Savoring Interventions for Mothers of Young Children: Mechanisms Linking Relational Savoring and Personal Savoring to Reflective Functioning

• In Event: Making room for mentalization in everyday parenting: from research to practice

Abstract

Parental mentalizing, the capacity to view parents’ and children’s behaviors in terms of underlying mental states, has emerged as a promising target of parenting interventions given its known role in the prediction of sensitive caregiving (Slade, 2005; Suchman et al., 2008). As mentalizing is a parenting skill that transcends children’s developmental stages, it has vast utility in parenting intervention and prevention programs. However, the majority of parenting interventions that enhance mentalizing are time-intensive, involve highly trained professionals as interveners, and primarily focus on challenging parent-child interactions, which can serve as deterrents for parents or under-resourced community agencies interested in engaging in mentalizing-based interventions. Therefore, programs that enhance parental mentalizing while having strong potential for widespread dissemination in under-resourced communities are needed.
Relational savoring is a brief attachment-based intervention with high potential for dissemination as it can be administered with high fidelity by paraprofessionals, can be administered in short intervals, and is appealing to parents who are struggling due to its singular focus on positive parent-child interactions. Relational savoring involves focusing deeply on moments of positive connectedness with others, either times when one has provided or received sensitive care to/from another person (Borelli, Smiley et al., 2020), in the service of magnifying the impact of these moments. When utilized with parents, interveners help parents identify memories of times when they provided sensitive care for their child and assist them in reflecting on the sensory details, emotions, cognitions, and meaning associated with the event for them, their child, and their relationship.
The results of the most rigorous RCT of relational savoring (RS) revealed that as compared to personal savoring (PS), in which mothers savor a positive individual experience, RS increased parenting sensitivity and reflective functioning (RF) for Latina mothers, measured at a three-month follow-up (Borelli, Kerr et al., 2022). As yet, it is unknown through what mechanisms RS impacts RF, an essential next step in our understanding. Using data from the same RCT, we examine the content of savoring sessions (specificity, positivity, connectedness, safe haven/secure base, self-focus, child-focus) as candidate mechanisms of change. Mothers (N = 147, Mage = 30.84 years, SDage = 5.13; 41.5% Latina) of toddlers (Mage = 20.96 months, SDage = 2.50; 53.5% female) were randomized to 4 sessions of RS or PS. Both RS and PS predicted higher RF, but through different means (See Figure 1.). RS was indirectly associated with higher RF through greater connectedness and specificity of savoring content, while PS was indirectly associated with higher RF through greater self-focus in savoring content. Suppression effects were observed, such that direct effects of RS emerged in models with indirect effects of PS, and vice versa.
These findings suggest that both RS and PS predict higher RF at follow-up but through different mechanisms. Our discussion will focus on the implications of these findings for the development and dissemination of mentalizing-based parenting intervention and prevention programs.

Authors

• Jessica L Borelli, University of California - Irvine
  Presenting Author

• Kelly Kazmierski

• Gerin Gaskin, Claremont Graduate University

• Margaret L. Kerr, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Patricia A Smiley, Pomona College

• Hannah Faith Rasmussen, University of Southern California