Parental Insightfulness: The Importance for Healthy Emotional Development

1:42
So thank you very much, Haifaa and Lindsey for inviting me to to talk. Can you hear me?

1:49
OK? Can you give a sign?

1:51
Yeah. All right. So if said I'm David Oppenheim, I'm coming to you tonight from the University of Haifa in Israel.

2:02
And a brief introduction.

2:05
While I'm a developmental psychologist, which means that I do research on on infants, children and their parents from early on. And I'm particularly interested in relationships that develop between infants, toddlers, young children and their parents and the impact of those relationships on children's development.

2:32
And I've been doing this research for maybe 30 years or more. And tonight I will be talking with you about insightfulness.

2:46
This is the term that we've coined insightfulness, the capacity to see the world, the child's point of view, to feel the world from the child's point of view.

2:57
And, and we have been working on, on developing ways to, to measure this capacity that you all would probably agree is important.

3:08
But can you, can you do science? Can you do research on that? And one important thing about my presentation today is that it's, it's based on the research that we and many others have done.

3:26
So I think in the field, in the clinical world, there are many, many different theories and many different approaches. And that's natural. But you always wonder which ones have evidence based, which ones are based on research and and everything I will talk with you about today is based on on the research that we've done. And that's kind of a unique characteristic.

3:56
Let me share my screen with you. Hold on just a second.

4:05
And OK, so are you seeing the slide?

4:16
OK, Lindsey, can you just nod if it's OK?

4:19
OK. So you see the you see the topic of today's presentation, parental insightfulness into the child's inner world previous to children's emotional health.

4:30
And this is what I will be talking about.

4:33
And you can see that on this slide. And you, you have these slides, you you wouldn't be able to get get hold of them. Is is my my personal website where you can find a lot of material talks and papers that we've done.

4:52
So I won't be really developing a whole lot of research at focus.

4:57
We have a short time I'll be getting in the bottom line, but you'll be able to read more if you'd like.

5:04
And lots of papers are, are freely available to download there.

5:09
I would like to say that all of this work on insightfulness I've been doing for many, many years with my friend and colleague Dina Reeve.

5:17
This picture you can see on the screen and another picture that I wanted to share with you is, is by far my where we're at right now.

5:28
It's it's 8:00 PM. It's not light, it's dark, but this is high for Bay.

5:35
And that gold Dome that you see is the High Temple is the world centre of the high faith. You've heard about it.

5:45
And this is our university. The student union is on the left and this is my building where I work and where I do all this research I've been doing for many years in this building and just students of our from our first campus, you know, just to get you a little bit of skill or where, where I am located in the world.

6:11
But from here we will jump straight into what we, our topic for today, which is insightful and, and jump right in to definition because saying that insightful is seeing and feeling things from the child's point of view that that is intuitively quite clear.

6:36
But what does it really mean? What does it include? What does it involve?

6:41
And I will and there are these 4 characteristics here that are the central ones.

6:47
There are more, but I will, I will focus on these.

6:50
First of all, the 1st element of insightfulness is to think about the motives underlying behaviour, to realize, to understand, to appreciate that when the child is behaving in a certain way and when the child is liking something or not liking something, angry about something, stressed about something, not interested in something, the under the under the behaviour there are motives, thoughts, feelings, wishes, needs.

7:21
And this, this for this audience, it, it may seem like completely obvious, but I'm sure working with parents, you know, that it varies the extent to which parents understand, but what you see on the outside is not necessarily what's going on inside.

7:40
And you know, an obvious example would be a child who is showing aggression, aggression, aggressive behaviour, but is actually fearful.

7:51
And if you just speak to the aggression, you won't be understanding something very important about the child experience and you won't be able also to help the child.

8:01
So there's there's something underlying the behaviour that it's thankfulness involves understanding that what's underlying the external behaviour.

8:11
The second element that I would like to emphasize is acceptance.

8:15
Acceptance of the child refers in our definition of insight from this and to particularly to accepting behaviour that is challenging or disappointing or different than our expectations.

8:33
It's very easy to accept the child's behaviour when the child's behaviour is what we'd like it to be.

8:41
It's more challenging to accept the child's behaviour when the child's behaviour is very different than what we'd like to be.

