A New Curriculum Designed to Build Protective Factors
Strengthening Families™ is an approach to working with families in a way that builds five core protective factors:
Parental Resilience
Social Connections
Knowledge of Parenting and Child Development
Concrete Support in Times of Need
Social and Emotional Competence of Children
When family support professionals work to build these five strengths in families, research shows:
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Families become more resilient
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Children develop more optimally
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Child abuse is prevented
Since 2015, Prevent Child Abuse Arizona has offered trainings to hundreds of family support professionals on the Strengthening Families™ approach. These trainings have helped professionals understand the importance and significance of the five protective factors.
However, we often received feedback that the professionals we trained were struggling to put the information they learned to action. They wanted specific ways to help families build these factors in their lives.
So in 2018, Prevent Child Abuse Arizona Training Director Claire Louge, along with certified trainers Sandi Cimino, Rhegan Derfus, Sara Martinez, and Brandi Samaniego, collaborated to develop a supplemental curriculum, Flourishing Families, to make the protective factors actionable.
Flourishing Families is designed to support early childhood home visitors work with families to build protective factors. The curriculum includes multiple activities that encourage the parents to reflect on their own personal understanding of parenting and build upon their existing strengths.
Flourishing Families is currently in its first draft. Prevent Child Abuse Arizona is seeking funding to continue refining the curriculum to ultimately train home visitors to implement Flourishing Families with families statewide.