DNA-V and ACT with Parents: Building the Parent’s Noticer

By Renae Martelli - ANZ ACBS chapter board member, 2024-2025

Why Working with Parents is Great as a CBS Practitioner

When I tell other therapists I work with children and young people, I am often met with the response, “gosh I don’t work with kids and teens because of the parents.”

This view is unfortunate, as working with parents can be the most rewarding work. It is also exciting from a contextual behavioural lens, as it allows us to collaborate and intervene within family and parent-child contexts. Parent work can be the most impactful and meaningful part of our role. When we help one parent grow, we may start to see ripple effects, not just towards our child or teen client, but potentially to the other parent/s, the wider family system, and even into the school community.

If you are interested in hearing more about working with parents, our chapter member video library includes a recent panel discussion “What I wish I could tell my younger self about using ACT with children, young people, and families” where we further discuss working with parents as child and adolescent therapists.

Parents and the Noticer

One of the abilities I focus on when supporting parents in their parenting role is the Noticer ability - the N in the DNA-V model. To learn more about DNA-V and access free resources, see https://dnav.international.

The Noticer is a metaphor to describe our ability to notice what’s happening within us (thoughts, emotions, and body sensations), around us (the environment), and in others (behaviours, emotions, and connections). It involves ACT processes of acceptance, present moment awareness, and self-as-context (the noticing self). It also supports behaviour tracking by bringing awareness to our behaviours, the responses of others, and the felt experiences when we are doing what we care about and when we are connecting and co-regulating with others.

When I work with parents, I begin by asking questions which allow me to assess their current Noticer skills, particularly their ability to notice their own inner experiences and those of their child or teen.

Why start at Noticer? Because noticing influences co-regulation, emotion regulation, allowing, acceptance, defusion, and self-compassion. It can also influence attachment and felt safety.

When a parent can experience and model acceptance, allowing, connecting with the body and its messages, and self-compassion, they’re supporting their child or teen to build those same responses and skills.

Ways to Build the Noticer

The Noticer involves a few processes, so it is helpful to get a good sense of where the parent is getting stuck in noticing. This involves determining where they are skilled, where they are getting stuck, what tends to trigger these behaviours, and what purpose the behaviours might be serving. Here are a few common stuck points and how we might build Noticer.

1. Getting stuck in their own feelings and body sensations 

This might show up as a parent feeling overwhelmed, angry, anxious, or stressed, and then reacting to these feelings and sensations in unworkable ways. Their behaviour becomes driven by their inner discomfort and possible avoidance functions.

We want to support parents to notice, name, and allow their feelings without letting those feelings dictate their responses. Many acceptance and allowing ACT strategies can be helpful here, as well as self-compassionate responses. To initially build the Noticer, you can ask questions like:

• “What did you notice in yourself?”

• “What did you notice in your body?”

• “What was your mind saying?”

• “What was the emotion when … happened?”

• “What did you notice in your child? What might they have been feeling or thinking?”

• “If I was there, what would I have seen?”

  
  

This supports development of noticing self and others, acceptance, allowing, and behaviour tracking, and opens parents to exploring values-based behaviours in situations where they might be feeling stuck.

2. Becoming dysregulated when their child is in emotional dysregulation or distress

Many parents are familiar with this: your child becomes frustrated or upset, they yell at you or demand something, and suddenly you’re yelling back feeling just as frustrated. Emotions can be contagious.

Research has explored the idea of “emotional contagion" and its evolutionary and protective functions, as well as the theorised functions of mirror neurons in this social experience (Bastiaansen, Thioux, & Keysers, 2009; Bonini, Rotunno, Arcuri, & Gallese, 2022; Liu, Zhang, Zhu, Ma, & Xiao, 2025).  I often share this with parents to normalise the experience and support self-compassionate responses.

I have also found that parents will not only feel their child’s distress or dysregulation (or relate to them from their own childhoods), but they also get stuck in their fears about their child’s future and ability to cope. This furthers the parent’s dysregulation.

We can support parents by helping them:

• Name their fears and emotions.

• Understand the automatic nervous system responses to their child or teen in distress or dysregulation to build awareness.

• Model and practise a range of acceptance and defusion strategies.

• Recognise the fears, track how tightly they are holding them, and how they are impacting in the present moment.

• Explore what the parent needs and what helpful emotional regulation responses are in moments when they notice their own dysregulation alongside their child or teen.

• Notice and acknowledge inner experiences, and then return to the present moment with values-based intentions and actions.

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3. Difficulty noticing their child or teen’s inner experiences

Some parents are great at tuning in, noticing, and naming their own inner experiences, but struggle at times to notice and connect to what’s happening for their child or teen. This can impact their present moment awareness of factors outside their own experience, as well as impacting co-regulation, validation, and compassionate responses. It can also influence the effectiveness of responses and strategies that parents select, as they are not taking into account the experience of the child or teen and their needs in the moment.

We might help by:

• Asking what they noticed in their child or teen within a specific situation, to broaden their awareness of other factors in that moment. This wider awareness provides richer information about what is (and isn’t) working in the moment, and therefore what else might be helpful to try.

• Using simple pause practices or “circuit breakers” such as dropping anchor, taking a breath, or performing a particular down-regulating movement.

• Using a prompt like “slow down, get curious, and notice on purpose” (from Tired of Anxiety by Sarah Cassidy and Lisa Coyne).

• Practising present-moment noticing strategies that allow them to observe both their own and their child’s experience.

• Supporting parents to build skills to notice and validate their child or teen’s thoughts and feelings.

Final Thoughts

Working with parents and within the family system can further support our child or teen client. One way we can support parents is by helping them build their Noticer skill. Parents who are skilled Noticers can notice and allow a range of thoughts and feelings within themselves and within their child or teen. They regulate themselves when needed, connect with and notice their child or teen’s inner experiences, notice what is occurring in the present moment within them and outside of them, defuse from fears and unhelpful thoughts, track what is working or not, and choose responses that might work based on a range of contextual factors. They respond in ways that are aligned with their values.

If you are currently working with parents, what are you already doing to help parents build their Noticer? Where could you start, or go deeper, in your next parent session?