8:51
Maybe it's distressing for us, maybe it's disappointing for us, maybe it's it's shameful for us that our child's behaviours acceptance means that we understand that the child is not doing this behaviour to irritate us or because the child is bad, but that there are reasons.

9:13
It goes back to the motives that they talked about in a minute ago. There are reasons for this behaviour.

9:19
Acceptance of the child and the motives doesn't mean setting that you're not setting any limits to what the child is doing, Not at all.

9:28
This is all about our thinking and feeling about the child, not about the parenting that we engage in.

9:35
Obviously there are many things, or not many, but there are things that children do that we set limits and do not allow.

9:42
And that does not mean that we're not accepting child.

9:45
And the opposite of acceptance is rejection and we see that as as indicating lower and 2nd.

9:55
The 3rd element is symbol and holding an emotionally complex view of the child.

10:00
By what we mean seeing the child as a as a multi dimension and multi dimensional way.

10:06
The child has many characteristics, some that are positive, some of them are maybe less of what we we like, maybe that maybe for another person, maybe another parent may be OK, but we're we don't like those behaviours.

10:19
But the childhood is all of these things at once.

10:23
And, and, and if sexual parents see this complexity and, and hold this complexity of the child and that the final characteristic or dimension of sexualness that have listened here openness regarding the child himself.

10:38
And that means that you, you don't have a fixed view about your child.

10:44
You, you know your child, you know your child's characteristics.

10:48
You know how your child behaves in certain stipulations.

10:53
But sometimes you realize that your child surprises you.

10:58
And what you thought about the child is actually not accurate.

11:02
And maybe the teacher in preschool will tell you something about your child that didn't realize.

11:08
Being open means trying to integrate all of these dimensions, including the things that surprise you, including things that are different from from your expectations, so that you are open regarding your child and also regarding yourself.

11:25
You realize the role your behavior has in your child's behavior.

11:31
And maybe your child became, you know, angry because he was hurt, his students were hurt because you paid no attention to them when they were trying to track your attention because you were in your phone or you were busy or you distracted myself.

11:51
So you're also open to see what's in your behavior contributed to your child's behavior.

11:58
OK, so that's let's jump right into an example of a mother who is insightful.

12:07
She's talking about her baby.

12:09
We showed her a little video clip of her baby and her pain where she was trying to teach the child to play with a toy that's a little bit difficult for a baby to play by himself.

12:22
And we showed her the video and asked after watching this segment, what do you think?

12:27
One through your child's head?

12:29
What was he thinking? What was he feeling?

12:32
I think it was interesting because these were new things from especially the puzzle.

12:37
He didn't seem to be bothered, but on the other hand, he wasn't too thrilled.

12:40
He seemed to be acting as usual, like in an ordinary athlete, from what we saw.

12:45
Does it tell you something about your child's personality more generally?

12:48
You know, his traits, his characteristics?

12:51
Yeah, I think so.

12:52
I think he's a very alert child, very curious, very explosive.

12:56
I think that he's a restless baby compared to other babies, but I think that this is not essentially a characteristic that is long lasting compared to his other traits and characteristics.

13:06
You could see it on the big update. We used Citrus thread very quickly and shift from one side to another.

13:12
And how did you feel when you watched this video clip?

13:14
And then if it surprised you, concern you, or made you happy.

13:18
All in all, it reflects his usual behavior.

13:21
I was happy that he didn't take over your camera or do something to it.

13:24
I can't say that his behavior surprised me.

13:26
It was maybe occurrence unusual.

13:28
And his behavior always makes me happy.

13:30
I mean, I think he's a very unique child.

13:32
He's fascinating because he's always in a mode of exploration.

13:36
You could always make him happy and surprise him easily.

13:39
On the other hand, it can be difficult because you need to keep your eye open constantly and to be inventive to what he's doing.

13:46
He used the suspicions very quickly and he's not a type of child who plays by himself.

13:52
OK, so this gave you a little bit of from a transcript of an interview with the mother that we classified as what isn't about her way of speaking about her child that fits what I described as so you could see complexity in her view of the child.

14:13
She was able to see the child, the whole person describing in positive terms, very positive terms, but at the same time acknowledged the difficulties, sentences, behavior always makes me happy.

