Voices of the Community

Diane Reynolds is the Founder of the Mindful Parenting Program on the Westside of Los Angeles.

"I know that having two children myself, they each have a different mommy."

Tell me again how you started the Mindful Parenting Program, what was your first inspiration?

When I was growing up clinically in my training I was taught first and foremost to treat the infant in the adult – to look for the history in every one of us. So it seemed natural to take my attention and put it on the early relational history that’s being created and co-created. I found that in giving a lot of attention to the early part of life as preventive intervention it helps ease a lot of difficulties later on. And while I do treat adults, I found I was much more focused on the very real infant in the room with the parent. Naturally, I wanted to take that into a group setting so I could serve more people at one time. Part of the driving force behind Mindful Parenting Groups was participating myself with my daughter in a RIE [Resources for Infant Educarers] class with Harriet Grebler from 3 months to over age 2. It was an incredibly interesting experience because it was an observation-based approach. I loved some parts and was frustrated by others, and I found myself wanting to couple the RIE experience with a deeper, richer exploration of the parent’s and child’s internal worlds. With great respect to RIE, it fell short for me when it came to what felt like an over-emphasis on “this is the way to do things" in the sense that people making use of it can get dogmatic. And I say that with great respect -- but I believe there’s no one right way to get there. I have a little danger signal that goes off internally for me when I hear that kind of advice from people. Instead I like to say: Let’s think about these things together and here are some ideas that might be worth considering. You’re the best author of the book on raising your child. No one book you could pull off a shelf could tell you everything about your child. You’re co-creating that book with your child. I know that having two children myself, they each have a different mommy. If I applied the same standards of care to both children, it would make us all frustrated. We aren’t going to tell parents what to do, but to learn to reflect on the experience they’re having with their children.

What research is the basis for Mindful Parenting Groups?

The group grew over time and I found research measured through Arietta Slade’s work called the Parent Development Interview. It’s modeled after the Adult Attachment Interview which focuses on an adult’s early attachment relationships. The Attachment Interview’s questions are designed to surprise the unconscious, and trigger very authentic feelings abut early relational history. [Slade’s] Parent Development Interview is a little shorter, but it also surprises the unconscious and helps pull for what one knows about one’s relationship with one’s child. There are questions such as, "Describe a time in the last week that you’ve felt angry as a parent?" "What did that feel like?" "What do you think that felt like for the child?" It’s provocative, it shows a parent’s limitations, and shows how many things are interwoven. [The questionnaire] was introduced to me by John Grienenberger, who developed Reflective Parenting Program, and it felt like a good marriage between what I was after and what this measure pulls for. We can apply this measure pre and post group too, and see if there’s a change in the parent’s reflective functioning after 12 weeks. Lo and behold, that’s what we found: There’s a statistical increase in a parent’s reflective functioning.

So how do you achieve this in the groups? What are you doing that’s able to have such an impact on the way parents think?

We ask parents what’s going on in their lives. Parents then have opportunity to think beyond their child’s behaviors and mental states. [Group] Facilitators also ask questions that stimulate wonder: “I wonder how Billy felt when Julie took that ball from him.” It’s all in the spirit of coming together to reflect on ourselves and our children in service of promoting healthy attachment because that’s what the research shows. There is a direct relationship between a parent’s reflective functioning and his or her attachment with the child. It evolves and shifts and moves and changes, but in large part a parent’s capacity to reflect on what’s going on inside their mind affects their relationship with their child.

How did your own experience as a mother of small children inform the Mindful Parenting philosophy?

My older child, my son, was so adaptive that I over-credited my influence as a parent. I thought, with my next child I’m going to allow him/her to experience more of their resilience. But then came my daughter, a child who had difficulty existing in her own skin. Every sound was piercing, everything hurt. That cut through any fantasy I had of letting my child experience her own resilience. I couldn’t bathe her for five months, we had to take a shower together so we could stay connected. She was neurologically atypical. She was a kid who needed a lot more thinking than a more adaptive kid.

There’s that saying, “The blessing is in the wound.” The idea is where there is pain, something good will come of it. Such a tremendous amount of growth and development came from having a child who demanded creativity and flexibility. I created these groups from being her mom. There’s a heart-breaking aspect of seeing a child who’s suffering and figuring out how to relieve that pain; it demands a lot.

I see. That sounds hard. So that's why you got the groups started? 

I was a counselor at the Maple Center in Beverly Hills and they had programs that served ages five to seniors. So we were thinking about early life but not serving early life. I’d been teaching classes there for a long time. Then I said, How about we do these groups and while we’re at it, we could have a program where we teach interns how to lead a course in serving young children. It became quite a substantial program, but I’m not affiliated with Maple Center any longer. Now, my colleague Wendy Denham and I receive private funding and some funds through the Los Angeles County Department of Health to teach the staff at an agency in Torrance. It’s called Ties for Families and what we’re doing is training staff to lead Mindful Parenting groups with prospective adoptive families and their foster-to-adoption children.

We are helping to facilitate the security of attachment in a high-risk population. Children often have developmental delays, there’s a lot to reflect on. Can you imagine taking your 7-month old baby and handing them over to a stranger for even two hours? I don’t mean to sound so negative, I don’t know what other choice there is — better than a child being cycled through six different foster placements. Maybe over time we’ll be able to facilitate biological parents reuniting with their children. It would be interesting to see if the growth in a parent’s reflective capacity might positively impact any behaviors that are counter to being a supportive parent. As the parent had to think about what his or her baby’s experience was, would that have any impact on whether or not they engaged in drinking or doing drugs? Drinking and drugs can cause a parent to push all kinds of things out of their mind. If they could increase their reflective capacity -- where does this go? Where does it lead? I’m full of research questions.

I’d really like there to be more availability in at-risk populations. Teen parents — it would be great to reach that population. We worked with teen mothers for a while in the Culver City school district, and it was challenging. We would do an observation period and ask questions of the parents and there would be dead silence. So we started to have the facilitator sit with the couples and make little reflective comments, such as, “Look how she’s turning towards you.” Then, when we asked, the pump was primed. They were already in a place where they could think about what was happening for them.

What is your dream for The Mindful Parenting Program?

My dream is to see these groups in use with at-risk populations. I don’t know if there is a situation where this could be utilized, but there are some prison populations where inmates can keep children with them in prison for a period of months, less than a year. What would it be like to do a mindful parenting group in that setting? Wendy and I would also like to have our own secure "financial" base where groups can be led for training purposes and we could provide to the community at low or no fee. Right now the Center for Mindful Parenting is a virtual center, it’s wherever we are.

I’m also committed to establishing an evidence base to support the reliability and validity of this intervention. We’ve done research and are accumulating data. Every group that we do in support of having the research to back us up on effectiveness of our program is great. It’s one thing to train, but we want fidelity of the model.

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