It Takes a Village to Raise a Child
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participatory research
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consultancy
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interdisciplinary
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socialcohesion
Mental Resilience in Action strengthens children, parents and professionals with interventions to sustainably develop resilience and social skills.
January 2020 - Q1 2021
As innovation strategist and program coordinator, I facilitated a child-centred approach. My role included retrieving children's stories, designing participatory forms of work, and co-creating practical interventions with children, parents and professionals.
The program aimed to strengthen the mental resilience of children in the municipality of the Hoeksche Waard. This was done by actively involving children in naming their needs and perspectives, designing interventions based on these insights, and building a supportive network of parents and professionals.
- Retrieve stories: Facilitation of sessions in which children reflected on what mental resilience means to them.
- Analysing: Gaining insight into children's needs, such as self-confidence, safe social relationships and success experiences.
- Developing: Designing playful interventions such as role plays, creative activities and sports challenges, tailored to the age cohorts (4-6, 6-8 and 8-12 years).
- Supervise: Supporting parents and professionals to integrate children's insights into their daily work and parenting.
- Ensuring: Ensuring a sustainable approach by involving the community and strengthening partnerships.
By putting children at the centre of the process, the program became a safe space in which they could share their experiences and ideas.
-Empathy: In sessions, children were able to speak freely about their feelings and fears, such as achievement pressure, bullying and family disputes.
-Self-direction: Children determined together as peers what they needed to become more resilient, such as more time to play freely, less performance pressure and help in dealing with stress.
-Co-creation: The combination of child creativity and adult expertise led to interventions that were both practical and inspiring.
- Increased self-confidence and improved social skills.
- Understanding of their own emotions and strategies to deal with them.
- Increased success experiences through playful and challenging learning environments.
- Tools and insights to support mental resilience in their children.
- An enhanced network of parents for peer-learning and exchange.
- Practical methodologies to integrate resilience and social-emotional learning into their work.
Children iscovered the importance of self-reflection and learning together. They valued activities such as crafts, sports and storytelling, which helped them regulate emotions.
Parents learned the value of empathetic listening and how to help children create success experiences without performance pressure.
Professionals ained new insights into the importance of child-centred interventions and how to apply them in their work environment.
- Participatory action research
- Facilitation of child-centred co-creation sessions
- Development of playful and learning interventions
- Analysis and policy development
- Coaching and interdisciplinairy team development