14:24
It's immediately balanced with the price of having such an active child.

14:28
He says only, you know, he doesn't concentrate a lot on one thing.

14:31
He moves from one thing to the other.

14:33
She's she's she's describing both sides of this child, But she sees these characteristics as something developmental.

14:41
You know, is this developmental optimism?

14:43
This is a this is a phase.

14:45
Obviously this and this is not like some characteristic as intrinsic and stable and negative, which is what a non insightful mother might say about her child.

14:59
There's exceptions and more things talking about the child.

15:03
She it's, it's, it's the baby.

15:06
It's difficult, it's not an easy baby.

15:08
But she talks about it in a positive way.

15:10
She shows acceptance and an insightfulness for the developmental tasks of his age and such behaviours like jumping from one thing to the other and not being able to attend for very long easily be described in a negative manner.

15:25
And and another mother could actually go in a more negative direction.

15:31
But this mother does not restlessness, suburbation, you see as a temporary development interface and not as a stable and global difficult personality characterist.

15:42
And the final thing to say about her narrative for speech is that it's fresh, it's rich, it slows.

15:51
You can really get a picture in your mind of what that baby is like.

15:56
And if you'd read several pages of this mother, you'd really get a good picture of this baby as a really baby with qualities, you know, of various sorts that this mother really admires, tries to understand and talks about this kind of accepting and insightful way.

16:20
So. So that gives you just a little bit of a feeling of what we mean by insightfulness.

16:26
And I just just wanted to say that if this reminds you a little bit of the concept of maternal sensitivity, I don't know if you've spoken about that in previous seminars or making subsequent seminars, but this really is part of the sensitivity construct.

16:45
In fact, Mary, it's worth, you know, the mother of the fashion theory describe sensitive mothers as mothers who see the world from the child's point of view.

16:56
So very close to this mothers, the idea for behind insightfulness is that a mother who or a father who think about their child in this kind of way this this promotes or underlies behavior, actual behavior with the child, actual interactions with the child that are more sensitive.

17:21
Sensitivity involves reading the child's signals correctly and responding to them appropriately.

17:28
And if your mind works in an insightful way, then it is easy to translate that into behaviours that are that are sensitive.

17:40
It's emotionally regulated.

17:41
It helps children calm when there's stress.

17:45
It helps children be interested when they're bored.

17:49
This kind of way of thinking and it's the basis for nurturing parenting behaviour.

17:57
The parent who's insightful understands the emotional needs of of the baby and, and reacts to those needs.

18:06
And as I said earlier, not only to the outward behaviour, but to the underlying need.

18:15
And that that kind of parental way of thinking and feeling and behaviour is something that really contributes to the security of the child in the relationship with the parent.

18:33
And there's nothing that gives a child or really any one of us a better and stronger sense of security than being understood from the inside, from not only what we show on the outside with what we actually feel and need from the inside.

18:55
So, so insightfulness from the child's point of view is a feeling that my, my daddy, my mommy are holding me in their mind.

19:06
They are they're thinking about me in this particular way, understanding my emotions, understanding, accepting all of me, even when I, my behaviour is so-called bad, quote UN quote or disappointing or angry.

19:25
My, my parents see this, accept this, understand this, and that gives children a solid sense of security.

19:33
That is very important for healthy emotional.

19:39
David, I'm going to interrupt you for a second. Will you try to shut off your video? We'll see if it helps your sound a little bit. You're getting a little bit more muffled. And if it doesn't, I'll have you turn it back on.

19:51
So I shut down the the video. I hope that is better.

19:56
We're hearing you better.

19:58
OK. All right.

19:59
Sorry. We want to see you, but we want to hear you.

20:02
That's fine. That's fine. Thank you.

20:05
OK, so I'd like to add a few more things about insightfulness.

20:11
First of all, insightfulness is embedded in everyday routines.

20:15
Insightfulness is not something that a parent devotes a lot of necessarily devotes a lot of conscious attention to.

20:24
It's what parents do, particularly with babies who, who, who do not necessarily speak and are young and we need to kind of guess sometimes what's, what's driving their behavior and, and what is underlying their behavior.

20:45
And, and we do that kind of automatically.

20:49
It's part of the job of being a parent.

