Study of the Parent's Subjective Experience of Parent-child Psychotherapy.

Overview

The child psychiatric care of children under age of 5 years involves taking care of the child, the parent and their interaction. The investigators know that the parent-child relationship plays a key role in attachment and the mental and cerebral development of the child and many studies have shown that the interaction based psychotherapy allows an improvement in the symptoms of the child. The aim of this qualitative and exploratory study is to evaluate the parent's subjective experience of the parent-child psychotherapeutic treatment, i.e., evaluate their experience of the psychotherapy, their relationship with the therapist and a possible change occurring during the psychotherapy. The analysis will be based on semi-structured interviews that will be carried out with the parents.

Parent-child psychotherapy is the first-line treatment in the context of a dysfunctional parent-child interaction and takes into account both the parent's skills/fragilities, the child's modes of expression of suffering, and their relational modalities. The care of the parent-child interaction has been the subject of many studies, but has rarely been evaluated from the point of view of the parent, even if the latter is one of the main actors in this interaction. In France, about 50% of the parent-child psychotherapeutic treatments lead to clinical improvement. They are mainly based on the use of integrative psychodynamic psychotherapies (PPI). PPIs, based on speech, allow the therapist to identify conflicts or anxieties related to the past or present history of the parents and to relate the current troubles of the child to these conflicts of the past. This requires sufficiently significant capacities of narration and mentalization (which consists in the capacity to intellectualize one's own psychic conflicts). The literature shows that for 50% of the population, this treatment does not seem to allow engagement in care. It is important to also explore the relationship between therapist and subject, central element in psychotherapies, and the notion of therapeutic alliance from the subject's point of view. This study aims to evaluate the subjective experience of the parents, following parent-child psychotherapy. The investigaotors consider that the parents are experts in their experience and that the interviews can help them better understand the therapeutic process of the parent-child psychotherapies.