About
Through my research, consultations, my training, and my writing, I pursue a single goal: to better understand contemporary parental realities in order to support families with rigor, nuance, and humanity.
I am a professor of developmental psychology at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) in Belgium. I hold a PhD in psychological sciences and completed my training at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
My research at the Psychological Sciences Research Institute (IPSY) in Belgium, which I have chaired since 2026, focuses on child development, parenting, and parental mental health, with a particular focus on difficult behaviors in children, parental burnout, and parental regret. Since 2017, I have co-directed the International Investigation of Parental Burnout (IIPB), an international consortium bringing together more than 100 researchers in over 40 countries, dedicated to the study of parental burnout worldwide.
As a clinician specializing in child development and parenting support, I practiced for ten years within the neuropediatrics unit of the Cliniques universitaires Saint-Luc in Brussels. Today, I am head of the Specialized Psychological Consultations (CPS) at the Institute for Research in Psychological Sciences at UCLouvain.
Keen to make scientific knowledge directly useful to practitioners and families, I co-founded the Training Institute for Psychology & Health (TIPH) in 2019, an organization dedicated to the continuing education of psychology, mental health, and education professionals.
A mother of five, I am the author of numerous international scientific publications as well as several books for the general public and professionals, including My Child is Unbearable! Understanding and Supporting Difficult Children and Parental Burnout: Avoiding It and Getting Through It, co-authored with Moïra Mikolajczak.
Photo: © UCLouvain / Aurore Delsoir