20:51
So don't think about insightfulness is necessarily this very conscious process when when parents come to our lab, yes, we ask them these questions and then they have to articulate it in in words.

21:08
But this is not what happens in everyday life.

21:12
Both insight and empathy or acceptance are needed.

21:15
We there are parents who actually understand the the child's difficulty but are very unaccepting or even rejecting of it.

21:25
So one example might be a child who's very shy and has great difficulties in new locations when they, when they go together like a birthday party or something, the child is very clingy and, and stick.

21:39
And you know, that doesn't, doesn't leave his, his mother.

21:45
And, and you know, in one case, in the case of an insightful mother, she might say, yeah, he's he's very anxious in new places.

21:56
And, and he clings to me and it takes a long time for him to actually try and explore a little bit.

22:02
But I guess that's what he needs to be to feel secure.

22:05
He needs to stay by me.

22:07
Alternatively, a mother can say, yes, he's very anxious in me places and when we go to, to, to places that are unfamiliar and I, I really can't stand it, you know, and I really, I really can't stand it.

22:21
But he's so clingy, you know, and when will he ever become more independent?

22:25
So the same behaviour can be construed very differently in a, in an insightful or in or rejecting way.

22:32
So it's not just insight and understanding, a cognitive understanding of, of the child's behaviour, but it's, it's also an empathic understanding and understanding that is, you know, trying to help the child.

22:48
And, and the last thing to say, insightfulness is not always expressed in ways that are experienced positively by the child.

22:55
So if, if the child wants to have the, the 10th cookie or the, the 5th candy or to stay up late beyond an hour, which we know from experience, you know, doesn't work well for, for him, he'll get overtired and so forth.

23:13
So the parent sets a limit and says, you know, it's time to go to bed or enough with the cookies, maybe we can eat something else and and so forth.

23:24
So, so the the parent is understanding and accepting, but not necessarily obviously and and not necessarily going with anything that the child wants.

23:36
The the the point is that setting limits from an from an insightful standpoint is very different than setting limits from an impulsive, angry and non insightful standpoint.

23:49
And it's more likely when it's insightful to eventually and not only get the behavioural result that we want, but also to actually help the child gradually over over development, develop their own internal breaks, so to speak, you know, their own regulation.

24:10
All right, here we go.

24:20
OK, so up to now it was very theoretical.

24:24
And let me just say how we actually assess insightfulness in our studies.

24:30
So we show, we videotape the mother and the child in three different interactions, such as structured play when the mom is distracted by something, a caregiving situation.

24:42
And then after we videotape the mother and the child, we separate them.

24:47
The child goes elsewhere and the mother is shown the two videos and is interviewed about the child's thoughts and feelings.

24:55
And we think it's very significant that the mother has to, or father needs to actually look at the video and have this kind of dialogue between their representations of the child inside their mind, how they know their child an actual, an actual video, which there is they have not seen before.

25:14
And, and that's what life is all about with with children.

25:17
The child behaves in a way that this, you know, perhaps different than what you expected.

25:23
And you have to kind of try and figure out what's going on in their mind.

25:26
We asked the the mother after she watches 2 minutes of the video, what do you think was going on in your child's head?

25:34
What was he thinking? What was he feeling?

25:36
Where on the video did you see that he was feeling angry or he was feeling bored or he was feeling happy or he was feeling interested or proud or whatever it is.

25:47
OK, so we asked that question. These are great questions also for intervention, by the way, not only for our assessment.

25:55
Is this behavior typical of your child?

25:57
Does it tell you something about your child's personality more generally?

26:01
And what were you feeling while you were watching?

26:03
Did anything surprise you or concern you or make you happy?

26:07
And we follow up these questions and then move to the next video and final video.

26:12
So All in all, it can take 30 to 45 minutes to complete the interview.

26:18
And the important thing to say here about how we rate the, the, the parent as, as, as insightful or not is that we do.

26:26
We do not look at the accuracy of the perceptions.

26:29
It's not whether what they say is right or wrong compared to the video.

26:34
It is how they organize their thoughts and feelings in relation to the child's inner world and behaviour that is critical.

26:42
So we actually analyzed the mother's insightfulness from the transcript of the interview, from the text without actually looking at the video.

26:53
It's not whether she was right or wrong about what she said about the video.

