Safe, Secure, and Loved: A Community-Led Approach to Strengthen Resiliency in Children, Families and Communities Using Mindfulness-Based Parent Education

Barbara M. Burns, Ph.D.

About this Event

Safe, Secure and Loved is a mindfulness-based parenting program designed to strengthen family resilience. The program provides parents of young children (0-5 years) with information and skills to support sensitive parent-child attachment, stress management, and flexible cognitive skills in parents and children. What makes this program unique is that it is designed to be facilitated by community leaders, is trauma-informed, and has a strong emphasis on cultural strengths of resiliency.  Cultural aspects of resilience combined with mindful parenting has great potential to transcend barriers that have limited the establishment of parenting as community-driven primary prevention work.

In this workshop, we will describe a community-led parent education program, called “Safe, Secure and Loved”, which introduces mindfulness and self-compassion practices as ways to promote habits of resilience. Habits of resilience are nurturing behavioral strategies to manage parenting stress, clarify parenting goals and strengthen children’s trajectories of resilience.

We will share highlights from Safe, Secure and Loved (SSL) and talk about how the individual habits of resilience are discussed in group activities, crafts, and journaling. We will describe how our community collaborations using SSL led to more effective ways to contextualize critical concepts of resilience and stress management.  For example, we found that participants eagerly practiced the habits of resilience at home, and shared new ideas with their neighbors and friends about how the habits could address specific challenges, the benefits of mindful parenting, and the connections of these ideas to their culture.

Learn more about “Safe, Secure and Loved” by reading about the work in the American Journal of Community Psychology

This workshop is designed for: Professionals working with young children and families:  Head Start/Early Head Start Centers; Nonprofits who Provide Parent Education; Private Practitioners; Faith-Based Institutions with Preschools; Community Medical Professionals and Pediatricians; Homeless Centers for Families; Libraries with Family Education Programs.

Continuing Education Units

This course includes 3 Continuing Education Units (CEUs). CEUs will be available for licensed psychologists, marriage and family therapists, mental health counselors,  and social workers in Washington State. We cannot guarantee that these CEUs will be accepted in other states. 

About the Presenter

Barbara Burns

Barbara M. Burns, Ph.D.

Barbara M. Burns, Ph.D. is a developmental psychologist and Professor of Child Studies at Santa Clara University. For more than 35 years, Dr. Burns has been studying the roots of resilience in young children experiencing adversity and trauma. Safe, Secure and Loved is a mindfulness-based parenting program designed to be facilitated by community leaders. Through her partnership with Sacred Heart Community Service (San Jose, CA), Safe, Secure and Loved is now established as a neighbor-to-neighbor parenting program in San Jose and Gilroy, CA. Parents who participate in Safe, Secure and Loved show increases in the protective factors associated with effective child maltreatment prevention. Community leaders who facilitate Safe, Secure and Loved parent groups report increases in confidence, social connections, and commitment to community.

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