A randomised controlled trial to evaluate "SAFE® - Basic Trust", an intervention to support attachment security and parental mentalization

INTERVENTION: Intervention 1: Group 1: Intervention group "SAFE® ‐ Basic Trust": The Intervention "SAFE® ‐ Basic Trust" ‐ is a manualised, low‐threshold, short‐term intervention that is conducted as home visits (outreach work with families). The six Live‐Intensive‐Units take place every 4 weeks in the presence of both parents and ‐ from unit 3 on ‐ the 2 to 5‐month‐old baby. The intervention is carried out by facilitators: ‐ experts in health and social work who already have experience in accompanying family work and who are getting an intensive training at the Institute for Early Life Care. A specific SAFE® ‐Basic Trust manual, guides the intervention. Aim of the Live‐Intensive Units is to reflect on the parents' own attachment experiences and to identify resources and stress factors that may influence the parent‐child‐interactions. Furthermore, the facilitator will help the parents to improve their reflective functioning during interactions with their child. Intervention 2: The second group (IG group 2=intervention group 2) receives a comparable manualized intervention with the same amount and length of home visits by comparably trained and supervised facilitators. In this group, parents get information and are stimulated to think about their child's cognitive, language and motor development, and they will watch and discuss videos with information on that content. To ensure the adherence to protocol the sessions will get videotaped. Intervention 3: The couples in the third group (CG group 3=Treatment as usual) receive no special intervention beyond the usual support and treatment offered by the clinic and [governmental] organizations for the support of young families. CONDITION: F00‐F99 ‐ Mental and behavioural disorders O00‐O99 ‐ Pregnancy, childbirth and the puerperium PRIMARY OUTCOME: classification of the attachment quality with father resp. mother.; method: Strange Situation (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978) with mother and child when the child is 12 months old and with father and child when the child is 15 months old. ; possible outcomes: secure attachment, anxious‐ambivalent attachment, anxious‐avoidant attachment, disorganized/disoriented attachment SECONDARY OUTCOME: parental ability to mentalise (Parent Development Interview; Aber, Slade, Berger, Bresgi, & Kaplan, 1985); coparenting quality (Coparenting Relationship Scale; Feinberg, Brown, & Kan, 2012); parental sensitivity in the interaction with the child (Emotional Availability Scale; Biringen, 2008) INCLUSION CRITERIA: primiparous parents that live in a relationship, age over 18 years