Review of the Conceptualization and Approach to Child-Family Mental Health: Updates from an International Co-parenting Collaborative

This focus group presents the first three years of work by the International Co-parenting Collaborative (ICC) to address a persistent gap in the field of child mental health. Since the mid-1990s, hundreds of empirical investigations examining co-parenting as a distinctive socialization force within family systems have firmly established that the quality of co-parenting in diverse family constellations significantly influences child development. While this work is highly relevant to how child mental health professionals address infancy and early childhood challenges, in practice, most clinical approaches routinely prioritize child-caregiver dyadic subsystems. This breakout session coherently analyzes various facets of the ICC’s work, from conceptual foundations and implementation experiences to emerging data and future directions. Its panelists will address (a) the background and need for family-based systems approaches to child mental health and the establishment of a common method for promoting family mindfulness around coparenting; (b) the process of implementing a common set of procedures and assessments to complement existing clinical services across multiple disciplines in six countries (Canada, Israel, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States); (c) examples of data obtained through the common methodology and its systematic use to guide the preparation of professionals to improve families’ understanding of and motivation to address coparenting; and (d) implementation experiences in a medical setting (an institute of child neurology and psychiatry) serving families of young children and adolescents. Next steps for systematically testing the methodology in existing and new centers and for training future collaborators to improve their skills in learning the model will also be presented.