Compassion Focused Parenting

The parenting a child receives in the first few years of life has profound long-term effects on the life of that child. Such long-term impacts of parenting on children include brain development, language and social skills, emotional regulation, empathy, mental and physical health, health risk behavior, and their capacity to cope with a spectrum of major life events. Yet, so many children are still raised in environments characterised by threat, stress, and maltreatment. This presentation has two main aims, first to suggest the need to move towards interventions that promote nurturing environments for children. Nurturing environments include four key principles: (a) promote and reinforce pro-social behavior; (b) minimize coercion, aggression, and conflict behavior; (c) reduce opportunities for problem behavior; and (d) promote mindful, flexible pro-social values. Current evidence-based parenting programs disseminated across countries have been evaluated in terms of reductions in problematic parenting and child behaviour, yet we know very little as to whether parenting interventions also lead to improvements in pro-social outcomes for children and parents, a key nurturing environment principle for children's mental health around the world. The second aim of this presentation is to demonstrate the importance of embedding the next generation of parenting interventions in brain functioning and affiliative processing, where I will describe a new approach to parenting called, ‘compassion-focused parenting’. The emphasis on a compassion-focus to parenting is to a) understand the nature of our ‘tricky brains’ in order to facilitate a process of de-shaming and de-blaming for parents, b) the importance of understanding physiological and emotional systems, and c) examine ways to deal with fears, blocks and resistances to compassion-focused parenting. This new approach can be examined through micro-trial designs, as well as larger scale randomized controlled trials. I will present a recently completed micro-trial designed study that examined the influence of a loving-kindness meditation for parents in reducing negative emotions (e.g., anger and frustration) and increasing positive emotions (e.g., sympathy and calmness) in response to difficult child behaviour whilst shopping. A compassion-focused approach to parenting aims to build the courage, wisdom and commitment for parents to help alleviate and prevent suffering for themselves and their children, whilst also helping them flourish.