Our approach helps to make that challenge a little more manageable.
ADAPT Scotland works with:
Adoptive and foster families and anyone who is parenting traumatised children. We work with parents and parenting figures to help increase their understanding of the reasons for the challenges presented by their children. Armed with this knowledge we offer strategies and interventions that can make a difference to the way children feel about themselves, their family and the world around them.
Developmentally appropriate approach is based on the principles of PLACE, as espoused by Dan Hughes and others.
Attachment focused work is at the heart of our approach. This allows us to offer assessments, parenting work and therapeutic involvement with children and their families that is relationship based and focussed on increasing children’s feelings of safety and security.
Parent mentoring is a key component in all the work we undertake. This means forming positive attachments to parents and carers as the springboard to helping parents develop the therapeutic parenting styles that best meet their children’s needs.
Therapeutic family work is offered. This work is based on DDP principles and practises. This means working with parents and children together to address the issues that are making it hard for them to progress and thrive.
Training is offered to parents, carers, schools and professionals who are working with traumatised children. Our training is bespoke and is aimed at meeting the needs of both the funding body and the participants.
ADAPT Scotland helps parents and children increase their understanding of the reasons why they struggle alongside offering strategies that create the safe base where change is possible.
ADAPT Scotland works with professionals to ensure that there is wider community understanding of the needs of traumatised children. It promotes the development of a coherent plan for helping children and families and the support to put this plan into practise.
Adapt Scotland provides DDP PACE Training (supported by DDP Connects UK). We can provide online or in-person training to inform practitioners, parents, and carers about PACE and to help them explore how they can bring the attitude of PACE into their practice and parenting.
All Delegates will receive a certificate of attendance.
Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy/Practice (DDP); is a treatment for families with fostered or adopted children created by Dan Hughes, an eminent clinical psychologist. Dan recognised that traditional parenting often does not suffice to meet the needs of children and young people, who have experienced the developmental trauma of neglect and abuse from birth parents in their early years; as well as, sometimes, multiple transitions. Underpinning this model is an understanding of developmental trauma, attachment, theory and research, interpersonal neurobiology, and child development.
PACE is an approach that promotes an attitude of Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity, and Empathy. These qualities support emotional safety within relationships and encourage open and engaged communication. Playfulness creates joy in the relationship. Acceptance creates emotional safety. Curiosity promotes a desire for a deeper understanding of the other persons perspective. Empathy conveys our curiosity and acceptance by connecting and responding to the other persons emotional experience. PACE is not a technique but rather a way of thinking and being that strengthens the emotional connections in our relationships with others.
FOCUS OF THE TRAINING:
- Parenting with PACE aimed at parents/caregivers, or practitioners supporting parents/caregivers. The importance of them receiving PACE from their social worker or through supervision
- Practicing with PACE aimed at practitioners who want to develop the attitude of PACE as part of their practice, including social care and education practitioners.
What is covered:
- Why children who have experienced developmental trauma, behave in the way they do
- What is the impact of developmental trauma that leads to the children needing a different parenting approach involving PACE alongside behavioural support
- Developmental trauma
- Blocked trust/fear of relationship
- Brain development
- Understanding secure, insecure and disorganised attachment
- Core beliefs, survival strategies
- Shame, shield of shame
Where do the ideas and thinking of PACE come from?
- Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity and Empathy
- Looking at what each one means and looks like
- How do we help/parent children that have experienced developmental trauma?
What parenting capacities do parents need?
- Reflective capacity
- Mind-mindedness
- Good regulation abilities
- Ability to notice defensive responding and to move back into open and engaged states
With these capacities’ parents can use the PACE way of being in order to build connections with the children.
- Understanding what PACE is, and what it is not, and to see this as a way of being able to build security and not a technique to change behaviour
- How to use this connection alongside regulation and behavioural support
- Dan’s Two Hands of Parenting
- Discipline with empathy
- Choices and consequences
- The importance of selfcare, and blocked care
This is a relational-based approach and intervention, which believes that the best way for children to recover from the trauma, neglect, and abuse that they experienced in their early years is through relationships. Adoptive parents or caregivers are the central change agents to support their child’s recovery. For this to happen they need to really understand what underlies their child’s behaviour and to see it as functional and related to survival. They are also supported in developing therapeutic parenting strategies and dialogue to minimise shame. For many children who have experienced developmental trauma, their internal working model is often that they are not good enough or worthy of being cared for or loved. At Adapt, we are trained in both Levels 1 and 2.
Find out more about Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy/Practice or PACE Training https://ddpnetwork.org/about-ddp/dan-hughes-founder/