PACE Model Parenting: Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity, and Empathy in Adoption

There are a lot of frameworks for parenting children who have experienced developmental trauma. What distinguishes the PACE model — developed by psychologist Dan Hughes as the relational foundation of Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy — is that it is not primarily a technique. It is a way of being with a child that creates the emotional conditions for healing.

If you have come across TBRI (Trust-Based Relational Intervention) through Dr. Karyn Purvis's work, PACE will feel complementary. Where TBRI emphasizes the practical principles of empowering, connecting, and correcting, PACE describes the underlying relational stance from which those principles operate. Many clinicians and adoptive parents use both frameworks together.

What PACE Stands For

Playfulness. Not silliness, necessarily, though sometimes that. Playfulness in the PACE sense is the ability to bring lightness and delight into the relationship — to find moments of joy in shared activities, to use humor to reduce shame and defensiveness, to make the relationship feel like a place the child wants to be rather than just a place where they are managed. Playfulness communicates: you are enjoyable. I like being with you.

For children who have experienced chronic neglect or institutional care, being enjoyed by an adult is often a genuinely unfamiliar experience. The consistent absence of playful engagement in early caregiving is part of what depletes the nervous system's capacity for joy and connection. Playfulness, deliberately offered, begins to refill that reservoir.

Acceptance. This is acceptance of the child's inner life — their feelings, thoughts, memories, and experience — not acceptance of all behaviors. The distinction is important. Acceptance means: I am not afraid of what is inside you. I am not going to reject you for feeling what you feel or wanting what you want. Whatever is in there, you can bring it to me.

For a child whose early experience taught them that showing genuine distress or need resulted in indifference or punishment, acceptance is a revolutionary offering. It creates the safety to be real rather than defended. A child who trusts that their inner experience will be accepted — not fixed, not dismissed, not punished — gradually begins to allow their inner experience into the relationship.

Curiosity. Curious inquiry is the therapeutic stance by which a parent or therapist helps a child explore their own experience without judgment. Rather than confronting a behavior or demanding explanation, a curious stance is: "I wonder what was happening for you right then." "I'm curious about what that felt like." "I wonder if there's a part of you that..."

Curiosity de-escalates shame because it signals that the adult is interested in understanding, not judging. For children with developmental trauma, shame is one of the most powerful drivers of behavioral escalation. The experience of an adult being genuinely curious about their inner life — without agenda, without correction — can be genuinely unexpected and powerfully healing.

Empathy. Empathy in the PACE framework is not sympathy. It is the explicit communication that the child's emotional experience makes sense — that their pain, anger, fear, or grief is understandable given their history. "Of course you feel that way. After everything you've been through, it makes complete sense that you would feel scared when I leave the room."

This empathic naming serves several functions. It helps the child identify and label their emotional experience, which is itself a regulatory function. It reduces shame (the child who is told their feelings make sense is less likely to feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with them). And it models the kind of attuned, reflective thinking about emotional experience that the child will eventually be able to apply to themselves.

How PACE Works in Practice

The difficulty with PACE is that it sounds straightforward in description and is genuinely hard to sustain in the middle of repeated relational stress. A child who has been rejecting you for months, who responds to warmth with provocation, who seems determined to push every boundary — bringing playfulness, acceptance, curiosity, and empathy to that child in the heat of a behavioral crisis is a significant internal and relational challenge.

A few practical applications:

During dysregulation, the PACE stance looks like: quiet presence (playfulness has receded), explicit acceptance ("I know you're really angry right now, and that's okay"), gentle curiosity ("I wonder if something happened today that got you feeling like this"), and empathy ("that sounds really hard. I'm not going anywhere."). You are not trying to fix the dysregulation; you are providing a relational climate in which the dysregulation can resolve.

After a behavioral incident, when both parent and child are regulated, PACE provides the relational frame for reconnection and re-do. The parent approaches the child with curiosity about what happened (not interrogation), acceptance of the child's experience without excusing the behavior, empathy for whatever drove the behavior, and possibly even a moment of gentle lightness (playfulness) once the connection has been re-established.

In ordinary moments, PACE is the ambient quality of the relationship — the parent who finds their child interesting and enjoyable, who responds to the child's feelings with acceptance rather than dismissal, who brings genuine curiosity to the child's experience rather than just managing behavior.

PACE and Shame Reduction

One of Dan Hughes's core insights is that shame is the central driver of much of the behavioral presentation in children with developmental trauma. A child who believes, at their core, that they are bad, unlovable, or damaged will behave in ways that confirm that belief — either through self-sabotage, through provoking rejection, or through preemptive defensive aggression.

Each element of PACE is, in some sense, a direct counter to shame. Playfulness says: you are someone I enjoy. Acceptance says: there is nothing in you that I cannot tolerate. Curiosity says: I want to understand you, not judge you. Empathy says: your experience makes sense.

Repeated exposure to these relational experiences — not in a single therapeutic session but across hundreds of daily interactions over months and years — gradually revises the child's core belief about themselves. This is the neuroplastic process that attachment therapy works to create.

Finding Clinicians Who Use PACE

PACE is the foundation of Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP), developed by Dan Hughes. The DDP Network (ddpnetwork.org) maintains a directory of trained clinicians globally. When interviewing potential therapists for your family, asking specifically about DDP training and familiarity with the PACE framework is a useful filter for adoption competency.

Many clinicians who are not formally DDP-trained still incorporate PACE principles alongside other evidence-based approaches, including TBRI and Theraplay. The frameworks are compatible and often used in combination.

For adoptive parents who want to integrate PACE into their daily parenting — with practical scripts, examples of each PACE element in common difficult situations, and guidance on sustaining the stance across the long middle of post-adoption adjustment — the Post-Adoption Support & Attachment Guide translates these clinical concepts into practical language for everyday use.

The Hardest Part

Sustaining PACE requires access to your own emotional regulation. A parent who is operating from a place of burnout, blocked care, or secondary traumatic stress will find the PACE elements — particularly acceptance and empathy — increasingly hard to access. The child's continued rejection or aggression makes genuine curiosity and empathy feel like a resource that keeps running dry.

This is why every serious clinical framework for adoptive parenting includes parental wellbeing as a non-negotiable component. PACE cannot be sustained from an empty tank. The parent who regularly accesses their own therapy, peer support, and respite is the parent who can maintain the relational stance that healing requires.

The PACE model is not a set of techniques you deploy when you feel like it. It is the relational environment you try to maintain consistently, repair when you get it wrong, and return to each time. Over time, the returning is itself a model for the child: this is how we do relationships. We lose our way, and we come back. That, in itself, is one of the most healing things you can teach.