring to each other and building up to a carefully crafted whole." - Neil Austin, ACP Bulletin, Winter 2012 Contributions from an impressive list of the key international researchers in this field. The book is written and edited in a style that constantly flows between theoretical understanding and practice, across different types of problems and settings. Even if practitioners use different approaches (which, in any case, are considered as complementary by several participating authors), they will gain interesting techniques in engaging, assessing and treating young people and families who have not responded to mainstream programmes. They can also use those to challenge and influence community, school and hospital systems; and also their own multidisciplinary team working, as presented in the final part of the manuscript. - Panos Vostanis, Child Adolescent Mental Health, 2013 I found this book to be powerful and thought provoking, to the extent that it pervaded my everyday thinking. ... In the book, MBT is considered a useful tool for all psychotherapists and counsellors working with people of all ages, but it promotes its greatest value as being to those working wih children and their families. Teachers might also find this book useful, especially the chapter on the Peaceful Schools Experiment. I found this book interesting and intriguing. The text is quite academic and would therefore be useful to students of psychology. It took me a while to digest some of the ideas held within it, but I felt it was worth the effort. - Judith Sonnenberg, BACP Children & Young Persons, March 2013 Minding the Child is a considered and diligent book, thoughtfully recording the crystallisation of mentalization-based theory and practice based on the work of Fonagy, Bateman, Allen and other colleagues who form the 'Mentalizing Mafiosi'. ... This interesting and thought-provoking book will, I am sure, fuel further thinking as to how flexible and adaptive the child psychotherapist working in CAMHS setting needs to be, especially in such challenging times as these. - Peter Slater, Journal of Child Psychotherapy, Vol. 39 No. 1 2013 This book offers insight that will be of value to a wide range of practitioners working with children and young people. I found myself underlining numerous sentences and passages that capture the essence of complex ideas with great clarity and then, as I read further, returning to them and finding new depth in them. ... This is a book that anyone with an interest in what enables us to function as relational beings in a social