Description

Growing Together: Supporting Families with Neurodivergent Children

Families with children and adolescents with neurodevelopmental conditions (such as autism, ADHD or high abilities) or experiencing emotional distress face everyday challenges that can impact their emotional well-being. These challenges do not arise solely from the child’s characteristics, but also from external factors such as the lack of adequate support, social isolation, or limited understanding from the surrounding environment.

This course offers professionals in the psychoeducational and child health fields a training space to deepen their understanding of respectful support strategies, from a perspective that integrates mentalization and double empathy.

Learning Objectives

• Understand the everyday challenges faced by families with children and adolescents with neurodevelopmental conditions (such as autism, ADHD, or high abilities).

• Recognize how external factors—such as lack of adequate support, social isolation, or limited understanding from the environment—affect family well-being.

• Develop an empathic approach to supporting families that considers context and emotions rather than placing individual blame.

• Strengthen caregivers’ capacity to recognize, understand, and regulate their own emotional experiences.

• Deepen understanding of the child’s inner world in order to foster secure and supportive relationships.

• Explore the concepts of mentalization and double empathy as guiding frameworks for working with families.

Practical Use

• Apply respectful and empathic strategies to support families in clinical, educational, or early intervention settings.
• Use mentalization-informed approaches to help caregivers reflect on their own emotions and those of their children.
• Facilitate conversations that improve mutual understanding between children and caregivers.
• Implement practical strategies that reduce family distress and strengthen the overall family system.
• Promote environments that support the emotional well-being of both caregivers and children.

Speakers

Leticia Asenjo Huete, EDAI’s Co-Director and Co-Founder

Psychologist, psychotherapist and writer; co-founder and co-director of EDAI. Her research field is mentalization, within the PhD program Brain, Cognition, and Behavior. Accredited MBT-F supervisor by the Anna Freud Centre. Lecturer in the Master’s in Early Childhood Intervention and Family Work (University of Barcelona).

Jesús Molina, PhD 

PhD and psychotherapist at EDAI. Lecturer in the Master’s in Early Childhood Intervention and Family Work (University of Barcelona).

This course is part of the EDAI School’s Specialization Programme in Neurodevelopment.

IMPORTANT: If the minimum number of participants is not reached one week before the start of the course, registered participants will be informed about the next steps.

For any inquiries, please contact: training@edai.eu