ATTACH™ Connecting with your Child
Building healthy relationships through reflection and mentalization
The ATTACH™ program is a project within the Frontiers of Innovation at the Center on the Developing Child’s Research & Development Platform
The Frontiers of Innovation is designed to accelerate the development and adoption of science based innovations that achieve breakthrough impact for children and families facing adversity.
Our engagement with Harvard University has offered extensive assistance. Including guiding the creation of ATTACH™ with our community partners, access to an extensive library of validated tools, mentorship in implementing community intervention programs, and share the results with the international community.
Improving Parent-Child Relationships
Through the ATTACH™ Parenting Program, we help parents build two essential skills – Mentalization and Reflective Function (RF) – that promote secure attachment with their children.
By strengthening their ability to reflect on their own thoughts and feelings, as well as their child’s, parents learn to manage difficult emotions and respond more effectively in challenging situations.
Regularly practicing this open, reflective approach enhances emotional regulation, improves communication, and fosters stronger, more positive parent-child relationships.
How to Understand Your Child
Mentalization
Mentalization is the ability to understand and reflect on your own and others’ mental states—such as thoughts, feelings, intentions, beliefs, motives, desires, and needs.
It involves imagining what may be happening in someone’s mind. Because we cannot directly know what others think or feel, mentalization relies on interpreting and making sense of observable cues.
Reflective Function
Reflective Function (RF) is the ability to express and verbalize one’s mentalizing capacity—reflecting on one’s own and others’ thoughts and feelings.
It provides a way to measure mentalization, known as reflective functioning. By strengthening this expressed reflection, individuals improve their understanding and communication of inner mental states.
In essence, Reflective Function is the uniquely human capacity to make sense of one another.
ATTACH™ promotes children’s health and mental development
In the ATTACH™ Parenting Program, we educate parents to reflect on their own thoughts and feelings and their child’s thoughts and feelings. We help parents keep their child’s mind in their mind.
This strengthens parents’ capabilities to meet their children’s needs and improves children’s mental and emotional health and development.
Our mission is to reduce the negative impacts of toxic stressors experienced by at-risk families and to help society raise the next generation of healthier well-adjusted children.
Testimonials
“It’s really helped me open my eyes and think about stuff before I actually do stuff.”
“It’s working to help me think and teach my kids how others feel and think. It’s helping with peers at school with my son. It also helped me work through issues with my son’s dad”
“I’m able to regulate my emotions better by talking it through and finding a compromise”
Strengthening parents’ capabilities
Data has shown that parenting quality and child development are improved from our program, thus strengthening parents’ capabilities without having to teach parents anything about parenting, child development, or child milestones.
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References
Allen, J.G., Fonagy, P., & Bateman, A.W. (2008). Mentalizing in Clinical Practice. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc.
Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E., & Target, M. (2002). Affect Regulation, Mentalization and the Development of the Self. New York: Other Press.
Fonagy P, Target M (1997) Attachment and reflective function: Their role in self-organization. Development & Psychopathology 9:679-700.
Fonagy, P., Steele, M., Steele, H., & Target, M. (1997). The Reflective-functioning manual, Version 4.1 for application to Adult Attachment Interviews. Unpublished Manuscript. University of London.
Fonagy P, Steele M, Steele H., & Target M. (1998) Reflective Function Manual (Version 5) for Application to Adult Attachment Interviews. . University College London, London, UK