Training for parents to deal with the child’s externalizing mental disorder is less effective if the parent has a mental disorder. Parent training is also less effective if the parent suffers from marital problems. Marital problems have a negative effect on parenting and child behaviour problems.
Child problem behaviour could bias parental attention. This can also occur as a result of parent mental disorder. Biased parental attention toward negative child behaviours may be an unintended consequence of involvement in child mental health services (i.e. negative behaviours are the focus of the treatment).
Parents that are attentive toward all expressions of their child without prejudgement can respond more sensitively to their needs and the children will feel understood and contained. Self-nourishing attention may be important for parents suffering from mental disorders. Parents of children with mental disorders may find this difficult due to increased demands and stresses of raising a child with a mental disorder. This can lead to greater self-critique. Therefore, self-compassion and self-nourishment are important skills.
Mindfulness interventions teach participants to adopt a more accepting, non-judgemental and compassionate stance toward themselves. This may restore the balance between self-attention and attention for the child. Mindful parenting training aims to improve parenting by improving the quality of parental attention (1), increasing awareness of parental stress (2), reducing parental reactivity (3) and decreasing the intergenerational transmission of dysfunctional parenting (4). It aims to lead to a greater awareness of a child’s unique nature (1), a greater ability to be present and listen with full attention (2), recognizing and accepting things as they are in each moment (3) and recognizing one’s reactive impulses and learning to respond more appropriately (4).
Mechanisms of change refer to the processes or events that are responsible for the change. There are six potential mechanisms for change for mindfulness parenting.
- Reducing parental stress will reduce parental reactivity (i.e. fight, flight, freeze response).
- Reducing parental preoccupation which is the result of parental or child psychopathology.
- Improving parental executive functioning in impulsive parents.
- Breaking the cycle of intergenerational transmission of dysfunctional parenting.
- Increasing self-nourishing attention.
- Improving marital functioning and co-parenting.
Evidence was found for mechanism one, five and six. However, there is a need for more research for mechanism two, three and four.
Parent management training appears to be effective for reducing child behaviour problems but less effective for parents who suffer from a mental disorder, especially mental disorders related to executive functioning (e.g. ADHD). Mindful parenting, however, may be effective for both reducing the child behavioural problems and for parental mental disorders (e.g. less parental stress).
There were significant reductions in children’s internalizing and externalizing problems after a mindful parenting intervention. There were also reductions in parent’s internalizing and externalizing problems. Parental stress, overprotection and rejection decreased whereas autonomy encouragement increased. There was an increase in family integrity but a deterioration during a waitlist condition. Marital functioning was not influenced by the intervention. The improvements were mainly maintained after 8 weeks.
The parents indicated that they felt the training added something to their life and that they became more aware of potential parenting issues.
