A goal of Children’s Home Society of WV has always been to strengthen families and nurture children. Researchers have identified the 5 key elements of family and community that work to protect and nurture children. These are called protective factors and include the following:
• Knowledge of parenting and child development: Accurate information about raising children and appropriate expectations for their behavior.
• Parental resilience: The ability to cope and bounce back from all types of challenges.
• Social connections: Friends, family members, neighbors, and other members of a community who provide emotional support and concrete assistance to parents.
• Concrete support in times of need: Financial security to cover day-to-day expenses and unexpected costs that come up from time to time; access to formal supports like CHIP, and informal support from social network.
• Children’s social and emotional competence: A child’s ability to interact positively with others and communicate his or her emotions effectively.
One of the ways we hope to builder a stronger, safer community for our children is to teach and train the families living in the community how to strengthen other families in the neighborhood. As we talked about earlier this week, the goal of this weekend is to increase parent involvement with each other (building social connections) and to further develop parenting and leadership skills to help you feel comfortable to reach out to other parents, sharing with them information you’ve learned.
It is our hope that you’ll want to work together to plan future family/parent events that would benefit a larger population of the neighborhood. An immediate opportunity is an event scheduled in April; a community discussion to address WV’s Most Critical Question:
How Do We Keep Our Children Free from Abuse and Neglect?
DVD “Circles of Caring”
Preview Discussion Guide and Moderator’s Guide.
How Can You Help?
Who to Invite?
How / Where / When to Advertise/Invite?
Contact Newspaper/ Television for coverage?
Plan for Child Care?
Food?
Need a Recorder
One approach to the prevention of child abuse and neglect is to provide support and information to parents. Your responses to the following questions will help us learn how to better provide that support to parents in this community.
Where and how do parents learn parenting?
What programs are there in our community to help support parents?
Why are some parents reluctant to ask for help?
What is the appropriate role for neighbors and communities in supporting families?
What can we do to provide better support and information to parents in our community?
How can you personally act to support and strengthen families in your life?
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