26:57
It is how she thinks, whether she invokes these motives underlying the behaviour, when she can talk in a complex way, whether she's open, where she's accepting those things that I talked about before.

27:10
All of those you can see in the in the transcript of her we classify the the the mothers in a complex way that I won't I won't describe all the details of how we do that into one of four categories.

27:26
One category is insightful and characterized by complexity, insight, acceptance and openness, which I talked about.

27:33
And then three other categories are non insightful.

27:37
1 is kind of A1 sided view of the child, often times a negative view.

27:44
There's lack of complexity because the parent sees the child's through a kind of narrow prism.

27:49
Usually some behaviour that is very disturbing for the parent and the parent continues regardless of what was in the video.

27:57
They go back to the child's hyperactivity or the child's aggression or the child's disconnection or whatever it is about about the child and they just go back to that one sided view.

28:10
They may have problem maintaining a focus on the child and begin to talk about themselves or other children or other problems.

28:18
Even when we ask them to talk about the child, they may have anger, a lot of anger on the child and anger is is is online and and they may have insight combined with the rejection which I talked about in the previous slide.

28:33
So that's one category, but another very different way to be non insightful is if you're disengaged, the whole idea of talking about your child's in the world is not really very interesting.

28:45
There's a lot of emphasis on behaviour, but not on motives underlying the behaviour, and an emphasis that the child is very self-sufficient and doesn't really need a parent range.

28:55
And then the final, the 4th category is a category that is the parent has mixed styles speaking and and it's important for for this organized attachment that I won't elaborate on this more today.

29:12
So the first thing we did was ask whether there are matches between the parents classification on the on the insightfulness assessment, whether there are, as I said, insightful one side, the disengage or mix and the attachment classification of the baby.

29:32
I hope you're familiar with, with these classifications.

29:35
Babies can be classified in the strain situation procedure into one of four attachment classifications.

29:43
1 is secure, which is as you can judge by the name is the is the optimal category and then three less optimal, less secure, the ambivalent C type, the avoidance A type and the disorganized D type.

30:05
And we have matches in three of the four.

30:11
And when mothers were insightful it was most likely that the babies would be securely attached.

30:16
When mothers were one sided, it was most likely the babies would be insecure of the ambivalence type.

30:24
And when mother were classified as mixed, the babies were most likely to be classified as disorganized and when mothers were classified disengaged, there was not a match with avoidance attachment.

30:36
But one of the issues is that we do not have many avoidance babies in our samples in Israel.

30:43
That's a whole other topic to talk about why that is the case.

30:47
But what it means is that we had mothers, but which should have had avoidant babies according to our hypothesis, but actually did not go with avoidance because we didn't have enough babies were avoidant.

31:04
But it did predict that the mothers were were lower on sensitivity.

31:08
And the theory of mind of these children, these babies when they grew up to be preschoolers and you can assess theory of mind, the theory of mind was lower.

31:18
So it gives some support to this disengagement classification.

31:21
But the best thing to do would be to repeat this study in AUS sample where you have quite a few avoided babies and much fewer ambivalent babies compared to OK.

31:34
So take home message from this, what I talked about is that yes, as as we as we expected insightfulness isn't apparent is associated with the secure attachment in the in the infant.

31:52
Lack of insightfulness in the parent is associated with insecure attachment in the infant.

31:58
And in fact you could you can even predict statistically at least from the type of lack of insightfulness to the type of insecurity that the baby would show.

32:11
So this was, this was very important for us to, to show, to provide what we call validity for this new measure of insightfulness and to support that really this, this capacity to talk about your child in a certain way is, is significant for the child emotional development for something very important, developing an attachment, a secure attachment.

32:39
I would like to, I would like to mention one more thing because over the years I've become very interested in studying autistic children, children with autism and, and I won't go deeply into it.

32:54
We, we don't have enough time.

32:56
But I want to mention that this association between insightfulness and secure attachment is also true with regards to children with autism or autistic children, and that some of some kids with autism develop secure attachments and to their mothers.

33:14
And they're much more likely to develop such attachments to their mothers when the mothers are insightful with regards to their inner experience.

33:23
So this is something very important than those of you in the audience who are working with autism or no autism.

