Speaker
Presentation in English
James McHale
University of South Florida. United States
Dr. McHale is a professor of psychology, director of the USF Center for Family Studies at the St. Petersburg campus, and executive director of the Center for Children and Families at the same center. Previously, he was the founding chair of the USF Department of Psychology in St. Petersburg, a position he held for seven years. James has published over 100 articles and manuscripts on co-parenting in diverse family systems, the central focus of the Family Studies Center’s work.
His research has been supported since 1996 by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and numerous other entities. He is the principal investigator for the NIH R01 National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a randomized controlled trial of a prenatal co-parenting intervention for fragile African American families; the HMRE award from the Administration for Children and Families; skills-based marriage and healthy relationship education services for at-risk families through a child welfare diversion program; and other state, local, and foundation grants.
Review of the Conceptualization and Approach to Child-Family Mental Health: Updates from an International Co-parenting Collaborative
This focus group presents the first three years of work by the International Co-parenting Collaborative (ICC) to address a persistent gap in the field of child mental health. Since the mid-1990s, hundreds of empirical investigations examining co-parenting as a distinctive socialization force within family systems have firmly established that the quality of co-parenting in diverse family constellations significantly influences child development. While this work is highly relevant to how child mental health professionals address infancy and early childhood challenges, in practice, most clinical approaches routinely prioritize child-caregiver dyadic subsystems.
This breakout session coherently analyzes various facets of the ICC’s work, from conceptual foundations and implementation experiences to emerging data and future directions. Its panelists will address (a) the background and need for family-based systems approaches to child mental health and the establishment of a common method for promoting family mindfulness around coparenting; (b) the process of implementing a common set of procedures and assessments to complement existing clinical services across multiple disciplines in six countries (Canada, Israel, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States); (c) examples of data obtained through the common methodology and its systematic use to guide the preparation of professionals to improve families’ understanding of and motivation to address coparenting; and (d) implementation experiences in a medical setting (an institute of child neurology and psychiatry) serving families of young children and adolescents.
Next steps for systematically testing the methodology in existing and new centers and for training future collaborators to improve their skills in learning the model will also be presented.
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