Research Library

England’s children’s social care workforce is in a state of crisis, with the problem perhaps more prominent in the field of child protection. This study explored the impact of social work qualification route on early career social workers’ sense of preparedness for child protection practice.

The Lighthouse Parenting Programme (LPP) is a multifamily mentalization-based intervention for parents with child protection service involvement. The Supporting Parents Project was a randomized controlled trial of the LPP being delivered by children’s social care services.

This paper reviews and summarizes the research on parental mentalizing using the Parent Development Interview and the Reflective Functioning coding. It also describes the future developments for the measure.

Level Up is a novel, UK-based intervention consisting of five online group sessions, straddling the summer holidays, and providing at-risk children and their parents/carers with skills to manage their behaviour, emotions, and relationships to support their transition to secondary school. A prior evaluation of Level Up reported a need to better describe the mechanisms of change. This study therefore evaluated the experiences of children and their parents/carers regarding the facilitators and barriers to engagement and change, and the perceived impact.

The aim of this work is to systematically review, synthesize, and critically appraise evidence for the efficacy and/or effectiveness of psychodynamic interventions for children under 5 years of age and their caregivers.

This study investigated the link between a foster carer's ability to mentalize and how this impacted on the emotional regulation of a child they care for. It used detailed analysis of video recordings of interactions between one foster carer and one child in their care. This study used data from a project called the Relationship Stories study, that is part of the Reflective Fostering Study funded by the NIHR.

This trial is the first experimental study of a family therapeutic intervention based on attachment theory for foster families within the Scandinavian context.

Little is known about the clinical characteristics of children and parents affected by intimate partner violence (IPV) presenting in health-care settings. We examined the associations between family adversities, health characteristics, and IPV in children and parents using linked electronic health records (EHRs) from primary and secondary care between 1 year before and 2 years after birth (the first 1000 days). We compared parental health problems in in children and parents with and without recorded IPV. Authors: Syed, S., Gilbert, R., Feder, G., Howe, L., Powell, C., Howarth, E., Deighton, J., Lacey, R.

There is a lack of services designed specifically for fathers to support them with parenting, mental health and wellbeing. This paper gives an overview of the co-design process for a universal digital intervention for fathers (fatherli) and the outline of the overall theory of how it might work to create positive changes, which is called a logic model. Authors: Liverpool, S., Eisenstadt, M., Mulligan Smith, A., Kozhevnikova, S.