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Development and Preliminary Evaluation of Family Minds: A Mentalization-based Psychoeducation Program for Foster Parents

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Abstract

Mentalization-based interventions show promise in improving mental health outcomes for children and parents through increasing a family's reflective functioning, or ability to mentalize. Mentalizing involves the ability to understand behavior in relation to mental states, such as thoughts and feelings, and typically develops within the context of secure attachment relationships. One area not given much consideration when training foster parents is their capacity to mentalize. This study evaluated Family Minds, a newly developed psychoeducational intervention for foster parents, designed to increase their ability to mentalize. The current paper reports on the development and preliminary empirical evaluation of Family Minds in a quasi-experimental study where 102 foster parents received either Family Minds or a typical foster parenting class, which served as a control group. Results indicate that parents who received Family Minds significantly increased their levels of reflective functioning as assessed with the Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire and a new Five-Minute Speech Sample procedure coded using the Reflective Functioning Scale, and revealed a tendency to show decreased levels of parenting stress on the Parenting Stress Index, while the control group showed no such improvements. These findings support the hypothesis that a short-term psychoeducational intervention may improve foster parents' ability to mentalize themselves and their children. These skills are very beneficial for foster parents, as they frequently deal with children who come into their home with challenging behaviors, attachment issues, and negative internal working models of relationships. This type of intervention has the potential to lower placement breakdowns and improve the mental health of foster children.

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Acknowledgements

Peter Fonagy is in receipt of a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Senior Investigator Award (NF-SI-0514-10157) and was in part supported by the NIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) North Thames at Barts Health NHS Trust.

Author Contributions

T.A.: created and implemented the Family Minds intervention and the study, assisted with the data analyses, and wrote the paper. P.L. and P.F.: collaborated with the design and writing of the study. P.F.: analyzed the data and wrote part of the results and discussion. P.L.: collaborated in the writing and editing of the final manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Steve Hicks School of Social Work, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, USA

    Tina Adkins

  2. Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Patrick Luyten

  3. Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, London, UK

    Patrick Luyten & Peter Fonagy

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  1. Tina Adkins
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Correspondence to Tina Adkins.

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P.L. and P.F. have been involved in the development, training and dissemination of mentalization-based treatments. The remaining author declares that she has no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee of University College London and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Adkins, T., Luyten, P. & Fonagy, P. Development and Preliminary Evaluation of Family Minds: A Mentalization-based Psychoeducation Program for Foster Parents. J Child Fam Stud 27, 2519–2532 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-018-1080-x

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