33:30
This may be particularly interesting for you and, and maybe even surprising because people used to think that it's very difficult to, to understand the inner experience of autistic children.

33:43
But we have found that actually a nice group, quite a substantial proportion of, of mothers and fathers of children with autism and are insightful with regards to their experience.

33:58
So parents can do it even when the child himself or herself has developmental issues such as autism.

34:07
If you have any questions, write them and I I will leave a few minutes in the end to talk about this.

34:14
So now we expand our lens and talk about fathers because up to now our in our early studies were all about mothers and their babies and their children.

34:28
And here we move to a study where we look at the insightfulness of both mothers and fathers.

34:36
This was the study of 18 month old toddlers in in low risk families.

34:44
We, we like to begin our studies with low risk families before we move to families with challenges.

34:51
And we assessed mother's insightfulness and the father's insightfulness separately.

34:57
And we also here we looked at the triadic interaction.

35:01
So how all three of them interact together.

35:04
It's something called the Lausanne trilogue play procedure.

35:08
Another topic for another night or day and presentation to, to, to talk about how you look at not only a day addict relationship such as mother child or father child, but a triadic relationship between all three of them.

35:23
So we and, and you can, you can kind of assess the quality of the what's called the family alliance.

35:34
So it's, it's, you can think about it like an attachment pattern, except that it's not between the child and the parent, but it's amongst all three family members.

35:45
How do they coordinate?

35:47
How do they cooperate?

35:48
How do they have fun together is what we look at in, in our observations.

35:54
So the first thing that was important in this study was to ask, does insightfulness, does it work in the same way for fathers?

36:05
Will they respond to the interview?

36:06
Will they be be able to show this capacity for insightfulness?

36:11
And so we interviewed the mothers and we interviewed the fathers and we transcribed the interviews and removed all information about the gender of the parents.

36:21
So we don't know if we're ****** a father or a mother.

36:25
And and we found that there was no difference in the rates of insightfulness between fathers and mothers.

36:34
Fathers were not less likely to be insightful compared to mothers.

36:40
And I think that's a really important finding.

36:43
And it means that if we do not include fathers in our interventions, in our work in and in our research, we are really not making use of a really important resource for children 'cause, you know, the, the, the, the mother may for in, in a certain family, the mother could have some difficulties, but the father is, it could, could actually show really good insightfulness.

37:12
So this is not only out of fairness to father, but it is also, if you think about the child's development, you know, this is a really, really important information to know.

37:26
And I can already tell you it's not on the side.

37:29
But I alluded to our autism studies and the same finding with autism, even when the children are autistic, mothers and fathers are equally likely to show a capacity for insightfulness.

37:46
So, yeah, so the next thing that we found, I'm I'm going back to the study that I mentioned about the mother and the father and how that they get together, how they interact together in this family alliance.

38:01
And we found this really nice finding when both parents were insightful, the family was most likely to interact in what's what's called this cooperative alliance.

38:12
They coordinate their movements, they coordinate their behaviors that parents do.

38:17
They are able to help the child play together with them and have fun together with them.

38:24
They're able to let the each parent lead the interaction in certain parts.

38:29
They're able to play all three of them together and and they're even able to have the mom and the dad chat a little bit and have the child engage and kind of entertain themselves.

38:43
When one parent was insightful and one was not, it was a conflictual alliance.

38:49
They still had an alliance, but there was tension and competition in the interactions.

38:54
And when neither parent was insightful, there was a disordered alliance.

38:58
So the least, least adaptive family alliance.

39:02
So there was here at the triadical level also very nice links between insightfulness of both parents and the family.

39:12
So the second take home message for tonight or for today rather, the insightfulness of mothers and fathers is associated with the family and eyes.

39:20
So it's important if you think about the family and the children grow up in families, not just with one parent.

39:27
It could be two parents, it could be by the way, it could be a parent and a grandparent.

39:31
It doesn't necessarily have to be mother and father.

39:35
There are many combinations, many families, but usually more than one parent.

39:40
And and that's important to look at the insightfulness of both, both Co parents.

39:49
The next next question we asked is in early insightfulness predict what will happen with the child later on.

40:01
So I will summarize very briefly what we did here.

40:05
We looked at the insightfulness of the mother towards the baby at 12 months and then.

