The Development of Parents of Children with Social, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties Through Circle of Security-Parenting

Abstract

Circle of Security Parenting (COS-P) is an attachment-based psychoeducational intervention designed to enhance parents' ability to understand and respond to their children’s emotional needs and to foster secure parent-child relationships. This study explored the development of parents of children with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties through participation in COS-P. Using a mixed-methods design, the study focused on changes in parents’ internal representations of their children, emotion regulation, parental self-efficacy, and responses to their children’s negative emotions at pre-intervention, post-intervention and 3-months follow-up. The results indicated that following participation in COS-P, on average, parents developed more coherent internal representations of their children and the parent-child relationship. Additionally, meaningful increases in parental-self-efficacy, and reductions in self-reported unsupportive responses to children’s negative emotions were observed. Small improvements in emotion regulation were reported by some participants. However, there was also considerable variability in individual trajectories over time, highlighting the importance of employing both variable-centered and person-centered analyses. This dual approach provided a more nuanced understanding of the diverse ways in which parents responded to the intervention, highlighting how aggregated results may obscure important individual differences. The findings underscored the potential of COS-P as an effective attachment-based intervention capable of facilitating meaningful changes in parenting perceptions of themselves and their children even within a brief intervention period. Furthermore, the study demonstrated the feasibility and utility of the Five-Minute Speech Sample – Coherence (FMSS-C) as a low-burden, cost-effective tool for measuring changes in parents’ internal representations in clinical settings. These results contributed to the growing evidence supporting the use of attachment-focused interventions to enhance parent-child relationships.