Welcome to Sesame’s United Health Care professional development course, Roads to Resilience! We know how important your work is to young children’s health, safety, and growth. You have the opportunity and power to support the most vulnerable children and their families mentally, physically, and academically. The foundation you help to build can positively affect them for the rest of their lives.
This is a scope and sequence designed to support healthy habits in children from birth to age 5. Our goal is to provide resources to help providers like you in Early Childcare, Health, Housing, and Social Services. The customized tracks were shaped from conversations, research, and information requests from stakeholders just like you.
Course Structure
Throughout this three-hour, self-paced, interactive course you’ll have the chance to learn more about how to build smarter, stronger, kids with resources you can choose based on the vital roles you play in your community!
- Units 1–4 are structured to support all providers working with children across a wide variety of contexts:
- Unit 1: Exploring Emotions
- Unit 2: Managing Milestones
- Unit 3: Stronger, Smarter, Kinder
- Unit 4: Understanding Traumatic Experiences
- Units 5 is more specialized so you can choose the path that’s most relevant, meeting the specific needs of children and families in your care.
- For providers working in Early Childcare and Education settings: Safe in Our Space
- For providers working in Healthcare settings: Clean Eating, Hearts Beating
- For providers working in Housing settings: Home Is Where the Heart Is
- For providers working in Social Service settings: Financial Education: Saving, Spending, Sharing
- Each unit features five general lessons to support all providers working with children.
- Lesson 1—Gather and Share: introductory videos on child-related topics
- Lesson 2—Explore Together: videos featuring ways to work with children
- Lesson 3—Caring for Caregivers: articles to share with caregivers
- Lesson 4—Read Together: digital storybooks to read with children
- Lesson 5—Play + Work Together: Customized resources that providers in your line of work can use with the caregivers and providers in a child’s circle of care.
At the end of every unit, you’ll have a chance to Show What You Know! You'll test the knowledge you’ve gained with a quick quiz, then dive even deeper into a supplemental lesson just for you!
- Upon course completion, you’ll receive a certificate celebrating the learning track you explored!
- Interested in the unique resources other providers are learning about? After completing your own self-paced course, you can always take it again, selecting a new provider path.
Course Goals
By the end of this 3-hour, self-paced course, providers will be able to:
- Share SSIC resources connected to child development, physical and mental health, and wellness related to everyone in the family
- Offer customized pathways to meet the specific needs of providers in the fields of early childcare, health, housing, and social services
Let's get started!
Introduction
Welcome to Rhythms of Resilience, a course designed to help providers and other caring community members introduce resilience-building practices to young children and families, especially those who have been affected by crisis.
This course will help you gain more understanding of what resilience is, and how it can be nurtured (in both children and adults) through consistent positive behaviors, activities, and interactions that support both emotional and cognitive well-being and development.
In this course, we’ll...
- talk about children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development at different ages and stages;
- explore (a tiny bit!) of how the brain works to learn, relearn, and strengthen skills;
- and we’ll break down how you as a caring helper, can introduce and scaffold the development of resilience-boosting skills in families affected by crisis.
Resilience can be a difficult concept to grasp. Sometimes used to describe a person’s character, resilience is a combination of intrinsic and learned skills, as well as external factors that help a person to bounce back from or overcome serious hardship.
At Sesame, we often think of those intrinsic and learned skills as a combination of emotional and social skills, problem solving, and an “I can do it!” attitude. This dynamic mix of skills can be strengthened through positive experiences and lots of practice. And for young children, especially those affected by crisis, consistent support from a caring adult is the most important factor to growing in resilience.
Needless to say, this course is not inclusive of all the skills or factors that help to make a person resilient but will focus on a handful of important skills that, if practiced, can make a meaningful difference, especially for children (and grown-ups) affected by crisis.
Please note: This course is part of Welcome Sesame, an initiative designed to support children and families affected by crisis, such as displacement due to violence, conflict, natural disaster, or some other reason. Because of this, you may read or hear references to “newcomers” or families “joining your community” throughout the course.
We’ll pay special attention to the challenges that newcomer children and families might face to establishing consistent rhythms of resilience—because of instability, lack of resources, or persistent stress—and we’ll offer some ideas to help.
Often, the strategies mentioned for this group of children and families are broadly applicable to families who have experienced other difficult circumstances as well. As always, keep an open mind, engage your curiosity, and ask yourself, “How can I apply what I’m learning to my own relationships, workplace, or community?”
A note of thanks:
Throughout this course, you’ll hear from a few key experts. These individuals have varied and extensive experience helping young children and families through challenging and traumatic situations. We are so grateful for their contributions to this course.
Rebecca Ford-Paz, PhD
Clinical Child Psychologist
Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago
Associate Professor, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
Disclaimer: Opinions, consultation, and guidance are my own. I am not speaking or acting on behalf of Lurie or Northwestern.
Chandra Ghosh-Ippen, Ph.D
Clinical Psychologist
Associate Director of the Child Trauma Research Program
University of California, San Francisco
Creator & Author at Piplo Productions