Reflective Parenting

A Guide to Understanding What's Going on in Your Child's Mind

Sheila Redfern, Allistair Cooper, Alistair Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317653271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Have you ever wondered what's going on in your child's mind? This engaging book shows how reflective parenting can help you understand your children, manage their behaviour and build your relationship and connection with them. It is filled with practical advice showing how recent developments in mentalization, attachment and neuroscience have transformed our understanding of the parent-child relationship and can bring meaningful change to your own family relationships.

Alistair Cooper and Sheila Redfern show you how to make a positive impact on your relationship with your child, starting from the development of the baby's first relationship with you as parents, to how you can be more reflective in relationships with toddlers, children and young people. Using everyday examples, the authors provide you with practical strategies to develop a more reflective style of parenting and how to use this approach in everyday interactions to help your child achieve their full potential in their development; cognitively, emotionally and behaviourally.

Reflective Parenting is an informative and enriching read for parents, written to help parents form a better relationship with their children. It is also an essential resource for clinicians working with children, young people and families to support them in managing the dynamics of the child-parent relationship. This is a book that every parent needs to read.

1
The Origins of Reflective Parenting

In this chapter we take a closer look at the main ideas behind Reflective Parenting, and how important these are in helping you and your baby or child to enjoy a positive and harmonious relationship. We explain briefly the research behind the ideas we are bringing to you in this book to help you understand the foundation for this approach. Reflective Parenting has many benefits for children. With its roots in secure attachment, Reflective Parenting leads to happier, confident, successful and resilient children, who are also more able to understand the thoughts and feelings of other people (1).

The rest of the book will take you step by step through the techniques you need for becoming a more reflective parent, increasing the skills you require to achieve this, as well as looking at problem areas where it can feel especially hard to see things from your child’s point of view. We will give you some tools and strategies, and introduce you to the concept of the ‘Parent APP’, a guide to the essential qualities needed for truly Reflective Parenting, explained in Chapter Four, which you can refer to when you find yourself stuck for ways to manage your relationship with your child, or where you feel you have tried absolutely everything to manage a difficult behaviour and you need a new approach. First, though, let’s look at where the ideas on Reflective Parenting come from, and what it is about this approach that will be so helpful to both your baby or young child’s development and your relationship with him.

The research on babies and children shows that we are motivated to understand what the actions of other people mean, and it seems that this motivation is present almost as soon as we are born. From the minute babies are born they have an instinct to relate to their main carer; they are hardwired, if you like, to interact. More importantly, babies are supersensitive to adults who show them attention and act in ways that match their own emotional states – who seek to engage with them in a way that mirrors how they are feeling and what they are doing. When you respond to your baby in this sensitive way, your baby is very capable of holding his attention so that he can interact with you. He can take part in an ongoing ‘conversation’ over the course of his early childhood, which, if all goes well, continues as he grows up. In this way, your baby’s mind begins to form, be built and moulded as he purposefully interacts with you.

Your baby is totally dependent on you from the minute he is born ... to feed him, change him, keep him warm, protect him, touch him and make him feel safe. His relationship with you is incredibly important, as it is through this relationship and the way in which you respond to him that you can help him develop the skills he will need to bounce back from adversity throughout his childhood, adolescence and into adulthood. Think of the relationship your child has with you as a training opportunity. With you, he can practice and experience what it’s like to be in a relationship, and this training prepares him for interacting with the world of people beyond his family. Teaching him about how other people work, through your everyday interactions with him, will be one of the most important lessons of his life. Within your relationship with your baby and child you can help him to develop emotionally by taking a particular interest in how he thinks, how he feels and why he does things. And by talking about all of these things with him, you will help him learn about himself and how people interact with him. The more you can learn to think about your relationship with your child and to help him understand his emotions as well as how you are feeling, the happier your relationship will be.

Let’s start by setting the scene for how babies learn to interact with the world around them, and centrally their parents. For your baby, this ‘training programme’ for relationships throughout his life, with you, his parents, starts early – in fact, as soon as he is born.

When your baby comes into the world, the way that he looks, acts, interacts, etc. will already have been influenced by his genetic history and temperament. There is a large body of important research around these areas. We want to acknowledge these influences, and briefly explain them, but our focus is going to be much more on your relationship from the moment your baby is born and what you can each bring to this relationship.

There are many factors that influence the unique emotional makeup that babies are born with. Every baby has an innate temperament which then interacts with the experiences the baby has with the important people and events in his world. This might include being cuddled, feeling criticised, receiving attention or being ignored. Think of temperament as tension in a tennis racket. The tighter the tension, the more reactive the racket might be to an approaching tennis ball. In this way, some babies react more to experiences in their environment, whatever they might be.

