Abstract
The style of parenting a child receives has profound long-term impacts on that child’s life. Yet, the rates of child maltreatment globally are high (in both developing and developed countries), indicating that many children around the world are being raised in toxic environments. Evidence-based parenting programs (EBPPs) have been demonstrated to have positive impacts on improving parenting style, whilst reducing childhood social, emotional and behavioural problems. EBPPs originated out of a need to address externalizing behaviour problems and to address conduct problems, and compliance became a key target of these parenting models. Thus, many EBPPs were developed in an era where operant and social learning theory-based approaches to parenting were most prominent and these parenting models still prevail today. This paper has one major aim—to demonstrate how the next generation of EBPPs need to be grounded in evolved caring motivational systems and affiliative emotion processing, which requires an understanding of the evolved processes involved in parent-offspring caring. This new approach to parenting is called, ‘compassion-focused parenting’, and this new approach to parenting will be described.
Highlights
The style of parenting a child receives has profound long-term impacts on that child’s life
The aim of this paper is to propose a new framework for understanding parenting and family interactions, referred to as compassion-focused parenting
The aim of the second part of this paper is to demonstrate how the model of Evidence-based parenting programs (EBPPs) can be improved through the inclusion of compassion, which focuses on the importance of affiliative processing to facilitate change
Summary
The family environment in which children are raised can have long-lasting impacts on a range of developmental outcomes, including brain development [1], emotion regulation [2], and empathy [3], as well as mental and physical health [4]. The aim of this paper is to propose a new framework for understanding parenting and family interactions, referred to as compassion-focused parenting This form of parenting is based on Gilbert’s [17] Compassion Focused Therapy model, and suggests that the generation of parenting programs should move beyond the reductions of negative behaviours as the only metric of success, and look at measures of prosocial behaviour and affiliative relating between parents and children as crucial outcomes of success. Programs (EBPPs) have been successful at addressing childhood difficulties by improving parenting practices; they have stagnated in terms of innovative growth, relying on operant and social learning theory-based approaches It will suggest how the big innovation in EBPPs will be to adopt an evolutionary functional analysis approach examining parent physiology and emotional functioning. This paper will be focused on examining the parent and child relationship (under 12 years of age)
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