Bottom Up Development Leads to Top Down Control

1. Bottom Up Development Leads to Top Down Control cognitive/ behavioural CORTEX (human) OFC OFC DEVELOPMENT CONTROL MIDBRAIN/LIMBIC (mammalian) playfulness security dance of attunement containment BRAIN STEM (reptilian) nurturing affective/ somato-sensory co-regulation

2. Attachment Insecurity

3. What Do Children Need? • To feel safe: • To feel • To feel understood • To feel they matter & belong • To learn to self-regulate & to be themselves

4. What Do We Mean by Feeling Safe? • Safe in their bodies • Safe in their families • Safely contained / co-regulated • Safe to love and be loved • Safe to explore their world • Safe in the knowledge that there will always be someone there for them

5. What Do Parents Need? • Information: • To know what was done to their child • To understand what this did to their child • To make sense of their child’s behaviour • Access: • To specialist advice, support and counselling • To a network of integrated services - for as long as it takes

6. Thinking Toddler • Meets unmet baby / toddler needs safely: for both child and parent. • Facilitates co-regulation: helping to re-set and rewire neurobiological systems. • Creates time and space for parent and child to ‘set it right’ and ‘get it right’: changing patterns, changing lives.

7. What is a Therapeutic Parent? • Key member of / link with therapeutic team • Primary, accessible resource for child - 24/7 • Consistent parental attachment figure • Developmental, therapeutic attachment guide and role model • Interpreter of ‘language of trauma’ • Hands on resource / link to other services • Expert voice and inspiration for their child • Co-creator of effective, fun strategies and healthy emotional environment for their child

8. Keys to therapeutic parenting • Parents are the ultimate healers for hurt children: providing therapy 24/7; • Understanding that children’s behaviour is their first language is vital to healing; • The battle for ‘hearts and minds’ must be informed, peaceful, firm and fair; • Families need all the friends, community and agency supports they can get.

9. Staying in the loop T R A D I T I O N A L attachmentweakens T H I N K I N G helpless/ hopeless child’s behaviour reactive parenting ‘stop it!’ hostile/ blaming behaviour strengthens punitive,distancing, critical, confronting, shaming

10. Getting out of the loop D E V E L O P M E N T A L attachments strengthen T H I N K I N G child’s behaviour proactive parenting behaviours weaken understanding, accepting, interpreting, playful, creative

11. Parenting Patterns • Parents tend to make sense of their child’s behaviour in terms of their own experiences of being parented; • Parent-child mis-attunements will occur, however secure parents’ attachment patterns are; • Parents need understanding and support to identify and explore inevitable vulnerabilities and ‘triggers’; • Supportive ‘adult attachment figures’ can empower parents to become sensitive, secure attachment figures for troubled, traumatised children; • Parent mentors are well-placed to fulfil this role: providing therapeutic supervision for therapeutic parents.

12. Attachment Security