Maternal hormones influence the baby’s development in the womb, and the emotions a woman feels during pregnancy can affect her hormones, so this in turn can have a big impact on the baby’s development, particularly on brain development. The most compelling link is between maternal stress and a baby’s development in the womb. The hormone cortisol, released during stressful situations, is particularly influential, and studies show that where mothers are very highly stressed, babies tend to be more fussy and irritable when born. It’s believed that this is due to the negative impact of an ‘overdose’ of cortisol during pregnancy, which affects the baby’s developing brain. On the flip side, the impact of affection and love when the baby is born has far-reaching positive effects (2) including helping babies to develop what is known in the research as a ‘social brain’ (3) (4). We now know from neuroscience research that the baby’s developing brain is designed to be moulded by the environment it encounters (5). In this way, a brain can begin to understand the thoughts, feelings and intentions of other people. This ability, known as ‘mentalizing’ (6), is going to be a word we refer to quite a bit throughout the book. Essentially, what it means is the ability to make sense of one’s own actions, and also the actions of other people, with reference to beliefs, desires and feelings. When things are going well, your baby needs to experience a relationship with a sensitive parent. We will help you throughout this book to understand why this skill of mentalizing is not only important, but quite simple to start doing in your everyday interactions. And you are probably doing a lot of it already, without even knowing it.

There may also be developmental factors that can make it more difficult to interact in a reflective and sensitive way with some babies. Babies born blind or on the autistic spectrum, for example, will send out a different set of signals to their parents than babies without these developmental issues, and so as a parent you may have a baby who needs a different level of sensitivity, or different cues from you, in order to maximise the closeness and security he feels in his relationship with you.

Reflective Parenting helps to buffer children from the negative effects of some of these early influences. Growing evidence demonstrates that where babies have reflective parents, these children grow up to develop the means of being able to understand and be more in control of their feelings (self-regulation) and develop the skills they need for establishing and maintaining relationships.

The origins of children learning to manage feelings

The origins of how your baby learns how to manage feelings, and to be able to regulate them, lie in the first few weeks and months of his interactions with you. Your baby’s brain makes him respond to things that happen before he has any understanding of what these feelings and experiences mean. He can be easily overwhelmed by unfamiliar things in his environment, such as smells, noises and separations from a parent. For example, baby Jack is lying in his cot, squirming around and grizzling. He gets more uncomfortable and starts to cry. Inside his mind and body his brain and nervous system are trying to manage this unpleasant feeling. Before his mum Rachel comes to him, he lacks any reference point from this inside feeling to what happens on the outside. It is as if his feelings inside just happen almost randomly without any anchor of an outside event to hang it on. So what would help Jack to manage this feeling? Fortunately, Jack can rely heavily on an external manager of his feelings, which is his mum.

Your baby’s emotional development is a complex process and almost entirely dependent on you, his parents, and others close to him. Luckily, much of the time you will be naturally supporting this process without necessarily even realising. You need first to notice and then to understand your baby’s emotional states (what’s inside his mind) and then to link these emotions in your mind to a triggering event or action (what’s outside his mind), such as in Jack’s case an uncomfortable sensation from a wet nappy. In practical terms, this could be as mundane as a mind-minded comment from his mum when Jack cries that helps him connect his feeling of discomfort and distress with his wet nappy, such as ‘Ah, does Mummy need to change your wet nappy? It’s not very comfy is it?’ In this simple statement, Jack’s mum is telling him that she understands that he has a mind that contains thoughts and feelings, which are not only separate from her own, but that she can tell him about. Each time you link what your baby is feeling to the physical world, your baby begins to understand how things connect and work together. When you state out loud what you feel is going on inside your baby’s mind, you are really helping him to understand himself, you and the outside world. And all of this can be done in typical everyday interactions.

Have you noticed times when you do this? Try asking yourself the question: ‘What might be going on in my child’s mind right now?’

These kinds of mind-minded statements can be made directly to your child or about your child to a partner or family member. Research has shown that ‘tuning in’ to what your baby is thinking and feeling – in other words, being more mind-minded – means that your child is more likely to be securely attached, have better language and play abilities at age 2, and have better understanding of other people’s thoughts and feelings when he starts school (7). Being mind-minded when your child is a baby also means that your child will be less likely to have behaviour problems in the preschool years. Using mind-minded statements beyond this age is enormously helpful for helping your child to understand other people, manage his own emotions and help him stay connected to you.

When you are making these mind-minded comments, your attunement with your baby’s feeling will naturally change your facial expression to match his feelings. This is known as marked-mirroring. Your baby would see his feelings reflected back at him in your facial expressions or tone of voice.

Marked-mirroring.

When your baby sees your facial expressions in response to his own feelings, he can start to link and connect emotions, and your response begins to make sense. In essence, the way you look tells your baby how he feels inside. This is the beginning of your child learning about how he feels, and crucially this is the start of him learning to manage his feelings so that they don’t overwhelm him. The way that you can do this is basically to respond to his emotions in a way that shows him that you can both understand how he is feeling and do something about it. For example, Jack’s mum might say, ‘Let me change that wet nappy for you into a nice warm dry one’, whilst her facial expression would be warm and comforting. Jack sees his mum as the regulator of how he is feeling. In other words, the supportive and in-tune presence of his mother is what helps him to manage his feeling of distress, which over time as he grows, teaches him that feelings can be managed. As he gets older he will be able to increasingly do this for himself, as if this ability gets passed from his mum to him. If something has upset you, connected with your own life, and your baby cries out in distress, it might take extra effort to match your tone and expression to how your baby feels, and so you might bring your own (quite separate) state of mind into the interaction. This is perfectly understandable and normal, but it does usually mean that it takes longer for the baby to regulate how he is feeling, as he needs your help to do this. In this situation, it would be best to take a few moments yourself to manage your own feelings, and then you will be in a better frame of mind to be reflective with how your baby feels.

