Supporting Resource Families Using the Strengthening Families Approach

Resilience is the process of managing stress and functioning well even when faced with challenges, adversity and trauma. By managing stressors, parents feel better and can provide more nurturing attention to their child, which enables their child to form a secure emotional attachment.

• Make yourself accessible to families. Listen to and encourage them.
• Ensure families have adequate access to respite (formal or informal).
• Help families assess their mental health. Ensure that they can access counseling or other mental health services to cope with stress and changes in their lives when they have a need.
• Acknowledge the challenges families face. Address their concerns that sharing information about their difficulties will jeopardize their standing with the child-placing agency.

Friends, family members, neighbors, and community members provide emotional support, help solve problems, offer parenting advice and give concrete assistance to parents. Parents need people who care about them and their children, who are good listeners, who they can turn to for well-informed advice, and who they can call on for help in solving problems.

All parents need help sometimes--help with the day-to-day care of children, help figuring out how to soothe a colicky baby, help getting to the emergency room when an accident happens, help in managing their tempers when they're fatigued or upset. When parents are faced with very trying conditions such as losing a job, home foreclosure, or the effects of trauma, they need access to concrete support and services that address their needs and help reduce the stress caused by very difficult challenges and adversity.

Accurate information about child development and appropriate expectations for children's behavior at every age help parents see their children in a positive light and promote their healthy development. Parents who experienced harsh discipline or other negative childhood experiences may need extra help to change the parenting patterns they learned as children.

A child or youth's ability to interact positively with others, regulate their own behavior, and effectively communicate their feelings has a positive impact on their relationships with their family, other adults, and peers. Challenging behaviors or delayed development create extra stress for families, so early identification and assistance for both parents and children can head off negative results and keep development on track.