What is it about?
Families mentalize when they are trying to understand each other’s behavior based on inner thoughts, feelings or wishes. Mentalizing is a helpful concept to understand the risk for developing mental health problems and stress and conflict in families. This manuscript aims to provide an introduction and brief overview on how the concept of mentalization can be useful for clinicians to understand mental health problems in children, youth and their families. We outline how mentalization-based treatment can be applied to help families understand each other better and resolve conflict. Clinical vignettes from three programs: the Lighthouse parenting program, MBT for school-aged children and MBT for young people with conduct problems are described. We conclude with a brief summary about the current research findings and future needs for clinical and research work.