Kathleen Restifo

Mindful Parenting in Mental Health Care.

Mindfulness June 1, 2010 Susan M Bögels, Annukka Lehtonen, Kathleen Restifo

Mindful parenting, an application of mindfulness meditation, is increasingly used to prevent and treat mental disorders in children and to disrupt the intergenerational transmission of mental health problems from parents to children. The authors propose six mechanisms through which mindful parenting may improve parent-child interactions: reducing parental stress and reactivity, reducing parental preoccupation due to psychopathology, improving executive functioning in impulsive parents, breaking cycles of dysfunctional parenting schemas, increasing self-nourishing attention, and improving marital functioning and co-parenting. They review existing research on these mechanisms and outline directions for future studies to address unanswered questions.