PACE for parents and carers

Yesterday marked the 4th and final session of our initial PACE workshops of 2013 for parents and carers.

Recovery from trauma is a long process and key to this is developing the relationships between children and their foster carers or adoptive parents.  Since January we have teamed up with just short of 60 adoptive parents and foster carers from across the South West to support them in tackling the challenges they face in building these relationships. We have done this through introducing the concepts of PACE (Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity and Empathy) developed by the American Psychologist, Dan Hughes (see his most recent book, written jointly with UK Psychologist Kim Golding, for a great exploration of this approach; Creating Loving Attachments: parenting with PACE to create loving attachments, 2012).

PACE is a highly successful parenting approach for working with children who have experienced trauma in their attachment relationships. Sessions were facilitated by our experienced clinical psychologist, Dr Emma Greatbatch. The principles of PACE were introduced and participants were given the opportunity to reflect on their own experiences of trying to use the approach and to learn from their fellow participants.

Our next PACE session will take place on 1st May, when we will welcome professionals working in the field of Fostering and Adoption to join us in exploring the use of PACE in supporting the parents and carers they work with. The workshop will take place over a full day and we are excited that we have been commissioned to deliver this workshop in-house on behalf of other agencies over the coming months.

As a practice there are several others ways in which we seek to support parents and carers to strengthen and build the relationships with their children:

We offer various direct therapeutic services for children, young people and their families such as DDP, Theraplay, Sensory Integration Therapy, Eye Movement Desensitisation & Reprocessing (EMDR), Family Systems Therapy, and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. The therapy offered will depend on the difficulties presented and on a psychological formulation, or understanding, of these, which is developed during an initial consultation with one of our psychologists.

We also offer assessment as a standalone service where this is helpful for the planning of placements or support services, or where an assessment can help a network to better understand a child’s presentation. We offer various types of psychological assessment including assessment of children’s attachment styles and relationships, and full cognitive assessment, both of which can be helpful to carers and parents in meeting the needs of the children they care for.

If you are interested in attending any of our future PACE workshops, or would like details of our bespoke training events, please email sam.morley@psychologyassociates.org.uk or call 0845 026 7260.