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.
Recent discoveries from developmental neurobiology, child development, and trauma science had shown that harsh and unresponsive caregiving during early childhood resulted in disrupted stress regulation systems in the developing brain. In addition, stressful family and community environments had been linked to specific pre-academic, social and health challenges in preschoolers. In response to these findings, new approaches to child abuse prevention started to focus on the need to mitigate young children’s adversities through parent education. The science of resilience has effectively provided the blueprints for a “behavioral therapeutic vaccine” that could buffer the negative impacts of early childhood adversity.
Kevin King, PhD., is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington and Director of the RADLab. The RADLab team is focused on understanding how self-regulation works in real life contexts at real-life time scales. Additionally, their work tries to understand what social and emotional contexts influence youths’ ability to deploy self-regulatory resources,
Dr. Katz research focuses on children’s social and emotional development in the context of family relationships, including marital conflict, domestic violence, and parent’s use of emotion coaching. Learn more about her research on the UW Psychology Department website.
