WHY LET’S CONNECT?

Let’s Connect is Resilience Promoting

Resilience refers to the capacity to adapt, persist, and respond to significant life change, stress, adversity, and/or trauma. Research has identified clearly the single most important factor for promoting resilience in children and youth is a supportive relationship with a safe, stable, and nurturing adult.  Social and emotional skills in both youth and adults are also key to promoting resilience; these skills include emotional awareness, emotion regulation, empathy and perspective-taking.  Let’s Connect focuses on strengthening caregiver-child relationships in the very ways that support resilience; first, by enhancing adult social and emotional capacities and wellbeing, then by teaching and coaching adults how to promote these same capacities for children within their day-to-day interactions.

Let’s Connect is Emotion-Focused

Let’s Connect takes the perspective that all emotions serve an important purpose in our lives. By paying attention to our emotional experiences and attuning to the emotional experiences of children and youth, we build capacity for responding to challenges in healthy and adaptive ways.  Attention to emotional experiences is calming and regulating, strengthens relationship, and offers important information about how to effectively and sensitively respond to challenging youth behaviors.

Let’s Connect is Trauma-Responsive

Children and youth who have experienced trauma need the adults in their lives to respond effectively to their unique emotional, cognitive, and behavioral needs; this is the reason that the involvement of a supportive caregiver is emphasized in many of the most effective treatments for childhood trauma.  Let’s Connect fosters caregiver supportive communication and response to children’s emotional needs, challenging family topics (e.g. divorce, incarceration, separation, loss), and children’s traumatic experiences.