Research and theory
Ben Grey and colleagues make a powerful case for recognising that relationships between parents and their children are best understood as a dynamic interplay of past histories, present socio-economic circumstances, and future hopes.David Howe, Emeritus Professor of Social Work, University of East Anglia. Endorsement of The Meaning of the Child Interview: Making Sense of Parent-Child Relationships
The Meaning of the Child evaluates relationships rather than parents. It asks two interrelated questions of a relationship at once.
To what degree is the relationship collaborative and mutual, rewarding to both child and parent?
To what degree does the parent feel threatened or challenged in the relationship, seeking either to change the child through intense feelings of anger or need, or to withdraw emotionally, and perhaps physically, in order to keep going?
From the parent's point of view, these responses can be read as compromises made to an environment, in the light of the parent's own experience, rather than as deficits. Equally importantly, these are not just behavioural patterns but patterns of defensive exclusion and selective attention - as parents we focus on what has kept us safe and exclude what might destabilise our efforts to protect ourselves. This has implications for those around us, including our children, who have to live within the stories we tell about them, and the sense we make of their experience and our own. It can make adaptation to new contexts difficult as we frequently avoid the very information we need to change things for ourselves and our child(ren).
Making sure the child is closely aligned with the parent, who can then protect them.
The child may experience this as controlling.
Danger and adversity are managed with the child. Maintaining the relationship and repairing ruptures is ultimately key to the management of danger and threat.
Difficult to achieve where danger is pervasive enough that swift action is often needed, or deceptive enough that the parent rarely has the information to assess it accurately.
Implicitly recognising that parents cannot always be around for their children, so children need to take some of the responsibility for their own nurture and protection.
The child may experience this as unresponsiveness.
The aim of intervention is not to make all parents conform to an expert blueprint, sensitive or otherwise, but to facilitate adaptation (Crittenden et al. 2021).
A level of synchrony is given alongside the pattern. It is not a classification of the parent but an indication of the needs of the relationship.
Classifications are not the goal of assessment. They are shorthand for understanding self- and child-protective processes, and for directing exploration of what might be challenging for a parent, how they are trying to handle it, and what this means for the parent-child relationship. These categories are adapted from Crittenden's CARE-Index, and rest on research going back to Mary Ainsworth's sensitivity scales (Ainsworth et al. 1979/2015). They are not proxy diagnoses, but they allow the procedure to be validated empirically and keep coding consistent between accredited coders.
The MotC places the caregiving relationship in a systemic context, with difficulties residing in the network of relationships around a child, and explicit attention to the ways danger and threat in partner, family and wider social relationships shape parent-child relationships (Dallos, Grey and Stancer 2026).
So-called insensitive patterns need to be seen in the context in which they operate, where they can be understood as strategies for managing adverse circumstances. What is most useful is not the label but what emerges around the specific challenges a relationship faces and the parent's efforts to meet them, with a focus on making sense of problems rather than scoring them. This allows services to be tailored to the ability of parents to make use of them, rather than parents or children being blamed for services that do not fit their needs.
Attachment and caregiving strategies do not simply sit inside a person. They emerge in an interpersonal context, so the strategy a parent uses may vary with the situation and with the relationship they are in (Baim et al. 2022).
The parent's network of relationships can be thought of as a series of embedded circles radiating out from the parent-child relationship, each one informing every other (Farnfield 2008). Each layer poses a question the parent is answering, consciously or not, through the way they care for their child.
In one relationship, managing tension in the partner relationship may be so critical to the safety of mother and child that it is what primarily shapes the caregiving pattern. In another, the social or material situation, whether war, racism, dangerous housing or abuse, may be what the caregiving is chiefly organised around. The MotC is read with this context in view rather than apart from it.
His work instead focuses on understanding relationships in their social environment. This enables creative, solution-oriented thinking about caregiving and relationships in child welfare practice.Robbie Duschinsky, Professor of Social Science and Health, University of Cambridge. Endorsement of The Meaning of the Child Interview: Making Sense of Parent-Child Relationships
The MotC draws on almost thirty years of research into the ways adults speak about their relationships, and what this reveals about how those relationships function.
Particular use is made of Crittenden's work on the Adult Attachment Interview (Crittenden and Landini 2011), itself a development of Bowlby's understanding of defensive processes: the way the brain processes information about relationships and threat in order to stay safe (Grey and Farnfield 2017a, 2017b), and how meaning derived from past experience shapes relationships. Also central is the body of research into reflective functioning (Fonagy 2006; Fonagy et al. 2004), the human ability to understand behaviour in relationships in terms of underlying mental states, and its application to parenting (Slade 2005), together with Solomon and George's work on representations of caregiving (George and Solomon 2008).
Its particular contribution lies in looking closely at the regulation of affect around the child, examining specific parent-child relationships rather than a general capacity of the parent, and attending to parental mentalising affectively as well as cognitively. It brings to light both the conscious intentions of the parent and the implicit scripts relating to past trauma or danger that may be undermining the relationship (Dallos 2019).
The MotC has been used in therapeutic work and to support child welfare decision making since 2010, and has been researched in its own right. It is one of only a few comparable tools validated with fathers as well as mothers.
Further work has examined parents of autistic children (Grey, Dallos and Stancer 2021; Dallos, Grey and Stancer 2023, 2026), helped evaluate the SAFE systemic intervention (McKenzie et al. 2020), and looked at the relationships of professionals with their clients (Ash and Grey 2022), a programme supporting adoptive parents facing challenging behaviour (Barrow, Grey and Essau 2023), sibling relationships and maternal caregiving (Drzymala, Grey and Fowler 2023), and fathers' caregiving during the COVID-19 pandemic (Voellmy et al. 2025). More projects are ongoing.
