Welcome to the Reflecting Parenting Program, an attachment based reflective approach to parenting, now part of the Center for Reflective Parenting . The Reflective Parenting Program was developed in order to provide services that help parents and caregivers to strengthen and build attachment relationships with their children. Our approach is based on the application of ground-breaking findings that have developed in recent years in the areas of child development research and the study of the neurobiology of the developing mind. What has emerged from this research is a consensus among researchers, educators, and clinicians, that the human attachment relationship between a child and her caregivers is the single most critical factor influencing child development. Those early relationships influence all subsequent relationships for the child, as well as her cognitive development and capacity to learn and to thrive.

Our model is also influenced by recent attachment studies and early intervention programs that have shown that the single best way to positively impact the attachment relationship is to increase a parent's capacity to reflect on her relationship with her child, and to reflect on the thoughts and feelings that lie behind her child's behavior. We call this approach reflective parenting.

The Reflective Parenting Program provides an opportunity for parents to engage in an experiential learning process specifically aimed to enhance reflection and improve the attachment between parent and child. We do this by helping parents to understand and respond to their children's motivations rather than reflexively reacting to their children's behavior. For professionals, we offer various training opportunities that focus on enhancing reflection in parents in order to improve developmental outcomes and create resiliency in children from a wide range of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.