Resilience Development Program
Program Description:
Resilience Development Education aims to help children build positive behaviors from five dimensions: emotional adjustment, executive ability, adaptive motivation, emotional safety and belonging, and positive self. In this way, children can form their own resilience, which can help them cope with possible setbacks and past traumas in their lives and guide them to grow up healthy.
External factors that lead to trauma in children can come from physical, emotional, or even sexual abuse. It can also be physical and emotional neglect. Children may be easily traumatized by prisoners or the mental ills at home, seeing someone abusing their parent(s), substance abuse or divorce.
Trauma can affect children in many ways. Behaviorally, post-traumatic children may exhibit smoking, alcoholism, substance abuse, absenteeism, and physical inactivity. Physically and mentally, they may develop the chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, bone fractures, severe obesity, self-harm, depression, suicidal tendencies, sudden infant death syndrome, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and more.
Awareness of the early year’s influence on children’s long-term development can help us understand their behaviors and predicament. Meanwhile, it also made us realize how much difference a bit of healing and happiness could bring to their life. But sometimes, a crack is also where the light shines in.
Many people not only exhibit amazing resilience but also flourish after a trauma. They take on proactive changes and growth in their insights, internal strength, creativity and so on. And many malleabilities, such as mental resilience, would be the key to thriving after traumatic events. Education is the most effective way to nourish all these malleabilities in children.
Therefore, we hope our “Resilience Development Education project” will fill in our moments with children with warmth and healing, cultivating their resilience, strength and ability to happiness.
Target children:
Children of all ages can benefit from this program, with or without traumatic experience.
Program Members:
Xinyue Chi, Yiqing Wang, Xihan Jia, Ningyue Tao, Xinhui Guo (all members are from a professional psychology background)
Program Origin:
Some of the children supported by EWB are post-traumatic children. Different types of trauma have lingering effects on children in every way. For example, unhealthy self-belief can render them give up easily and reluctant to take action for change. Their unstable emotional management can lead to varying degrees of frustration in their study and life.
These children need a fundamental change in their core perceptions. We have found through research that post-traumatic growth can cultivate children’s psychological resilience through five aspects: emotional adjustment, execution ability, adaptive motivation, emotional security and belonging, and positive self. Therefore, the growth helps them build a healthy self and gain more positive experiences.
Combining personal experience and research, we found that the most effective mode of practice is to teach children some daily skills and develop related habits. This way, we hope to help them cope with possible anxiety patterns in the future and strengthen their self-awareness continuously.
Thus, Resilience Development Education Program was born. Different from the psychological programs that intervene after the crisis, what Resilience Development Education Program aims to do is to let the children have a positive and healthy mentality and strength to deal with the challenges and setbacks in life prior to the crisis.