The Métissages Group: A Second-Line Transcultural Setting for Children Growing Up Between Several Worlds, and Their Families

Children growing up between several cultural worlds — through migration, mixed parentage, adoption or placement — may develop difficulties that first-line services struggle to understand when their cultural dimension goes unrecognised. This brief report describes the Métissages group, a second-line transcultural group setting created in 2015 in a French child and adolescent psychiatry department. In ten years it has received around one hundred families, referred by the first-line teams already caring for them. We outline the setting’s rationale and indication, and its frame: a circle of therapists that includes the interpreter and the referring professional. Two principles organise it. The first is working at the child’s height: it is the child, not the parents, who is asked to tell the family story. The second is an auxiliary function carried by the whole circle. A composite clinical illustration follows one treatment through the setting’s successive mediations. Finally, we present four exploratory observations from ten years of practice and outline directions for its systematic evaluation.