Using Mentalization Tools when Matching

Who this is for

Adoption practitioners and managers (Voluntary Adoption Agencies, Regional Adoption Agencies, Local Authorities, and independent social workers), children’s social care services, children and family social workers, foster carers, kinship carers, designated teachers, and other professionals working with children and families.

Mentalization allows parents to make sense of both their own and child’s internal states and can play a crucial role in understanding and supporting a child. Children can learn to mentalize through interaction with a caregiver who is able to take an interest in them, understanding their internal states and reactions.

Using mentalizing tools when considering matching practice in adoption can support practitioners to assess prospective adopter’s capacity to support and understand a child who has experienced early adversity.

This webinar provides a short introduction to understanding mentalization concepts and then the application of these to matching practice. Using mentalization questions can help identify how prospective adopters make sense of their own childhoods. Blocks to mentalizing can be fear, anger and shame, taking a mentalization focus can support practitioners to explore this. Using mentalizing tools for matching allow practitioners to explore the prospective adopter’s capacity to understand a child’s history and presentation. This can in turn help practitioners to contemplate the match between adopter and child.

The speakers use case studies to bring alive mentalization ideas and principles, discuss how to use mentalizing questions to inform matching practice and supervision and to support prospective adopters to be able to mentalize.

Learning 0utcomes

• Have a basic understanding of mentalization
• Understand the value of this framework when considering matching
• Feel confident applying the knowledge acquired about mentalization in interactions and discussions with adopters and Children’s social workers to inform the matching needs of a child
• Feel confident in the use of the mentalization based tools to analyse a match
• To be able to apply the learning from this session to the overall understanding of the support that parents and children may need after matching.

About the trainers

Dr Polly Cowan

Polly works as a part-time Practice Manager in a VAA and has a research interest in adoption, her PhD research was on adoption breakdown. Using mentalization in adoption assessment is a practice focus for her. Recent publications have been around eating behaviors in care experienced children and young people. She is as associate tutor at the University of Stirling. She sits as a tribunal member for the Additional Support Needs Tribunal in Scotland.

Dr Alice Loving

Alice has worked within the field of Child Protection for fourteen years, working directly supporting families in the community and within a mother and baby residential setting. She completed her PhD within the Social Care department at Royal Holloway University, which focused on exploring influencing factors on the outcomes for parents working with social services.  She delivers training on ‘Applying Attachment, Trauma and Mentalization based principles in social work practice’, to social care practitioners within the UK and Ireland. She is passionate about improving the teaching and training of social workers to better prepare them for relationship-based practice that facilitates more positive outcomes for families.She has published work in the Child and Family Social Work and Children England journals. Her most recent publications include a chapter titled ‘Working with cases of neglect and emotional abuse,’ featured in ‘Child Protection and the Care Continuum’. She has recently produced a practice guide titled ‘Attachment Trauma and Parenting’, commissioned by Community Care.

Instructions

A member of staff will be in touch with attendees one week prior to the event to share a pre-event delegate pack.

If you have any questions regarding this webinar, please contact us at info@cvaa.org.uk. We will aim to answer your query within two working days.

CVAA accept online payments only. In case you do not have instant access to your company card, we suggest using your personal card instead to book a training event and claim it back with your agency in your expenses. Requesting an invoice to pay for our standard practice events is not possible.