The "P" in Parenting is for Positive: A Conversation with Matthew R. Sanders, Ph.D.

Abstract

In her 1947 paper, The Role of the Parent in Psychotherapy with Children, Hilde Bruch outlined the challenges experienced by psychiatrists when dealing with parents of children being treated in psychotherapy. “[The] problem of how to handle the parent has been recognized as a serious difficulty since psychotherapy was first extended to the treatment of children.” Bruch described the shift in thinking that was taking place at that time. Although parents were seen less as willful contributors to the problems of their children and more as adults within the lives of children who were affected by their own psychopathology, the prevailing sentiment was that engaging parents within the context of a child’s treatment would contaminate the work and strangle any opportunity for therapeutic success. As a result, parents were often referred to their own separate, individual treatments in order to better address the problems that were believed to be compromising the lives of their children. In her paper, Bruch described her attempts to directly address parental issues in the context of treating their children. Her descriptions of the challenges she encountered are remarkably familiar 75 years later. She described the shame that parents carry for their children’s problems, the competitiveness they might have with the psychiatrist working with their children, and most relevant to today given contemporary parents’ access to multiple sources of information on the Internet, the challenges of dealing with the parent who comes armed with information about “modern psychology.” At the time that Bruch wrote her paper, psychotherapeutic work with parents was often done grudgingly by therapists who treated children. Parents were generally assumed to be unable to be instructed how best to help their children because challenges to their parenting were seen as stemming from their own psychological and personality conflicts. Over time, there has been a shift in clinicians’ thinking that more accurately acknowledges the positive effects parenting can have on the healthy development of children. Parenting practices that are empathetic and supportive, and that foster a sense of safety and optimism in children have been shown to result in healthy child development (Collins et al., 2000), as they promote self-regulatory skills and the capacity to be resilient in the face of adversities (Odgers et al., 2012). Positive parenting is described as authoritative, rather than autocratic, and employs empathic discipline and clear and effective communication with children. Positive parenting is currently recognized as one of the most critical components to child health and wellbeing across the