by Ruth Schmidt Neven

         ISBN 0 86431 1494   ACER

Exploring Parenthood describes a psychodynamic model that can be used by professionals to provide support to parents.

The author has been Chief Child Psychotherapist at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne. She is now the Director of the Centre for Child and Family Development in Camberwell, Victoria, which runs workshops based in this approach.

In the psychodynamic approach, parenting is seen as a transformative experience in which both child and parent are active participants, and a parent learns to become a parent all over time. The dynamic nature of parenting requires that professionals avoid trying to provide parents with answers but instead help them to deal with uncertainty, to learn from their own experience, and to be directly involved in the active solution of their own problem.

The focus is on preventative health, with the parent-professional partnership operating before difficulties have a chance to become entrenched problems. This approach addresses the need for more understanding of the emotional experience of children and parents. It allows for different solutions to common problems, encourages diversity in a changing society, and builds on parent competence.

The model applies pyschodynamic thinking to three different levels of parent support: to the task of parenting itself, to the nature of the professional support, and to the organisational structure of agencies involved in parent support. These levels are separately addressed in the book.

The first section looks at the emotional milestones of development from birth to adulthood and introduces valuable concepts gained from clinical experience.

Then the author shows how this developmental framework can be used as a foundation for exploring parenting in different circumstances (sole parents, fathers, stepfamilies, parenting under stress, parenting children with disabilities etc.).

Later sections describe the link and parallel between individual developmental milestones and the pyschodynamic requirements both for working successfully with parents in groups, and for setting up organisational structures that are more effective in supporting parents and professionals.