Developmental Reparenting

Developmental reparenting arose within the adoption and fostering community from attachment theory and research. It helps families make and maintain healthy attachments.    
Trained mentors help parents understand the needs of their traumatised children and parent them in a way that helps their children ‘repair’ from the trauma of abuse and neglect.  

The main principles of Developmental Reparenting

• Children communicate their needs in their behaviour
• Children’s histories provide the ‘dictionary’ to understand their ‘behavioural language’ 
  
• Children need to ‘go back to go forward’ to fill their emotional gaps
  
• Children ‘can’t do’ not ‘won’t do’
  
• All aspects of children’s functioning need consideration 
  
• Trauma affects children in their body, brain, behaviour and cognition
  
• Early trauma impacts children’s understanding of the intentionality behind others actions
  
• Caring for traumatised children impacts parents
  
• Parents need to feel safe to explore their ability to make changes and to provide a safe environment for their children to do the same  
  

Therapeutic work with children

Needs to:

• Be integrated with the work with parents
  
• Directly involve parents/carers
  
• Directly work with children’s trauma based defences
  
• Be based on PLACE principles
  
• Empathising with how difficult and scary change is while providing opportunities to build the safe base where change is possible