Barnardo's Fostering & Adoption NI

BARNARDO'S BITESIZE: What is Therapeutic Parenting?

• Barnardo's Fostering & Adoption NI

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Therapeutic parenting recognises children's behaviour as communication and focuses on nurturing connections to help children who've experienced trauma develop trust and security. Unlike traditional parenting approaches, therapeutic parenting requires understanding a child's inner world and developmental needs rather than simply managing behaviours.

• Therapeutic parenting is not about being a therapist but about healing through nurturing relationships
• Children who enter care have experienced trauma and have different developmental starting points
• Traditional parenting techniques like time-outs can trigger feelings of rejection in care-experienced children
• Children learn who they are through how others respond to them
• Care-experienced children often function at a younger emotional age despite their chronological age
• Children with early trauma often develop internal working models where they feel unsafe and unlovable
• Building predictable, safe experiences helps traumatised children slowly develop trust

If you'd like to hear more from the Barnardo's Fostering and Adoption NI podcast, like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. To learn more about fostering adoption with us, search for Barnardo's online or find a link in our program description.


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https://www.barnardos.org.uk/get-support/fostering-and-adoption

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https://linktr.ee/barnardosfosteringni

To ask a question, give us some feedback or make a topic request, email us at:
BFANI@barnardos.org.uk

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Stella:

it's not always the most helpful term, but it's really, um, about very heavily nurtured parenting. So parenting that requires a lot of nurturing and, uh, support for children and young people. I know when I started out I'd never heard of it. I'd never heard of it and, um, and I wish I, you know, looking back now, um, I, I really wish I had it was something that would have made a big difference for me from the start and my my own background is in education. I was a teacher and I wish I'd known about it then. And I suppose, just to give you a little bit of context in relation to myself as well, so, although I work for Bernardos in Northern Ireland, um, I really I'm not a social worker. I came to this role really through my own experience as a foster care and a doctor and, um, as I say, when I started I'd never heard of therapeutic parenting, so it was a bit of a learning curve and I have to say that, without you going on in the inner world of children, for children, it's really trying to support connections with those children, to learn about how they're feeling and to be able to support them to be able to get on better in the world and it's useful for all children. But it's especially useful for children who've come through the care system because they have experienced, you know, they're coming into care on the back of things like physical, emotional, sexual abuse, neglect, domestic violence, parental addictions. They have a very different starting point from children who are coming from a secure base. Starting point from children who are coming from a secure base and the therapeutic approach really tries to recognise that base, to recognise the different starting point and to start to in many ways, reparent them and give them those good enough experiences.

Stella:

I suppose when you think of therapeutic parenting, when you hear therapeutic parenting, you could be forgiven to think is that a parent? That's who's a therapist? What's this therapy part? The therapist, it's not about being a therapist and I think that's really important to make that distinction. You're not expected to be a therapist. Therapists maybe have children or you know whoever they work with for an hour or so at a time maximum. You couldn't do that as a parent.

Stella:

Therapeutic parenting is day in, day out and it's really about it all comes down to relationships and the power of relationships and the therapy. The therapeutic part is really about healing and, uh, nurture, and I suppose that's that's. That's gives you a little bit of a snapshot about what therapeutic parenting is all about and it's really, I suppose it's recognizing that behavior. Children's behavior, is language that tells us something about what's going on for those children. It's communicating something, so it's starting to pay attention to behavior in relation to what is the child communicating as to, as opposed to. Well, their behavior is just there to give me a hard time, you know. So, um yeah, so that's the starting point anyway, nes, I think that's a great starting point.

Ness:

So there's a couple of things I just want to bring up there. Yes, it's not about being a therapist as a parent, but some other terminal terminology has come from therapy. So we talk about the secure base, which is a concept from uh psychoanalyst, John Bowlby let me just push my glasses up. The secure base is the idea that when we are children, we learn about the world and we are brave within the world if we know we have safety to come back to. So the more that we feel safe within our base, our family, the more we feel confident about facing a world that is uncertain and can be challenging. And so there is something about children who have attachment trauma.

