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Mentalization-Based Treatment for Children (MBT-C) - A Time-Limited Approach

Mentalization-Based Treatment for Children (MBT-C) is a time-limited approach to working with children in middle childhood (ages 5-12) and their parents.

About this training

This course offers an introduction to Mentalization-Based Treatment for Children (MBT-C), to help you support children and families to build mentalizing abilities and improve their treatment outcomes.

MBT-C is a transdiagnostic, time-limited, and manualized therapy. It involves 12 weekly individual child sessions, with integrated parent sessions to enhance treatment outcomes. It is a flexible approach for use in clinical settings to address childhood difficulties such as emotional and behavioural problems, anxiety and depression.

In practice, MBT-C helps children understand the thoughts and feelings that might underly specific behaviours, so they can develop the skills to manage these successfully. Interventions focus on developing building blocks for mentalizing, supporting attention control and emotion regulation.

This training will help you develop a practical understanding of the key elements of the model. Over three days, you’ll explore:

  • the core mentalizing stance

  • approaches to assessment and case formulation

  • skills for working with children, parents and carers from a mentalizing perspective.

The training is based on the text ‘Mentalization-Based Treatment for Children: A Time-Limited Approach’, which you can find here.

Course tutors

  • Holly Dwyer Hall

  • Emma Morris

Aims of this training

  • learn the key features of time-limited MBT-C with children and their parents or carers

  • develop skills to assess mentalizing in children, parents and carers, and to formulate relational goals for treatment

  • develop ability to employ a mentalizing stance in work with children and parents or carers

  • develop practical skills in employing MBT-C techniques to support the building blocks of mentalizing: attention control, emotion regulation and explicit mentalizing.

Who is this training for?

This training is for professionals working in child and family mental health who have:

  • experience working therapeutically with children and families

  • a mental health qualification such as child psychotherapy, psychology, arts therapies, family therapy, mental health nursing, and social work.

If you are unsure if this training is right for you, get in touch with the training team at mbtcyp@annafreud.org.

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