‘Therapeutic parenting’ has become the buzz term within fostering and adoption in recent years. Every course I go on, every book I read, every blog I peruse seems to suggest that therapeutic parenting as the answer to all the problems experienced by fostered and adopted children.
But is it?
I have written many times about my family’s efforts to be therapeutic and offered therapeutic approaches to issues such as trauma rages. However, I have concerns about the direction of therapeutic parenting in the UK.
Over the rest of this month I will be outlining some of these in a series of posts. Concerns such as whether it is a realistic expectation of parents, whether parents alone can ever offer enough to provide healing to traumatised children, the lack of therapeutic services to support parents and the conflicts that arise between therapeutic parents and the rest of society. Ultimately this month I want to give my views on whether or not therapeutic parenting is the answer to the problems of fostering and adoption as many people seem to be suggesting. (The links above will work once I’ve written the posts!)
Today’s post centres on the issue of meaning.
What does it mean to be a therapeutic parent?
Considering this term is mentioned so much, there lacks a consensus on what it actually means. It appears to mean different things to different people and that can make it very confusing, particularly for parents only just being introduced to the idea.
When I began my role as a foster-adopt parent, the term being used was ‘attachment parenting’. Now that at least has a wiki page! However, if you read that page you may quickly become aware of the issues that surrounded that term. The notion of attachment parenting became linked to controversial practices such as prolonged co-sleeping, breastfeeding past infancy and, most worryingly, holding and re-birthing therapies ~ now banned in the UK after retraumatising children and even being responsible for a child fatality in the USA. Consequently, it has been some time since I have heard that term used positively.
Often when parents access training and support it is at times when fostering or adoption feels really hard. It’s likely that their stress levels are high so it is really important that information is clear and consistent. So, what does therapeutic parenting mean? And what does it look like in practice? These were the questions I was asking myself eleven years ago.
My Definition of Therapeutic Parenting.
If you are a blog subscriber then you will soon have free access to an email course on my 3B’s Approach. (If not, why not sign up here?). In writing my own model of therapeutic parenting I wanted to take on board all of the theory of re-parenting traumatised children. I also wanted to add in my own experiences of the reality of parenting and make it as easy as possible to understand and use.
Here is my definition as it relates to the 3B’s model:
So, that is my definition.
I wonder what therapeutic parenting mean to you?
Feel free to let me know by placing a comment below.
If you want to know more about my first book for parents that explains my 3B’s model in more detail, please click here.
Leave a Reply