Working with Parents: A Mentalization-Based Framework

This article presents a mentalization-based treatment (MBT) framework for working with parents that fosters the emergence of mentalization in a context grounded in relational and developmental points of view. A basic premise of this framework is that mentalization and epistemic trust provide protective factors for parents during moments of family stress, promoting the parents' capacity to negotiate the developmental tasks of parenting, as these tasks interact with both their inner world and the external realities of an ethnically and racially diverse, gendered culture.