The Meaning of The Child Interview (MotC) – A new method of assessing and understanding parent-child relationships of ‘at risk’ families Accepted for publication by Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Pre-publication version

Reder and Duncan’s well known 1990’s studies of fatal child abuse drew attention to how parental scripts regarding their children could dangerously distort relationships in ways that were sometimes fatal to children (Reder, Duncan, & Gray, 1993; Reder & Duncan 1999). This paper reports on a new system for assessing the ‘meaning of the child to the parent’, called the Meaning of the Child Interview (MotC). Parents are interviewed using the established Parent Development Interview (Aber, Slade, Berger, Bresgi, & Kaplan, 1985), or equivalent, and the transcript of the interview is then analysed according to parental sensitivity and likely risk to the child. The MotC constructs were developed from those used in observed parent-child interaction (specifically, the CARE-Index: Crittenden 2010, Crittenden and Bonvillian 1984) and the form of discourse analysis used in the Dynamic Maturational Model – Adult Attachment Interview (Crittenden and Landini 2011), allowing a more systemic and intersubjective understanding of parenting representations than often put forward. The paper discusses the theoretical background to the MotC, gives a brief review of similar measures, and then introduces the coding system and patterns of caregiving. The validity of the MotC is addressed elsewhere (Grey 2014a&b; Grey and Farnfield submitted).