Parenting for Resiliency
Resiliency is the brain’s ability to respond to stress in a healthy way. Parenting for resiliency supports healthy brain development in our children, and strengthens both our children’s resiliency and our own.
- Resiliency helps us manage both emotional and physical arousal in ways that promote healthy relationships and a healthy body.
- Resiliency protects us from the negative outcomes associated with adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).
Parenting for Resiliency is a neuro-developmentally informed approach to parenting. There are so many different parenting programs and books and articles on parenting! How do you figure out which approaches promote resiliency and encourage health brain development? To figure that out, it helps to know a little about how your child’s brain develops.
A child’s brain develops best when the child experiences a consistent, respectful, and warm connection with a primary caregiver who maintains a calm mind and body. To build resiliency, we need to focus on…
- nourishing a child’s relational reward system
- attending to a child’s sensory needs
- supporting physiological and emotional self-regulation via co-regulation
Co-regulation is consistently attuned and repetitive interactions between a caregiver and child that respond to the emotional, cognitive, and sensory needs of both parent and child. Co-regulation builds a healthy relational reward system in the brain. Positive parenting focuses on co-regulation in order to nourish the relational reward system which is the foundation of self-regulation, relational skills, functional sensory processing, cognitive capability and an overall feeling of well-being.
Robbyn Peters Bennett, LPC 