Ness:

So any child has been removed from a family or has not felt safe within a family and had to be removed. They have not had that secure base initially, so suddenly they're. Or adventures being exploratory about life, all those things can feel slightly more threatening and frightening. So our way of managing and containing a child who may not be able to put into words that very basic and primal fear is going to be a little bit different, and I like the way that you talk about, stella. We are looking at what the behavior presents rather than what the behavior specifically is. You now, I've sat in on some of your training before now and one of the things I was interested in having watched years and years of that nanny program on channel four is you give a very good example of how timeouts might be read very, very differently by a child who has whose care experience, as opposed to a birth child. So a child who was born to parents, and I'm wondering if you would say something about that yeah, yeah, so I also watched um.

Stella:

It's not Nanny McPhee, super nanny, super nanny yeah, do you remember those super nannies? And and you know some of those more traditional parenting methods are, they will work. They may work quite well for lots of children who, as ness says, has have that sort of secure base and have had good enough um strategy. You know parenting strategies growing up, but because our children haven't had that, it can present very, very differently and I think this is often a challenge for people maybe coming to foster and adoption, who already have reared children, maybe reared their own birth children and then the foster and adopted child comes along and what worked for the children that were born to them maybe doesn't work for the foster and adoption child, adopted child, and it's. You know, if we think about why some of those parenting and more traditional parenting methods are challenging things like the time, that idea of you know you've done something wrong, so I'm going to put you over there to think about what you're doing that can feel for a child who's maybe had a history of being excluded, maybe had a history of rejection or, you know, being ignored or whatever. That can be actually really, really hurtful for them, really triggering. So we have to learn, I suppose, what's going to work for individual children. Timeouts might work for some children, but what therapeutic parenting approach would advocate is more of a time in spending time with the child, trying to reconnect with them. There's all sorts of different parenting methodologies right there, from the sort of intense, quite controlling helicopter parenting things right through to the sort of free rangers, you know go out there and you know look after yourself, sort of thing. And I suppose, as I say, the therapeutic parenting approach is you know, I feel it is. You know it's not just for fostered and adopted children. I think it's a good approach.

Stella:

I mean, I am an advocate of it. I wasn't reared that way. I was reared in a more traditional parenting approach. Nobody ever sat down with me if I did something wrong and say, well, I wonder how you're feeling. You know that wasn't what happened. So it doesn't always come naturally to me and I have to try and um, try and always keep it in the forefront of my mind is thinking well, my child's starting point was is very different to the starting point that I had, for example. So I have to put bring it always be bringing it back down to how do I make the child feel safe and how do I can connect with this child that they can start to feel, um, you know, and learn how to be in relationship, uh, with me and then subsequently with other people as well? Um, I think it's.

Stella:

I suppose it's remembering that children generally learn how they, how, who they are, and they learn how to be in the world through how their caregiving adults are with them. We learn who we are through how other people are with us. If you're uh, if you, if people experience you, as you know, um experienced you with joy if they experience you somebody who's lovable and to be loved, that's how you start to feel about yourself. But if you are, you know, um, experienced, as a child who you know is excluded, or a child who is getting hurt or hit, that's you know you start to feel I'm not good enough, it's my fault, and this is some of the challenges of children.

Stella:

For children who have, you know, they've been brought into care because the parenting hasn't been good enough, for whatever reason, in order to keep them safe. And so they, you know, and you could have a child, uh, you know a much older, you know a child who, um, could be older, who's had all these sort of negative experiences. So there might be, uh, you know, let's say, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, but maybe they haven't had. They haven't had the same nurturing experiences that a very young child has had, so some of them might require a much younger nurturing approach. So providing parenting that, um, you might do for a younger child as well, while at the same time parenting their chronological age as well, you're also paying attention to the very basic needs that young children have as well, and it's really trying to make children start to feel safe, start to feel connected and start to be able to trust as well.

Ness:

Absolutely. It's about keeping that connection and that dialogue going in a way that is appropriate for the child's development age and level of experience as well, and it's probably worth pointing out, isn't it, that it's not uncommon for children who've been brought into care, who've experienced a lot of trauma, to present as younger than their age group a lot of trauma to presenters younger than their age group.

