Mentoring or Grooming? What’s the Difference?
Numerous mental health studies suggest that one of the best ways to help children develop resilience and recover from adverse childhood experiences is for them to have a trusted confidante outside the family. Yet we also are told that protecting children from sexual abuse requires our preventing a sexual predator ...
Helping Children Recover by Being a Safe Space
For those of us who have traumatized children in our care, it is difficult to know how to help them. A recent study from Canada tells us that being a safe person for children to confide in may be one of the best things that we can do. The study ...
Building Family Resilience
One topic that I have been pondering lately is how families manage adversity and teach their children to be resilient. I ran across a recent study that gave me both hope and some concrete ideas for helping our children. The authors did an in-depth analysis of the National Survey of ...
Which Comes First, Resilience or Self-Esteem?
A pattern that shows up very often in studies of resilience is a high correlation between resilience and self-esteem. It would be very easy to conclude that, if we help children develop self-esteem, we can also increase their resilience. These studies, however, only measure correlation, not causation. Furthermore, other studies ...
Resilience Requires Unsupervised Time
One of the most important, and difficult, ways that we can encourage resilience in children is to allow them unsupervised play time. Allowing children to have unsupervised time is extremely difficult in our hyper-protective society, but it is essential to helping children become resilient. A groundbreaking analytical review from Canada ...
Encouraging Resilience
One of the better trends in the last decade of caring for children is the recognition that children need to develop resilience. In spite of our best efforts, all children will face setbacks and conflicts. We need to help our children learn how to bounce back. Several mental health articles ...