Editorial

This is a special edition on the theme of work with parents. It includes papers from three continents – with contributions from the UK, USA and Australia – and continues the trend of the Journal's increasing international character. The range of papers in this issue highlights both similarities and differences in style, emphasis and approach to work with parents – across different continents and between a variety of work settings. These articles prompt us to think again about the aims, methods and applications of psychoanalytically informed work with parents, and the nature of the engagement with parents that we offer. From a different perspective, the Clinical Commentary section is also on work with parents, and similarly prompts considerations of theoretical and technical issues in such work; here there is an added level of complexity in terms of work with parents of a child with an autistic spectrum diagnosis.

A notable feature of the articles in this edition is the recurrent reference to, and discussion of, the wider cultural context and its impact on parenting and hence on work with parents; we cannot read these papers without being struck by the parallel between the child's context of the family and the parents' context of the culture they are part of.

The opening paper, ‘Changing positions: helping parents look through the child's eyes', is by Pamela Sorensen, Assistant Professor of Psychiatric Medicine at the University of Virginia, USA and Director of the Under Fives Study Center in the Division of Child and Family Psychiatry. Sorensen, whose writing is lucid and compelling, delineates some of the ‘cultural impediments’ to parenting. Sorensen suggests that culturally determined ‘basic assumptions’ about children and child development can profoundly interfere with parents being able to understand the links between a child's behaviour and their emotional experience and relationships, i.e. ‘to look through the child's eyes’. Sorensen describes a non-clinical in