40:13
That baby became an adolescent 15 years later and was at the age of 16.

40:19
We found them again and we interviewed them about their best friend.

40:26
So we asked ourselves whether these adolescents, once babies are now capable of showing insightfulness with regards to the inner experience of their best friend.

40:39
We observed them playing together.

40:41
We interviewed the adolescent and we sought to to see whether if you experienced insightfulness earlier in your life, that will increase the chances that you will be able to show insightfulness towards your best friend.

41:00
For guys, it was a male friend, for girls, it was a female friend.

41:04
OK, so and here you can see on this very simple slide on the left when mothers Pi stands for positively insightful.

41:15
When mothers were insightful, you could see that 70% of their adolescent children were insightful with respect to their best friends and with mother were not insightful only 35% half were able to show insightfulness with regards to their best friend.

41:39
So this beginning life with with an insightful, in this case mother puts you on a pathway that leads later on to greater likelihood that you will have this social emotional capacity for insightfulness with regards to your own to your friends.

42:00
So now we're moving outside the family.

42:04
I want to emphasize this does not mean that something happens between the age between birth and age 1 or 1 1/2 that determines long term what will happen.

42:16
Because the same mother who was insightful early on probably continue to be insightful later.

42:22
So it's a, it's a context, it's a, it's a relationship context that the child is growing up in.

42:28
So this is not, I'm not emphasizing that early experiences is is determining later capacities, but I'm just saying it's sets in motion processes that lead to better capacities later on.

42:45
And and who which parent would not like his adolescent boy or girl to to have this capacity to be in cycle with with regards to their friends.

42:58
That's a wonderful, important quality.

43:01
So take home message #3 maternal insightful in infancy, predict the insightfulness of the child as an adolescent for his or her close friend.

43:12
So we moved to high risk populations because until now I talked about low risk populations.

43:21
And here this is a study that Sarah Gray did in in Boston now almost 10 years ago, and she is very interested in high risk populations, children who are exposed to community violence.

43:40
And she asked the question, what is the role of maternal insightfulness in buffering the effects of child exposure to violence on child symptoms?

43:53
So we know that children who are exposed to violence in the community, that's very dysregulating and disruptive.

44:03
If there's high levels of exposure, we see that being expressed in more symptomatology in children, more behaviour problems in children.

44:12
But can maternal insightfulness buffer, interrupt, so to speak, this and and give the child some way to integrate, regulate, deal with their exposure with the help of an insightful parent so that it does not get expressed in symptoms?

44:34
That was the question that she asked in this study and she got beautiful results.

44:39
What you see here, just two slides, not going too deep into the science of it, but just to give you a sense on the Y axis, internalizing behaviour problems measured by the CBCL.

44:55
And on the left hand side of the graph you have the insightful, the group, the group of when mothers were insightful.

45:02
And on the right side of the graph you see when mothers were not insightful.

45:08
And the light Gray is the non exposed.

45:11
And you see that the non exposed children show low levels of internalizing behavior problems, whether the mother is insightful or not insight.

45:21
But the children who were exposed to violence, if the mother was insightful, their levels of behavior problems are no different than children who are not exposed.

45:31
So it's as if the insightfulness of the mother, her capacity to kind of comfort the child, understand the child, understand the child's reactions to the scary violence to which the child was exposed, helps the child deal with those things and not develop behaviour problems.

45:50
But if you go to the right side of the graph, you see that if the mothers were not insightful, the children who were exposed to violence show much more behaviour problems, internalizing behaviour problems, than than than children who were not exposed.

46:08
So, so it's a, it's a really beautiful result because it speaks so much to the importance of helping parents be more insightful to their children, particularly children who are exposed to violence or trauma or other scary things that dysregulate and they need help to regulate their emotions, their fears, their behaviours.

46:35
And insightfulness is what helps parents do that.

46:40
We see very similar results in the observational measures of negative affect.

46:44
I won't go into the details, but essentially it's the same finding that it's the exposed children with non insightful mothers who show the high levels of negative affect.

46:59
But when the children are exposed but have insightful parents, they don't mothers, they don't show elevated levels of negative affect.

47:08
So maternal insightfulness can buffer children against the negative effects of stress.

47:12
That's our message #4 there are, there's a little bit more that I'd like to to tell you before I leave some time for questions.

