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Having looked in the last issue of the Research Digest at some of the many studies providing an evidence base for parent-infant psychotherapy, I now turn to an area in which we as a profession are much weaker when it comes to research. ‘Parent work’, as it is termed, is a core skill and essential training requirement for child and adolescent psychotherapists. Depending on the work we go on to do post-qualification, we may find that meetings with parents form a substantive portion of our clinical hours, either in parallel to therapeutic work with children, or as a sole intervention to support a child.
I have often found that this kind of work is not well understood by colleagues from different training backgrounds, who can sometimes view the sole aim of parent work as supporting the child’s engagement in their own therapy. Indeed, there is a large body of research literature in this area, some of which is included in this digest . While narrow in terms of its view of parental role, it also implicitly locates the ‘problem’ within the child, which may be far from the case. However, our colleagues can be forgiven for their lack of appreciation of this way of working, as while I am aware of many theoretical and clinical texts that look in depth at how we can work psychoanalytically with parents (such as ‘Dialogues with Parents’ by Margaret Rustin1, and ‘Core Principles of Assessment and Therapeutic Communication with Children, Parents and Families’ by Ruth Schmidt Neven2) we have been slow to research, and thus evidence, this way of working.
Recent research in the child psychotherapy field has supported an understanding that parallel parent work as essential when a young person is receiving treatment. For example, short term psychoanalytic psychotherapy (STPP) for adolescents with depression that was researched as part of the IMPACT trial, offered seven sessions for parents and carers alongside the 28 offered to the index patient3, and a feasibility trial for treatment-res