Video interaction guidance to support parent-child relationships

Are you looking for some support specifically for the relationship between you and your child? Do you feel that your child is struggling and you would like to be able to support them better?

Video Interaction Guidance (VIG) is a great tool for improving relationships. It can be simple and effective, even in strained family relationships. 

Although my current experience of VIG is within parent-child work, it can be used in all sorts of relationships, including with infants, teens and adults and within schools and businesses.

VIG looks at the tiny interactions occurring between individuals when they are communicating successfully. Using it with parents enables them to see how they are already supporting their child, by enabling them to observe themselves in their best moments. They can also see how their child responds to this. This builds hope and encouragement in times when things may be feeling quite desperate. Confidence can then grow and enable even the difficult times to be talked over from a place of strength.

The approach involves deciding goals and then filming the parent and child together. Careful editing gives the parent some short clips showing positive communication. These can then be looked at with the parent, looking at the interactions already being used by the parent to good effect. This process is then repeated 3 or 4 times developing empathy, confidence and empowerment.

Based on an approach developed by Harrie Biemans and colleagues in the Netherlands in the 1980’s, VIG is also developing a growing evidence base and is NICE recommended.*

See the Association for Video Interaction Guidance UK's website for more information: https://www.videointeractionguidance.net/

*See https://www.videointeractionguidance.net/aboutvig for more information on VIG’s evidence base and applications.