47:26
So now we're moving to to autism, but to intervention with autism.

47:34
And Mike Seller, Ted Huffman and Marion Sigmund did an intervention designed to increase the responsive parental behaviours of parents to to help mothers of autistic children be more responsive, be more sensitive, be more synchronous with their with their children.

48:00
Because that is something that really helps autistic children improve in their communication, in their social engagement, which is a challenge for many of these children.

48:13
So they had this beautiful intervention trying to help the mothers.

48:17
And what they discovered is that they really were helpful, but only for the mothers who were insightful prior to treatment.

48:26
So on the left hand side, you can see the insightful, the the group, the group of insightful mothers and you can see the experimental group in black.

48:37
They really increased in synchronization.

48:40
There's synchronization between pretreatment to post treatment really improved thanks to the intervention.

48:50
And if they didn't give the the if they didn't get the intervention then their then their synchronization did not improve.

49:01
When you look into the non insightful group there is no difference.

49:04
The the intervention was not affected.

49:07
So I think this also for us as clinician raises a very important question, who of the parents that we're working with comes to us already prepared with a good capacity for insightfulness and who are struggling with insightfulness.

49:27
And at least this autism finding here suggests that when the parent is coming, so to speak, equipped with the software, if you will, this kind of way of thinking it, it may be much more easy for us to promote their sensitive behaviour or their synchronous behaviour, whatever it is we're trying to help them do.

49:49
Because they, they have a basic capacity to see the world from the child's point of view.

49:53
They may need our help with certain behaviours or with certain unique features of their child, but they have this basic capacity and and it's easier for us to help them grow when the parent is is lacking or lower in this capacity, a lot of our intervention may not yield the outcome we are seeking and we may need to think differently.

50:21
How do we first help these parents think more in a more insightful way about their children before we actually try to intervene in their parenting behaviour?

50:33
Because it's, so to speak, that software that I mentioned that is needed to actually incorporate our suggestions or other behaviors that we are thinking can, can be helpful.

50:46
So this is a very intriguing finding and it it makes you think about the parents you're working with who are more insightful, who are less insightful and how we may need to approach the two types a little differently.

51:05
So yeah, the take home message here was the family play intervention was effective and increasing mother synchrony only for the mothers who are insightful prior to treatment.

51:14
So I'm wrapping up now there. This this work has lots of clinical implications.

51:25
First, for assessment, I think that you can you, you don't necessarily need to run an insightfulness assessment the way we do it for research purposes that's probably not practical and not feasible.

51:39
But the questions we ask and this procedure of videotaping and then asking the parent questions about the videotape, and particularly these questions, questions that are not us suggesting to the parent what the child might be thinking or feeling, but us asking the parent, encouraging the parent to think about what the child might be thinking or feeling.

52:03
I think that in and of itself can be very useful for the parent to approach the child in a different way, for us to understand the parent more and understand their areas of strength and the areas of difficulties.

52:21
And the, the this can be very, the insightfulness assessment can, can really help.

52:28
And you know, following the, the assessment, we can actually target insightfulness.

52:35
And in fact, there are quite a few interventions, some of which you may be familiar with actually, that target insightfulness, parental insightfulness, but but don't necessarily use this term.

52:51
I'm thinking about CPP, child parent psychotherapy.

52:55
Certainly the model talks a lot about the capacity to empathize with the child, to understand the child, particularly around trauma and the child's reaction to trauma.

53:08
There are other things too, of course, in CPP, but this is a major component.

53:13
Watch, wait and wonder if you're familiar with that circle of security minding the baby.

53:18
And here and here, colleagues developed a group therapy, drama therapy kind of approach where they did little drama therapy exercises where the the parent literally was supposed to act at the role of the child.

53:35
So there's nothing more than putting you in the shoes of the child where you actually have to beat the child.

53:42
That's what they do in drama therapy. And my colleagues, one of them it is a drama therapist and they developed this group intervention with to promote the insightfulness.

53:56
So I will thank you for your attention. I'm stopping the sharing now. Maybe I will turn on my camera again. Maybe it it will work and I found Lindsey. If you have questions, if people have questions on chat or I will be happy to address them in the kind of 5 minutes we have left.