Mental health articles

Parenting capacity Parenting capacity can be briefly summarised as the capacity to recognise and meet the infant’s changing physical, social and emotional needs in a developmentally appropriate way, and to accept responsibility for this. It is determined by: • parental factors (and the infant–parent relationship) • infant factors (and the infant–parent relationship) • contextual sources of stress and support (and the family-context interaction) (Reder, Duncan & Lucey, 2003b). Recently, there has been consideration of the relative weight or emphasis to be given to each of the above factors in considering risk to infants and children. Donald and Juriedini (2004) argue that parenting-capacity assessment should centre primarily on the parent’s ability or potential to provide empathic, childfocused parenting, in other words, on the ‘adequacy of the emotional relationship between parent and child’, specifically ‘on the parental capacity for empathy’ (p. 7). They describe factors in the child or the relational and social context as ‘modulating effects’ upon the primary domain of parenting capacity. While their approach is recent and untested in practice, it has the advantage of focusing the clinician upon the quality of the relationship and the parent’s potential for an adequate emotional relationship with his or her child.

Tags: infant