Tina Adkins

University of Texas at Austin | UT · School of Social Work

It is well established that looked after children are more likely to develop complex behavioural and emotional difficulties that can leave many carers struggling to help and understand the child. This can lead to the breakdown of placements whereby the lack of placement stability leaves the child even more vulnerable. The Family Minds (FM) psycho-e...

Parental reflective functioning is the ability of a parent to be aware of their own emotions/behavior while being open to understanding their children’s mental states. It is a critical feature of sensitive caregiving and important for understanding the emotions that influence behavior. Parents with high reflective functioning (RF) are better at man...

In a recent contribution to this journal, Cummings (2023) reports findings from a preliminary qualitative study of practitioner viewpoints regarding digitally delivered mental health support to care-experienced young people. Cummings’ study highlights the need to engage with professional experiences of using digital methods with this group, both du...

Professional self-disclosure can be defined as the professional helper revealing by verbal means something personal about themselves to the person or persons they are seeking to help. This article provides reflections on child and adolescent mental health service (CAMHS) clinicians’ navigation of professional self-disclosure during the COVID-19 pan...

Children who are adopted are at greater risk of experiencing mental health difficulties than their non-adopted peers, and this has influenced decisions to develop dedicated care pathways, teams and clinical posts in child and adolescent mental health services. This article reports practice-based reflection and service evaluation findings on this ar...

Mentalization is a cognitive skill that involves the ability to tease out the mental states in self and other, and has the potential to help mitigate the risks associated with having parental ACEs. Foster parents who have low mentalizing skills are more likely to be triggered negatively by their foster children and thus parent in an insensitive man...

Family Minds is a brief group psychoeducational parenting intervention designed to increase the reflective functioning (RF) and mentalization skills of foster parents. RF is important for foster parents who have to build relationships with children whose adverse experiences increase their risk for psychosocial challenges. A randomized controlled tr...

Family Minds is a group psychoeducational parenting intervention designed to increase reflective functioning (RF). RF involves parents’ capacity to understand their child’s mind and behavior. RF is important for foster parents who have to build relationships with children whose adverse experiences increase risk for psychosocial challenges. An RCT...

Highlights •First peer-reviewed study on foster parents’ ACEs and their relation to foster children’s social-emotional challenges. •Eighty-nine foster parents completed the ACE Questionnaire and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. •Twenty percent of foster parents reported 4+ ACEs, compared to 12.5 % in the original CDC-Kaiser study. •Fos...

The results of this RCT demonstrate that Family Minds, a short-term group intervention, can improve foster parents’ mentalizing abilities. Furthermore, foster parents report that 6 months after the intervention, their foster/adoptive children’s internalizing difficulties had significantly decreased, suggesting that that improving a parent’s mentali...

Data on the ACEs of a sample of Texas foster parents, including comparison to the CDC-Kaiser study. Additional data includes linear regression results that show higher ACE Totals predicts an increase in emotional problems of their children as reported on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Each ACE is further examined to see which ones ar...

This short presentation covers the basics of a short group mentalizing intervention for parents called Family Minds, and presents the results from a randomized controlled trial of this intervention. Results indicate that a short psycho-educational intervention can increase the mentalizing and reflective functioning of parents, as well as perhaps lo...

Mentalization-based interventions show promise in improving mental health outcomes for children and parents through increasing a family's reflective functioning, or ability to mentalize. Mentalizing involves the ability to understand behavior in relation to mental states, such as thoughts and feelings, and typically develops within the context of s...