Resilience & Well-Being
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New science is helping us to understand resilience and how it helps us to process traumatic events in ways that minimize damage to their physical health, mental health, and relationships. Here we focus on the biological processes that undergird resilience, the types of environments and experiences that help children strengthen their resilience, and effective strategies for working with children and families in ways that promote and support resilience.
Featured Resources
Thinking About Prevention Through the Lens of Culture and Community: Prevention Programs in Tribal Communities
Partnering with the Center for Tribes to explore strategies and approaches to child abuse and neglect prevention in tribal communities.
ACF Video Series on Early Childhood Social Emotional Development and Mental Health and Caregiver Well-Being
A series of short videos to spotlight the importance of robust social emotional development and mental health support strategies within programs serving young children and their families.
HOPE (Interactive Learning Module)
This short learning module allows you to hear directly from Dr. Bob Sege about HOPE (Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences). Learn, test your knowledge, and develop action plans.
Complete List of Resources
Videos and Social Media
- NEWSocial Media Resources for Purposeful Parenting
Several captivating social media messages to use in your own e-mails, newsletters, presentations, or other tools, or share directly to your Facebook page. - Children's Social-Emotional Mental Health & Caregiver Well-Being Videos
Early childhood experiences can strengthen or disrupt a young child's development. Learn more about how supporting a child's social emotional development and the well-being of their caregivers is a proactive prevention approach to promoting positive long-term outcomes.
Tools and Tip Sheets
- NEWHOPE (Interactive Learning Module)
This short learning module allows you to hear directly from Dr. Bob Sege about HOPE (Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences). Learn, test your knowledge and develop action plans. - From the Field: Balancing ACEs with HOPE
Learn about the role of positive experiences early in life as powerful factors that can break the link between Adverse Child Experiences (ACEs) and poor health.
Digital Dialogue Recordings
- NEWThinking About Prevention Through the Lens of Culture and Community: Prevention Programs in Tribal Communities
Partnering with the Center for Tribes to explore strategies and approaches to child abuse and neglect prevention in tribal communities. - Building Community Capacity to Support Perinatal Mental Health
Perinatal mood and anxiety disorders are among the most common complications that occur in pregnancy or in the first 12 months after delivery. Yet despite the long-reaching negative impacts on parent-child attachment, child development, and financial stability, perinatal mental health (PMH) disorders often remain underdiagnosed, untreated, or under-treated. - Supporting Children and Youth Coping with Unresolved Loss
A series of short videos to spotlight the importance of robust social emotional development and mental health support strategies within programs serving young children and their families. - The Science and Practice of Self-Regulation
In this Digital Dialogue, we will be focusing on what the science tells us about resilience, healing, and self-regulation. Learn more about the brain's anatomy and practical tips for identifying restorative practices that work when your body is under stress. - Birth Parent Foster Caregiver Partnerships: Taking a Family Systems Perspective
Family systems theory gives us a framework for understanding, supporting, or engaging in birth parent foster parent partnerships while acknowledging the complexity and the relational work they require. - Promoting Healthy Behaviors for Kinship Caregivers
Kinship caregivers often prioritize their children’s needs before caring for their own, often delaying their own medical appointments and medication to purchase shoes for children, transportation, and food. Learn more about kinship caregiver health and an approach to working with kinship caregivers that emphasizes self-compassion and self-care. Created by a multi-disciplinary team of doctors and social workers, the Time for Me Toolkit helps peer navigators to support and provide psychoeducation to caregivers around six pillars of health management (Healthy Eating, Being Active, Healthy Sleep, Healthy Coping, Medical Adherence, and Self-Monitoring). - Laying the Groundwork: Paid Family Leave as a Prevention and Promotion Strategy
New data shows that policies to provide universal concrete and economic supports to families can have a powerful impact on child abuse and neglect prevention and broader family well-being. This Digital Dialogue covered one such strategy—paid family and medical leave. It explored what research tells us about the impacts of these concrete supports and provided information about one state’s journey to a statewide policy. - Caring for Kinship Caregivers
In 2018, 2.7 million children were being raised in a kinship care family without a parent present – either with grandparents, aunts/uncles, siblings, or close family friends. While kinship caregivers provide essential support to children, many frequently need support to carry out this added responsibility effectively. - Addressing the Systemic Inequities that Stand in the Way of Children’s Well-being
Poverty, race, culture, or zip code should not predetermine a child’s school and life success. This digital dialogue explored the historical roots and current practices and policies that may lead to racial disparities (e.g., conflation of effects of poverty and neglect/abuse) within early childhood and child welfare. - All Children—All Families: Improving Practice For and With LGBTQ+ Youth and Families
The Human Rights Campaign is working with hundreds of child welfare systems across the nation to build new and inclusive practices for LGBTQ+ youth and families. Learn more about the effective innovations being put into practice and tools you can use to shift practice in your own program and system.
External Resources
Partners
- Parental Resilience
Child Welfare Information Gateway
This page provides a number of resources to help those who are looking to support parental resilience building. - Building Child Welfare Agency Capacity to Address Well-being
Capacity Building Center for States
The Center's resources promote protective factors, child and youth well-being, parent and caregiver well-being, parenting resources, and capacity building for programs and systems. Capacity building strategies include increasing the knowledge and skills of child welfare professionals to integrate service systems; restructure programs and services to better address social, emotional, and behavioral functioning; and support the well-being of children, youth, and families. - Well-being and the Young Child
FRIENDS National Resource Center
This collection of guidance and resources focuses on the role that prevention programs can play in promoting the well-being of families with young children. - HOPE (Health Outcomes from Positive Experience) National Resource Center
HOPE – Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences – represents a paradigm shift in how we see and talk about the positive experiences that support children's growth and development into healthy, resilient adults. - Center for the Developing Child
Harvard University
The Center’s Mission is to drive science-based innovation that achieves breakthrough outcomes for children facing adversity.