2024 Reiss-Greenberg Chair with Hopi Hall

Arietta Slade, PhD: There are many elements of parent work and there are many parts of it that we all we have to be relatively facile in. But what I'm gonna really emphasize when I meet with you is the importance of helping parents develop these capacities to be curious, to be interested in their child, and to begin to try to understand them.

Hopi Hall, PsyD: It is an honor and a privilege to present a case to Dr. Arietta Slade, who I hope to gain insight in how to work with parents and a child when their situation is complicated. I'm looking forward to learning more about mentalization and how to untangle my thoughts about a family system, including how some of the issues are co-created between generations. [Arietta Slade] When the child is in an individual therapy, working with the parents to really begin taking a mentalizing stance in relation to the child is, I think, absolutely critical. There are many ways that we talk about parent work you know giving advice developmental guidance behavioral strategies et cetera. I'm gonna make the case that really unless a parent is engaged in trying to understand their child, that behavioral strategies are just behavioral strategies. Their effectiveness is made much stronger by the parents' engagement in really trying to make sense of the child. One of the things that I'm going to be talking about at this conference is parental mentalizing, and parental mentalizing refers to the parents' capacity to imagine and be curious about what's going on inside the child's mind. Why are they doing what they're doing? What are they thinking? What are they feeling? Your child is trying to tell you something. And a reflective stance of mentalizing, parents says - what is that something?