Akamas
Experience Learning
PROMOTING HEALTHY DEVELOPMENT
Written By
Kate Cairns
Learning Outcomes
To achieve this unit a learner must:
- Describe how carers can enable children to recover from or adapt to developmental impairments arising from unmet attachment needs
- Explain the importance of life story work for looked after children and young people in enabling them to form a strong and positive personal narrative
- Prepare a plan for an intervention with a child or young person that will enable them to develop resilience and prepare for the transition to adult life
- Demonstrate how they have used what they have learned in this unit in their work with children and young people
Content and Structure
MODULE 1
Enabling children to recover from or adapt to developmental impairments arising from unmet attachment needs
The attachment process in healthy infants:
- Key issues for babies: dependency and control.
- Links between attachment relationships and brain development.
- Key stages: stress regulation; trust; empathy and feelings; impulse and shame.
- Effects of unmet attachment needs.
- Distorted development in relation to dependency and control.
- Thinking and feeling with a different brain: sensory awareness, information processing and cognition.
- Impairments in: stress regulation, formation of trust relationships, emotional literacy, impulse regulation, regulation of shame, and moral accountability.
Helping children to recover or adapt
- Helping children to regulate stress.
- Helping children to develop emotional literacy.
- Helping children to regulate impulse and shame.
MODULE 2
Life story work for looked after children and young people: enabling children to form a strong and positive personal narrative
Life story work and the seven dimensions of child development
- How the personal narrative of children is linked to their development in terms of health, education, identity, family and social relationships, social presentation, emotional and behavioural development, and self-care skills
Informal and formal life story work
- Day-to-day life and the development of narrative.
- Formal life story work with looked after children: keeping the narrative safe.
Helping children to form a strong and positive personal narrative
- Working directly with children day by day to enhance their life narrative.
- Using the review system to encourage and enable formal life story work.
- Engaging children in formal life story work.
MODULE 3
Intervention with a child or young person: enabling them to develop resilience and prepare for the transition to adult life
The importance of resilience
- The impact of transitions on traumatised children.
- Defining resilience.
- Recognising the strengths and resourcefulness of looked after children.
- The difference between coping and resilience.
- Recognising the link between resilience and successful transitions.
Factors that contribute to preparing children and young people for the transition to adult life
- Secure base: assessing security and the quality of attachments.
- Education: assessing educational development, attainment and opportunities.
- Friendships: assessing sociability and social support.
- Talents and interests: assessing existing activities and opportunities for development.
- Positive values: assessing moral reasoning, understanding other perspectives and caring for others.
- Social competencies: assessing autonomy, self- control, temperament, self-efficacy and attention.
Helping children to develop resilience
- Working ecologically with and for the child or young person throughout the placement to promote their resilience.
- Promoting a sense of security and enhancing the quality of attachments.
- Promoting educational attainment.
- Enhancing sociability and encouraging positive friendships.
- Encouraging the development of existing and new talents and interests.
- Promoting positive values.
Level: 3
