ATTACH™ Connecting with your Child
Building healthy relationships through reflection and mentalization
Improving Parent Child Relationships with the ATTACH™ Program | Attachment and Child Health
Through the ATTACH™ Parenting Program, we aim to help parents learn two very essential skills called Mentalization and Reflective Function (RF), which aids in promoting and maintaining a secure attachment with their children.
Through this capacity for reflection, parents develop the ability to understand their own thoughts and feelings, and that of others, namely their children. This ability to reflect on mental states helps parents manage difficult emotions and improves their reactions during challenging situations.
By talking about thoughts and feelings while keeping an open mind, parents are able to regularly mentalize more in everyday life. This practice of mentalizing improves the ability to tolerate negative thoughts and feelings and promotes a sense of calmness when dealing with pressure and fosters improved parent-child communication.
Increased Reflective Function skills improves parents’ communication and encourages meaningful connections between external and internal worlds, cultivating stronger, more positive relationships with their children.
How to Understand Your Baby
Mentalization
Mentalization is the ability to think, evoke, understand, and reflect upon one’s own and others’ state of mind.
Mentalizing denotes the capacity to imagine and think explicitly about mental states, namely thoughts, feelings, intentions, beliefs, motives, emotions, desires and needs.
Mentalization happens inside one’s mind but since we cannot ever know what others think and feel we must have a medium to measure it.
Reflective Function
Reflective Function (RF) is the ability to verbalize and express one’s mentalizing capacities (e.g., reflecting on one’s own and others mental states), thus RF provides the medium needed to measure mentalization. This method of operationalizing Mentalization is referred to as Reflective Functioning.
Through this capacity of expressed reflection, individuals develop the ability to understand their own thoughts and feelings and others’ thoughts and feelings, which aids in better communication of inner mental states.
In short, Reflective Function is the uniquely human capacity to make sense of each other.
ATTACH™ promotes children’s health and mental development
In the ATTACH™ Parenting Program, we educate parents to reflect on their own thoughts and feelings and their child’s thoughts and feelings. Or simply put, we help parents keep their child’s mind in their mind.
This strengthens parents’ capabilities to meet their children’s needs and improves children’s mental and emotional health and development.
Our mission is to reduce the negative impacts of toxic stressors experienced by at-risk families and to help society raise the next generation of healthier well-adjusted children.
Testimonials
“It’s really helped me open my eyes and think about stuff before I actually do stuff.”
“It’s working to help me think and teach my kids how others feel and think. It’s helping with peers at school with my son. It also helped me work through issues with my son’s dad”
“I’m able to regulate my emotions better by talking it through and finding a compromise”
Strengthening parents’ capabilities
Data has shown that parenting quality and child development are improved from our program, thus strengthening parents’ capabilities without having to teach parents anything about parenting, child development, or child milestones.
Follow us on Social Media
Check out our Instagram!
References
Allen, J.G., Fonagy, P., & Bateman, A.W. (2008). Mentalizing in Clinical Practice. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc.
Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E., & Target, M. (2002). Affect Regulation, Mentalization and the Development of the Self. New York: Other Press.
Fonagy P, Target M (1997) Attachment and reflective function: Their role in self-organization. Development & Psychopathology 9:679-700.
Fonagy, P., Steele, M., Steele, H., & Target, M. (1997). The Reflective-functioning manual, Version 4.1 for application to Adult Attachment Interviews. Unpublished Manuscript. University of London.
Fonagy P, Steele M, Steele H., & Target M. (1998) Reflective Function Manual (Version 5) for Application to Adult Attachment Interviews. . University College London, London, UK