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New ZealandMellow Parenting Background
Mellow Parenting was originally developed by a team of psychologists, psychiatrists and social Workers, all involved in the early childhood field. The original programme was subjected to a case controlled cohort study, funded by the Department of Health. Neighbouring family centres offering their own parenting interventions (treatment as usual) were used as a contrast for families using families centres where Mellow Parenting was offered. There were positive results for mothers, mother infant interaction, child behaviour and child development (Puckering et al, 1999) Subsequent developments included a programme for parents and children under one year of age particularly targeting mothers with post natal depression and where there were child protection concerns. This programme, Mellow Babies, has been evaluated in a randomised controlled trial and shown to improve parent-child interaction and reduce maternal depression (Puckering et al 2010). Maternal depression is a major risk factor for poor child development and later child behaviour problems. Although treatment for maternal depression is effective, few interventions have demonstrated a change in parent-child relationships, the vector by which maternal depression affects child outcome (Cooper et al 2003, Murray et al 2003).
Mellow Parenting was originally developed to meet the specific needs of vulnerable, hard-to-reach families, many of whom have experienced deprivation, abuse and disruption in their own childhoods. Often their lives are unpredictable and chaotic and this, together with substance abuse and unregulated mood disorders, means that they are an extremely challenging group to engage. During the 90’s there was a strong feeling amongst professionals in Britain that the primarily behaviourally focused interventions, excellent as they are, were not engaging the hardest to reach families nor were they able to help parents to make links between their own experiences and their parenting. This is clearly described in the NICE guidelines on parent education for children with conduct disorder (NICE, 2006), which identifies the characteristics of parents least likely to be engaged successfully in parenting programmes. Parents who are young, poor, poorly educated, lacking in social support and suffering from their own mental health problems, actually the very group who should cause most concern, are the least likely to engage. Our programme has demonstrated itself to be extremely effective in engaging and sustaining the engagement of just such families.
Mellow Parenting is an intensive programme that is delivered over one day a week for fourteen weeks. The recruitment process is crucial and it is here that we begin to nurture families, building up their self esteem by focusing on their strengths.
The programme uses video feedback from footage of the families themselves to enable us to do this in a much more direct and powerful way. Practitioners are trained to observe parent child interactions and to feed back even the embryonic skills observed and to explain to parents why they are important. Our parent child interaction coding system, which has been developed over 15 years of research and practice, allows practitioners to objectively observe, record and feedback to other professionals, clients and the courts what they have observed. Video feedback helps parents build on their existing skills with real evidence from their interactions with their child. It is one of the key components identified in the Bakermans-Kraneneberg meta analysis of effective programmes to improve parental sensitivity and parent-child attachment (Bakermans-Kranenberg et al, 2003).
Other parts of the programme concentrate on helping parents to reflect on their own lives and relationships and to practice both in the sessions and in “homework” new ways to relate the their children. We know that teaching parents to use behavioural management strategies is valuable but it is not enough in itself to change the relationships parents have with their children if the parents have no “internal model” of good parenting to draw on from their own childhoods and are unable to understand their feelings and behaviour, and are burdened by their own issues.
Mellow Parenting currently has extremely positive data from one large-scale comparison study, which includes data from a six month follow up, which continued to show results were sustained over time, and a later dissertation based on an eight year follow up (Kearney, 2007).
We also have numerous replication studies including some which have been able to use control groups (Renaud, 1998), Changes are regularly demonstrated by practitioners, not only in the UK but internationally, across a number of measures including; maternal depression, self-esteem, children’s behaviour, parent-child interactions and changes in the child’s cognitive functioning. In addition the programme has demonstrated itself to be extremely effective in engaging and sustaining the engagement of hard to reach families with high levels of retention in the group and completion of the sessions.
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