Stella:

Yeah, emotionally younger, oftenness. You know that in many ways. Sometimes you will get many children who maybe practically they are maybe taking care of themselves or taking care of siblings and things like that, but maybe emotionally they're, they're not able to regulate themselves. So if you think about when you have a little small baby and a human baby is really vulnerable, they take forever to reach any sort of level of independence. And a little human baby, when it's very small like that, it is entirely reliant on its adult caregiver for all its to meet all its survival needs and it knows it. And when a little baby has a need, it doesn't even know initially itself what the need is. It just knows something, doesn't feel right and I need help. And in order to get that help, oh baby, what does it do? It cries. Do you know what it cries? To attract the attention of its caregiver.

Stella:

In a good enough situation, a good enough parent, good enough parent, comes along, has a bit of a sniff, tries the you know, checks the nappy, you know, tries the bottle, or the hungry, or the thirsty, or the tired. Did they just need a wee cuddle or a wee chat or the cold, whatever it is, a good enough parent works that out for the child and does this again and again and again and again, and over time the child learns to expect that the adult is going to help it out with those things. So it learns. So if you think of a wee newborn baby, well, it's crying. You know, do you ever know that sort of urgency that the wee newborn baby cries? It's really quite frantic, it's. It is like as if it's crying for its life and that that's the sort of feeling it has. Doesn't know, oh, I'm tired or hungry or thirsty, it'll. It learns that who's through how they're good enough adult works that out for them and in in a good enough situation, the child learns you know it's going to be okay. My adult adult, my parent, my caregiver, whoever it is, is going to work those things out. I deserve that and I feel connected to them and I feel safe. And oh, that uncomfortable feeling in my tummy that was fixed by the bottle or the food or whatever it was. Oh, that uncomfortable feeling back there down the line. They'll know that means I need to go to the toilet, whatever it is. So they learn about their own body through how the adult has worked it out for them, and they learn about what to expect in the world. They learn about themselves, their own sort of sense of who they are, and they learn how to be with people through how their adult has worked it out for them, helped them through that.

Stella:

Unfortunately, for children who haven't had those good enough parenting experiences, they often get a very different experience. So maybe when they've cried, when they've had their basic needs not met, maybe somebody shouted at them or maybe somebody hurt them or hit them or ignored them, maybe Maybe there was nobody there. Maybe sometimes it happened and maybe sometimes it didn't. Maybe there was you know another sibling or something doing it for them and they weren't quite right with it. You know, maybe it wasn't. You know whoever was looking after them, or you know they survived so they got this far, but maybe there wasn't. You know that good enough parenting, good enough parenting experience and they have.

Stella:

So they cannot learn to trust that things are going to be okay. In fact, in many situations they learn to expect the worst. They learn to think it's my fault, I'm not good enough, I can't trust my caregivers because sometimes they might even hurt me. And if I know that, if I think that the person who I need the most for my very survival is actually quite scary. You're in this untenable situation where I really need you for help, but actually I'm too terrified to go there.

Stella:

And the children situation.

Stella:

So in the first scenario, where things were okay enough, the child learned sort of I'm okay, they're okay, the world is okay.

Stella:

But in the other scenario, when, when the parenting experience is not good enough, the situation is I'm not okay, they're not okay, the world is a scary place to be in.

Stella:

And so you, you know, you could have two children in front of you who've had very different starts in life, who they may look similar on the outside, but their internal working models of how they experience themselves, how they experience other people and how they get on the world it's entirely different and that's the challenge, you know. So you may see a seven-year-old, two seven-year-old boys in front of you, or whatever it is, but actually they they're very different starting points and over time they're learning behaviors to help them cope in the world, you know, and if you don't feel safe, it's a very different experience. So, um, I suppose this to get back to, you know that sort of attachment 101, but it's really to think about. The therapeutic parenting approach is paying attention to the inner world of the child, recognising that our children may not have this internal sense of feeling OK and that we have to. It's harder to do it the older they get and we have to do it again and again and again.

Speaker 3:

It's building predictability for children so they can start to learn to trust us if you'd like to hear more from the Barnardo's fostering and adoption ni podcast, like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to learn more about fostering adoption with us, search for Barnardo's online or find a link in our program description.