"Thinking about ourselves as we are thought by our primary caregivers"-mentalization skills in the context of institutional foster care

rack:Child & Adolescent TraumaBackground:Children in institutional foster care due to parental-substance-use-disorders areat increased risk of developing complex PTSD in early childhood. Mentalization is a profoundskill for preventing psychopathology and stabilizing emotion regulation. Children learn tomentalize by being mentalized. But what if caregivers themselves have poor mentalizing skills?Objective and Method:Children living in foster care due to parental-substance-use-disordersand their caregivers, attending a mentalization-based-group-intervention, participating in thismixed-method-study, conducted at the Faculty of Psychology (University of Vienna, A).Hypothesis include that foster children’s ability to mentalize is lower than of their caregivers.We assume that 1. the caregiver’s social competences have an impact on the children’smental state and 2. this mentalization-based group intervention helps to increase thechildren’s level of RF, the empirical operationalization of mentalization. In a pre-post and 1-year follow-up design we use: Reflective Functioning (RF) Scale for the Adult AttachmentInterview and for the Child Attachment Interview, Inventory-of-social-competences,Coloured-Progressive-Matrices, Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL/6-18R),“Patte-Noire”-Test,EMCDDA-Questionnaire. Biographical Data are collected via semi-structured-interviews.Preliminary results show that the RF-level of some of the participating foster caregivers are low.Thus, we designed and implemented a mentalization-based-training for institutional caregiversto increase their reflective functioning and sensitivity for the interpersonal communicationdealing with children suffering from complex-PTSD. This training is evaluated by a pre-postmeasure of the participants RF (RF-Questionnaire, RFQ-8).Results:Focusing on the caregivers, we will share preliminary results from the studyconcerning the caregivers’level of RF as well as thefirst outcomes of the caregivers’mentalization-based-training.