Healing and growing together: restoring the parent-child relationship with IAFT

How can we transform children’s difficult behaviour without punishing, shouting or controlling them? In Healing and Growing Together, Dafna Lender proposes an innovative response, rooted in neuroscience and co-regulation. This deeply human book is a guide to reconnecting with children at their most sensitive, most wounded, but also most alive.

A different way of being with children

For a long time, we believed that the role of a parent or educator was to correct. To correct behaviour, to reprimand, to reward, to teach. But what happens when these methods fail? When shouting no longer works? When the child withdraws, explodes or collapses?

Dafna Lender invites us to take a fresh look: what if difficult behaviour was an expression of pain? What if behind every crisis there was a desperate attempt by the child to stay connected?

Rather than trying to control children, Healing and Growing Together invites us to connect with them. For it is this connection, genuine and warm, that makes transformation possible.

The link at the heart of the IAFT approach

The book is based on the IAFT(Integrative Attachment Family Therapy) approach, developed by Dafna Lender on the basis of the work of Daniel Hughes, Allan Schore and Stephen Porges.

IAFT is an integrative family therapy based on attachment, combining neuroscience, polyvagal theory and attachment theory to better understand and support injured children and the adults who care for them.

What sets this approach apart is its deeply relational focus. The aim is not to ‘treat’ the child or correct a symptom, but to re-establish a secure relationship between the adult and the child.

To achieve this, IAFT is based on three main principles:

• The adult is the regulated person in the system: he or she shows the way to co-regulation.
• It is the relationship that heals, not the explanation.
• The body is the site of transformation.

These principles permeate the entire book, through role-playing situations, dialogue scripts and practical suggestions for everyday use.

A practical guide

The great advantage of this book is its practical structure. The chapters deal with common problems: tantrums, isolation, aggression, anxiety, opposition, withdrawal, etc. and offer a neurophysiological perspective, a change of outlook, and tools.

You will discover how to :

• Decipher what is really behind problematic behaviour,
• Restore safe relationships without punishing,
• Get out of the power struggle to re-establish the bond,
• Regulate yourself to better regulate your child,
• Using play, voice and posture to co-regulate effectively.

For example, when faced with a child who is shouting or hitting, rather than scolding, the author suggests going up to the child, crouching down at his or her level and saying in a gentle but firm voice: “Your body is telling me that something is too difficult for you and I’m here to help”.

This type of posture is counter-intuitive for many adults, but genuinely restorative. It allows the child to feel that he or she is not alone with this overload.

Healing together

This book is not just an educational guide, it’s also a healing book that speaks to parents and children alike. Because by learning how to better welcome children, we can often repair old wounds from our own childhood.

Dafna Lender invites us to be attentive to our reactions as adults, to recognise our automatisms of flight, fight or powerlessness. She reminds us that we too have vulnerable parts, and that these parts are often awakened by contact with children’s most disconcerting behaviour.

In this way, Healing and Growing Together is also a book about ourselves. It helps us to understand why certain attitudes of a child affect us so deeply and how to transform these triggers into opportunities for personal development.

Bessel van der Kolk, author of the bestseller Le Corps n’oublie rien, wrote the preface to the book. He writes: “By offering experiences that defuse the trauma reactions of helplessness, rage and collapse, we can transform adults and children alike.

A quotation that takes on its full meaning when we welcome Bessel van der Kolk to Paris on 16 and 17 September for an exceptional event co-hosted with Licia Sky. This unique event will bring together two of the greatest voices in trauma to share the same message: to heal, you first need to feel safe.