Adoptive parents’ experiences of dyadic developmental psychotherapy by Ben Gurney-Smith and Megan Wingfield has been published in Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
Understanding the experiences of parents receiving DDP with their children is important and has implications for practice and further research.
This is the first qualitative study of parents receiving DDP and this article outlines how parents experienced DDP as different to other approaches, how it felt effective, what the role of the parent and therapist felt like with pointers for further quantitative research and implications for clinical practice.
The study is based on interviews with 12 adoptive parents;
“Part of it was understanding why Lilly was feeling the way she was feeling, why she was presenting the way she was presenting… Richard drew a picture of the brain… so we understood that… because of how Lilly’s brain is different, normal parenting sort of doesn’t work.”
Mike
“It’s lovely to have a formula because we had nothing before… Whereas now there is, there is a bit of security as parents as well.”
Marie
“The placement would have likely broken down because I don’t think I could’ve coped with it having no understanding what was going through his head.”
Stan
The article can be found through the DDP Library, and downloaded in full (paywall) from the Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry website.
The article first appeared in the October 2018 issue of Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, DOI 10.1177/1359104518807737, published by SAGE © 2018, and the copyright remains with them.
