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  • Title: The ability of adolescents to predict future outcome. Part II: Therapeutic enhancement of predictive skills.
    Author: Trad PV.
    Journal: Adolescence; 1993; 28(112):757-80. PubMed ID: 8266833.
    Abstract:
    The assertion of autonomy, a developmental challenge of adolescence, helps predict the teenager's attitude toward pregnancy and parenthood. Significantly, the ability to predict the future relationship with the infant has direct implications for the achievement of an adaptive outcome. Indeed, the interpersonal outcome of the parent-infant relationship may be predicted by the adolescent's behaviors with her infant. A prospective orientation may offer an important vantage point for improving this relationship. For example, the ability to predict future outcome helps identify potential conflict, such as abuse. When applying a prospective approach during the prenatal period, the adolescent's past relationship with her own mother and her motivations for becoming a parent will be explored in order to predict the future dyadic relationship. For adolescents who are already parents, an assessment of the dyad's contemporaneous interaction may further predict future interpersonal exchange. Moreover, orienting the adolescent parent toward the future may identify areas of potential conflict, as well as foster more adaptive dyadic exchange. The relationship between the adolescent mother and her infant is complicated by the fact that both face the same developmental challenge--assertion of autonomy. If the adolescent's own mother cannot tolerate her daughter's moves toward individuation and autonomy and provides inadequate modeling of nurturing behavior, the infant is at risk of being abused. A prospective approach focused on the adolescent's past and current relationship with her mother, combined with her capacity to envision how future developmental gains will impact on her evolving relationship with her infant, can be used by psychotherapists to predict the quality of the mother-infant relationship. If the adolescent has had an abusive or conflicted relationship with her own mother, she may repeat this pattern and introduce conflict into her relationship with her child. Also germane are the adolescent's motivations for becoming pregnant; those who view motherhood as a means of breaking away from their own mother's control or of achieving intimacy may fail to promote their infant's adaptive maturation. Here-and-now factors that should be assessed by the therapist include the mother's proficiency in reading her infant's cues, the nature of the infant's attachment to the mother (insecure, ambivalent, or secure), the fit between the infant's temperament (difficult, easy, or slow to warm up) and the mother's, and the extent to which her expectations of her infant's abilities are age-appropriate. Orienting the adolescent mother toward the future involves instilling the ability to plan and motivation to seek further interaction. For example, the therapist can teach adolescent mothers previewing techniques, in which the mother deduces from intuition and education about child development that her infant is on the verge of acquiring a new skill, devises interactional exercises aimed at rehearsing this skill, and, in the process, enhances the intimacy and permission for autonomy in the dyadic relationship.
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