Strategic Resilience for Foster Parents

Maintaining healthy connections with oneself and with others is crucial to foster parents. In their roles as caregivers to a wide range of children and youth, coping with stress to extreme stress can be a daily challenge. Long term stress depletes our natural coping mechanisms, and impacts the nervous system placing it on alarm. Initially the alarm state may be subtle, but over time, disruption in physical, emotional, mental and relationships can start to accumulate. This overwhelm impacts foster parents themselves as well as the children they are caring for.The strategic resilience approach presents SEER (Strategic Effective Enduring Resilience) protocols and practices that act as ‘resilience first aide’ for foster parents. These practices are helpful for individuals and can be adapted to work with children assisting them to regain coherence and calmness.