Mindful Parenting, 2014
A Guide for Mental Health Practitioners
Mindfulness in Behavioral Health Series

Mindful Parenting: A Guide for Mental Health Practitioners offers an evidence-based, eight week structured mindfulness training program for parents with lasting benefits for parents and their children. Designed for use in mental health contexts, its methods are effective whether parents or children have behavioral or emotional issues. The program's eight sessions focus on mindfulness-oriented skills for parents, such as responding to (as opposed to reacting to) parenting stress, handling conflict with children or partners, fostering empathy, and setting limits. The book dovetails with other clinical mindfulness approaches, and is written clearly and accessibly so that professionals can learn the material easily and impart it to clients.

Featured in the text: 

• Detailed theoretical, clinical, and empirical foundations of the program.
• The complete Mindful Parenting manual with guidelines for eight sessions and a follow-up.
• Handouts and assignments for each session.
• Findings from clinical trials of the Mindful Parenting program.
• Perspectives from parents who have finished the course.

Its clinical focus and empirical support make Mindful Parenting an invaluable tool for practitioners and clinicians in child, school, and family psychology, psychotherapy/counseling, psychiatry, social work, and developmental psychology.

Foreword.- Part I. Theoretical and Empirical Background.- Chapter 1. Introduction to Mindful Parenting.- Chapter 2. An Evolutionary Perspective on Parenting and Parenting Stress.- Chapter 3. Effects of the Mindful Parenting Course.- Part II. Mindful Parenting: A Guide to the 8 Week Program.- Chapter 4: Overview and Guidelines for the Mindful Parenting Program.- Chapter 5: Session 1: Automatic Parenting.- Chapter 6: Session 2: Beginner’s Mind Parenting.- Chapter 7: Session 3: Reconnecting with our Body as a Parent.- Chapter 8: Session 4: Responding vs. Reacting to Parenting Stress.- Chapter 9: Session 5: Parenting Patterns and Schemas.- Chapter 10: Session 6: Conflict and Parenting.- Chapter 11: Session 7: Love and Limits.- Chapter 12: Session 8: Are We There yet? A Mindful Path Through Parenting.- Chapter 13: Follow-up Session: Each Time, Beginning Anew.- Chapter 14: Voices of the Parents: Life After the Mindful Parenting Course.

Susan Bögels, Ph.D., is a professor in Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the intergenerational transmission of psychopathology, through parent-child and family interactions, with a specific focus on the father, on the role of attentional processes in psychopathology, and on child and family interventions, including mindfulness. She is also the director of the academic center for the treatment of parents and children, UvA minds, in which evidence-based cognitive-behavioral and mindfulness interventions are offered to families. She is a member of the workgroup on Anxiety, Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum, PostTraumatic, and Dissociative Disorders of the DSM-5.

Kathleen Restifo, Ph.D., is a clinical and developmental psychologist specializing in family interventions for children and parents with emotional disorders. She is a practicing family therapist and a mindfulness trainer. Her clinical interests include integrating mindfulness and compassion practices with psychotherapeutic approaches for children, couples and families. Her research interests include evolutionary perspectives on parenting stress, effects of mindfulness-based interventions on children, and family processes in development of psychopathology. She is the founder of Mindful Families, a center which provides mindfulness and psychotherapy for children, parents and families, and is adjunct faculty at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands.

Offers an evidence-based eight-week mindful parenting program

Systematically trains psychotherapists in mindfulness techniques to help families cope more effectively with day-to-day stresses

Includes psychoeducational information on how parental and child stress and psychopathology affect the family dynamic

Discusses how to prevent the transmission of maladaptive parenting patterns