A Joint Journey to Strengthen Parenting:
Dealing With Parents` Resistance through Therapeutic Processes Guided by Winnicott`s Approach

Residential care is a community framework to help children who have experienced neglect and abuse within the family. Its goal is to create a safe and nurturing space for the children, while implementing a treatment process with the parents.

Winnicott explains the therapeutic staff`s conduct with the parents, including the following maternal emotional functions:

Handling, refers to the physical care of the baby. Its therapeutic counterpart relates to the setting. When the child is at daily care, the child receives meals, homework time, lunch, classes and treatment. Parents receive training, parent days and trips.

Holding, relates to the mental and physical strength of the patient/child, which leads to security and emotional development. For example, when a counselor calls the mother on parent day and encourages her to arrive on time, she speaks and holds the child`s pain in her soul and passes it on to the mother.

Winnicott sees regression as integral to correction and development. When the parents are in a regressive, childlike place, they tend to treat the staff as parental figures. Gentle regression enables parents to express different sides of themselves within a therapeutic framework that is safe and promotes development.

Object presenting enables a parent to present the world to their child in micro-portion. We offer parents interpretations and thoughts that are neither threatening nor complicated. For example: if a mother fantasizes that her daughter is in residential care simply to improve her grades, we gradually introduce her real predicament.