Our approach to child and family mental health
Our Approach
We treat your relationship with your child as part of the treatment.
When a child is struggling, what you see at home is usually only part of what is going on. Difficult behaviour is often a sign that a need is going unmet, or that a child is trying to feel safe in the only way they can manage. We start by looking at what sits underneath it. Your relationship with your child is the main thing we build on.
Why understanding has to come first
Most families come to us having already tried the usual advice. Firmer boundaries, reward charts, staying calm through the storm. When those things stop working, parents often start to wonder if they are getting it wrong, or if something is wrong with their child.
Usually neither is true. Advice tends to fail when it is applied to a problem nobody has understood properly yet. So we do the understanding first. We look at your child’s development, their mental health, their learning, and what life has actually been like for them. Once that picture is clear, the right next steps are usually clear too, and they tend to last.
What we believe
Behaviour makes sense.
Children do the best they can with what their brain and body are coping with at the time. When we understand the need driving the behaviour, it stops being something to manage and becomes something we can help with.
Safety and connection come first.
A child has to feel safe before they can learn, settle, or think about their own behaviour. We treat that as the starting point of the work, not something we get to later.
Parents and carers are the key agents of healing.
Your child needs you more than they need a weekly appointment with us. Most of our work goes into building your understanding and confidence, so the change happens at home and keeps going after our involvement ends.
We look at the whole child.
Development, mental health, learning and life experience usually get handled separately, by different services. We bring them into one picture, so you can see how everything connects.
Repair matters more than never getting it wrong.
Every parent has moments they are not proud of. What children remember is what happens next. We help you take the lead in repairing those moments, and we never ask you to use the relationship itself as a punishment.
How we work
Our work is grounded in Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy, developed by the psychologist Dan Hughes for children affected by trauma and attachment difficulties. In practice, it means we work with you and your child together, rather than treating your child on their own.
Underneath it is a way of being with children that we call PACE.
Playfulness
keeps warmth in the relationship, even through hard patches.
Acceptance
means a child’s feelings are met without judgement, so they do not have to hide them.
Curiosity
looks for what is going on underneath, instead of reacting to what is on the surface.
Empathy
helps a child feel less alone with a feeling that is too big to manage on their own.
You are not relying on one person for all of this. You are supported by a team, with senior clinicians and a child psychiatrist involved in the thinking, so no single clinician carries your child’s care alone.
The thinking behind our work
Our practice rests on well-established research into how children develop and how relationships shape the brain.
Dan Hughes gives us the relational model itself. Jon Baylin’s work on the neuroscience of caregiving helps us understand how looking after a distressed child can quietly wear a parent down, and how that capacity can be rebuilt. Daniel Siegel’s work on the developing brain gives us ordinary language for explaining what is happening inside your child. Martin Teicher’s research on how early adversity affects development guides how we support children who have been through trauma, and shows why getting in early makes such a difference.
You do not need to know any of this to work with us. It sits behind the calm, practical guidance you receive.
What this looks like for your family
From the first conversation, our aim is that you feel understood. From there, we work out together what is going on, help your child’s behaviour start to make sense, and support you to strengthen things at home. As your child grows and new stages bring new questions, we stay within reach.
You leave understanding what is going on, and knowing what to do on Monday morning.
Start where you are
If you would like help understanding what is happening for your child, our team can help you make a start. If you are not ready for that yet, you are welcome to begin with our free parent community, or with the Confident Parent Program, which is a calm first step.
Either way, you are not doing this alone.