As your baby grows into a determined, busy toddler to an increasingly independent child, continuing to be alert to what he is thinking or feeling is still incredibly valid and helpful. Reflective Parenting – developing a greater awareness of your own emotions and then thinking about what is going on inside your child’s mind – has been shown to be a key influence on children’s emotional development. The more often you can be reflective in your interactions with your child, the more you will be helping him to understand his own feelings. Children don’t just grow out of difficult behaviour of their own accord; they need you to show them how to grapple with emotions, which then impacts on misbehaviour. You might find that over the course of his childhood he will need your help more as his feelings about events in his life become more powerful. This kind of challenging behaviour is a natural part of childhood, just like growing physically. If children don’t get this kind of help from you, then these emotions can become more exaggerated as they make greater efforts to get a response from you.

Do babies have relationship skills?

When Rachel’s ex-partner Matt was at a play zone with his 9-month-old son Jack, and talked to two other dads about their views of the first year of their children’s lives, there was disagreement about how much, if anything of interest, happened when their children were babies. One parent thought that being a father with a young baby was a little boring as they did not seem to do much, but then after about a year things improved markedly. Another found the first year fascinating, if a little daunting. The experiences of having a baby for mothers and fathers can differ enormously and as we are writing this together as a male and a female psychologist, a father and a mother, we hope to be able to bring you these different experiences throughout the book. So, whether you are a father or mother, is there more to babies and how we relate to them that could make this experience a great deal more interesting, both for the parent and the baby?

What did you feel like when your baby was born? When you looked at him, what did you imagine was going on inside his head? Did you even think about that? And what was going on inside yours? What did you imagine he was capable of doing? And did you think you had any direct influence on this? Maybe you remember your own son or daughter, newly born, staring in wonder at the chaos of light, noise and smell, and then looking at you? Your baby had a preference for you, his parent, and preferred the smell of you, the sight of you and the sound of your voice to anything or anyone else – he was born with an innate desire to interact with you. You might have found yourself so focused on keeping this little person alive, you gave little or no thought to what was actually going on inside him.

What must it be like to be a newborn baby, a little person who knows nothing about the world? It is easy to assume that a baby is unable to understand anything either inside his mind or in the outside world: that babies come into the world a completely blank slate. Indeed, until the start of the twentieth century, many researchers believed just this: that babies had no awareness of either themselves or other people around them. If you think back to those first few days and weeks of your baby’s life, what was your main focus? Wondering what was going on inside him, what kind of person he was going to be? Or making sure that you had his temperature just right at night time, and that he wasn’t getting a nappy rash and was feeding well?

Sometimes it seems though that this view of a baby’s limited abilities is still around today, with some parenting books focusing only on programmes for managing feeding, sleeping and toileting routines, instead of on your relationship with each other. While these are all important and essential to your baby’s survival, we believe it is also helpful, and indeed vitally important, to start thinking at an early stage about what else might be going on in your baby’s mind. It can be hard to make this your focus, as understandably you are taken up with thoughts about how to keep this new life fed and warm, and most importantly alive. However, by doing this, you will be better able to manage difficult behaviour later on, and to iron out difficulties in your relationship with your child. The research tells us that starting to think about what’s going on inside your baby, and importantly, showing him this through your interactions with him, is a great way of helping your baby to both think about and manage how he feels.

The tide of thinking started to change in the 1970s when developmental psychologists such as Trevarthen (8) spent a lot of time observing infants and their parents. By watching babies, he found that when they were feeling calm and comfortable they seemed to move in purposeful ways, as if a baby has an idea of what he wants to do before he does it. The research showed that babies were not always randomly kicking and moving or making sounds with no awareness of their parents, but often moved and made noises in interaction with them. Research on newborn babies (9) showed that, just hours after birth, newborn babies could move their fingers when they saw other people moving their fingers. Babies also got better at copying over time, showing their potential for learning and improving the coordination of their actions. What all of this tells us is that from the minute they are born, babies already have a strong inclination to think about and interact with an ‘other’. And the most important other is most certainly you.

Babies are immediately skilled at communicating with others, and make a great effort to do so. And as a baby gets older, he becomes really interested in experiencing how other people see him. Think of a 9-month-old baby, holding up a toy for others to see. For a young baby, it is fun discovering new things, but it becomes much more fun when you find out that you can share these things with other people who can take delight in joining in your fun. For your baby, even objects become intrinsically more interesting when he sees that another person is interested in them. This is worth remembering for later on, as you will see that in your play with your baby, and later in childhood, ...