Aurélie Harf

[The parents' experience of school refusal in adolescence].

While todays society places considerable importance on schooling and performances, school absenteeism is currently very high. One of the causes is anxiety-based school refusal. This phenomenon affects the adolescent but also has an impact on their family. Exploring the experience of the parents of teenagers presenting anxiety-based school refusal enables these families to be given better support.

Cultural Identity and Internationally Adopted Children: Qualitative Approach to Parental Representations

Approximately 30 000 children are adopted across national borders each year. A review of the literature on the cultural belonging of these internationally adopted children shows substantial differences between the literature from English-speaking countries and that from France and Europe in general. The objective of this study is to start from the discourse of French adoptive parents to explore their representations of their childs cultural belonging and their positions (their thoughts and representations) concerning connections with the childs country of birth and its culture. The study includes 51 French parents who adopted one or more children internationally. Each parent participated in a semi-structured interview, focused on the adoption procedure and their current associations with the childs birth country. The interviews were analyzed according to a qualitative phenomenological method, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The principal themes that emerged from our analysis of the interviews made it possible to classify the parents into three different groups. The first group maintained no association with the childs country of birth and refused any multiplicity of cultural identities. The second group actively maintained regular associations with the childs country of birth and culture and affirmed that their family was multicultural. Finally, the third group adapted their associations with the childs birth country and its culture according to the childs questions and interests. Exploring parental representations of the adopted child enables professionals involved in adoption to provide better support to these families and to do preventive work at the level of family interactions.

Parent infant psychotherapy in situations of exile and migration: How to build a therapeutic alliance

will present evidence that emotional reciprocation, largely through parent-child ye contact, underlies neural and psychological development that “cascades” nto higher functions such as human empathy. Conversely, problems with ye contact characterise children with conduct problems and impairments in mpathy, and might drive cascading errors in development that lead to adult psyhopathy. Research will be presented that uses various strategies from computer ace recognition to naturalistic family interactions to show that impairments in ye contact are characteristic of children with at risk for ongoing problems of ntisocial/aggressive behaviour. It is argued that these impairments may in part nderlie the failure to develop into a healthy empathic adult. Implications for nnovative early interventions will be discussed.