Restoring Resilience (RR) is excited to partner with educators and educational settings to provide a trauma prevention and resolution framework when working with children/youth 3-25yr olds.
At Restoring Resilience we believe that for any child/youth to thrive, an ecological perspective is vital as a child/youth cannot be viewed in isolation or separate to its family, culture, school, and community. A child’s health and wellbeing are inextricably interdependent on the quality of relationships between educator/school and family, therapist/practitioner and community. The program invites all significant adults in a child’s/youth’s life to share in a psychobiological understanding of physiological drivers in child/youth behaviour. It is in the partnerships and collaboration the child/youth can feel safe and connected, a regulated child develops in spaces that understands the power of relational neurobiology.
The Restoring Resilience ‘Grow – Working with Children’ program provides a subscription program for educators, to provide a lens on understanding physiological drivers of challenging behaviour and responses. The subscription is a mixture of pre-recorded modules and Live Consults.
GROW Working with Children and Youth program is underpinned by Relational Gestalt theory to support relational safety, attachment and connection; Polyvagal theory to demystify drivers of disruptive and challenging behaviours and Somatic interventions to release activation, reset the nervous system and restore resilience, connection and social engagement. The synthesis of these modalities is potent and has been translated so educator’s can assist to children/youth to start learning these fundamental and necessary skills for nervous system regulation from as young 3yo.
The Program introduces the ‘GROW – Emotion Regulation Tool Kit’ into classrooms which is a powerful resource that was adapted from Dr Stephen Porges Polyvagal Map which can be used with children aged 3-25yo. The kit comprises a large colourful, visual map to help children/youth identify emotional states and begin to learn the skill of shifting from awareness to noticing and tracking bodily sensations and impulses, which builds the fundamental skill of interoception. Poor interoception is know to correlate with poor mental health and emotional regulation.
The training provides educators with a menu of specific Somatic Experiencing interventions to support the child’s/youth’s nervous system to return to a state of safety, connection and wellbeing when stuck in stress physiological states of fight, flight, and freeze. The GROW Emotion Regulation Tools Kit is recommended to be used in classrooms, counselling and therapeutic settings and at home with caretakers to ensure the child/youth is attuned and responded to with consistency and predictability.
The ‘GROW – Working with Children and Youth’ program is ecological, therefore the health and wellbeing of the educator must be triaged as a priority. In turn the subscription Self Care modules and Monthly Live Online Consults are an integral part of the training. An educator’s capacity to continue co-regulating and supporting children from a window of health, wellbeing, and sustainability requires a space where their own nervous systems, health and wellbeing is prioritised, nurtured and nourished.