Positive Solutions for Families
The Center on the Social and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning (CSEFEL) has developed an evidence-based, user-friendly parent training series of six sessions to help professionals working with parents promote positive and effective parenting behaviors, which will in turn promote children’s social and emotional development and address the challenging behavior and mental health needs of children in child care and Head Start programs.
The training materials provide information for families on how to promote children’s social and emotional skills, understand their problem behavior, and use positive approaches to help children learn appropriate behavior. The training is designed to give parents general information on key strategies that may be used with all children. Sessions are not designed to offer parents specific advice for their child’s individual issues. Facilitators of the training session should be knowledgeable about local agencies and service providers that may be able to assist families who have complex support needs or children with problem behavior that requires the guidance of a professional. In the last session, parents will be offered a routine guide that offers advice for supporting their children across common family routines.
Adverse Childhood Experience’s Introduction
An introduction to the neuroscience of early childhood development and how an adult’s Adverse Childhood Experiences impact both our parenting and our children. We also explore what we can do to build resiliency.
Session 1 : Making a Connection - Building relationships, quality time,positive comments and encouragement
Discuss the purpose of the group and the importance of social-emotional development for young children. Meet each other and learn about our families. Discuss goals and ground rules we might have for our group. Identify the importance of building positive relationships with children. Discuss the “power” of using positive comments and encouragement with children.
Session 2: Making it Happen - Play as a powerful parenting practice, supporting the development of friendship skills, encouraging positive behavior
Discuss Things to try at home from previous session and link to the importance of supporting social-emotional development. Understand how play can be a powerful parenting practice. Learn ways to help children develop friendship skills. Link building relationships, using positive comments/encouragement, and play to children’s behavior
Session 3: Determining the meaning of behavior, making expectations clear, developing and teaching household rules
Examine why children do what they do. Practice ways to determine the meaning of behavior. Understand how to make expectations clear for children. Understand effective ways to develop and teach household rules.
Session 4: Emotional vocabulary, managing anger and handling disappointment, problem solving
Define the concept of emotional vocabulary. Identify feeling words and identify effective ways to teach feeling vocabulary. Demonstrate the use of books to support emotional vocabulary and social-emotional development. Identify how the turtle technique can be used to cope with feelings of anger and disappointment. Learn how to teach problem-solving skills.
Session 5: Strategies to promote positive behavior
Examine specific strategies that can be used to promote positive adult and child behavior in home and community settings.
Session 6: Problem solving, challenging behavior, and everyday routines
Identify that problem behavior has meaning. Identify the meaning of behavior by examining what happens before and after the problem behavior. Identify the three parts of a behavior plan: preventions, new skills to teach, and new responses. Learn to use the Family Routine Guide to identify supports for use with children during daily routines.