Child-Parent Psychotherapy with Infants and Very Young Children

Abstract

Child-parent Psychotherapy (CPP) for traumatized infants and young children is based on the principles that relationships are central to healthy development, and that children organize their responses to threat and danger, and therefore to trauma, around their attachment relationships. These earliest relational experiences also provide templates from which the developing young child predicts how others will behave, shaping the child’s earliest understanding of relationships. Secure relationships lay the foundations for resilience by shaping young children’s capacities in three critical domains: (1) regulating strong emotions, (2) forming sustaining relationships, and (3) developing the ability to process information about the world, using that information to solve problems. This chapter provides an overview of CPP, examples of the process of treatment and a description of progress toward treatment success. A case is presented that documents the progression of a maltreated child in CPP, and describes its value as a mental health treatment.