Focus Area: Cultivating Mindfulness & Compassion

Awareness of Thoughts (10 minutes)

This guided practice allows you to become familiar with your mind’s patterns, which is a foundation to strengthening mindfulness and resilience, led by Ann Hollar.

Stephanie F. Thompson

Thompson Highres Square 2021

Stephanie Thompson, Ph.D. has been involved in research at the CCFW since its founding in 2011. She is particularly interested in understanding the experiences of mothers that span economic adversity, depression, anxiety, pregnancy, and parenting with the hope of tailoring maternal health services to best support them. Dr. Thompson additionally studies how stress affects infant

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

Mg 0162 2 360x288

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.

“Reach out, I’ll be there”: Awakening Resilience Across Communities

Mg 0162 2 360x288

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.