Review the following action sheets for information about your role in supporting families by promoting protective factors. The action sheets include strategies, questions to ask, and activities to do with parents related to each protective factor.

Parental Resilience

Your daily interactions with parents can help them to build their resilience and their belief in themselves as parents and capable decision-makers. You can:

• Have a positive and strengths-based approach to all families
• Support parents as key decision-makers for their families and provide opportunities for decision making that affects the program or community
• Encourage parents to take care of themselves, particularly during stressful times
• Normalize the fact that parenting is stressful and help the parent plan proactively about how to respond to stressful parenting situations
• Validate and support good decisions

Questions to Ask

• Where do you draw your strength?
• How does this help you in parenting?
• What are your dreams for yourself and family
• What kind of worries and frustrations do you deal with during the day?
• How do you solve them?
• How are you able to meet your children's needs when you are stressed?
• How does your spouse, partner, or closest friend support you?
• When you are under stress, what is most helpful?
• What do you do to take care of yourself when you are stressed?

Activities to Do With Parents 

• Ask the parent to write down their self-care strategies and ensure that they are taking time for self-care each day.
• Ask the parent to identify situations they find stressful and make a plan in advance for how they will keep themselves calm and centered in these circumstances.

Social Connections 

You can help parents to think critically about their social network and how they could utilize it more effectively, as well as the skills and tools they need to expand it. The following strategies may assist you in engaging families in developing social connections: 

• Model good relational behavior and use your interactions with families as an opportunity to help parents develop stronger relational skills
• When engaging the family’s broader network, be sensitive to the quality of existing relationships and help the family identify supporters in their network who will contribute positively
• Invite parents to events where they can get to know each other – with or without their kids – and reach out especially to those parents that may be socially isolated 

Questions to Ask 

• Do you have friends or family members that help you out once in a while?
• Are you a member of any groups or organizations?
• Who can you call for advice or just to talk? How often do you see them?
• What kind of social support do you need?
• Do you find it easy or challenging to make friends? If it is challenging, what specific things represent a barrier for you?
• What helps you feel connected?

Activities to Do With Parents 

• Work with the parent to develop an EcoMap showing the people and organizations that are sources of support and/or stress in his or her life.
• Role play with the parent to help them practice skills in approaching another parent to develop a friendship. Have the parent choose a realistic scenario such as starting a conversation at a school event, on the playground or at a place of worship.

Knowledge of Parenting and Child Development 

Each contact you have with the family provides an important opportunity to link them to parenting resources, provide child development information and model and validate effective caregiving. You can: 

• Connect parents to parenting education classes or workshops
• Model appropriate expectations for the child
• Engage parents in dialogue when their expectations are not in line with the child’s developmental abilities
• Underline the importance of nurturing care to help the parent in valuing the importance of their own role
• Provide “just in time” parenting education: crucial information a parent needs at the time when parenting issues arise 

Questions to Ask 

• What does your child do best and what do you like about your child?
• What do you like about parenting?
• What do you find challenging about parenting?
• How have you learned about parenting skills?
• How do you continue to learn about your child’s development?
• What has helped you learn about yourself as a parent?
• Are there things that worry you about your child’s development or behavior?
• Have other people expressed concern about your child?

Activities to Do With Parents 

• Ask the parent what their hopes and dreams are for their child(ren). Discuss any worries the parent has about ensuring those hopes and dreams are met. Then discuss what the parent is doing today (or wants to do) to help achieve those hopes and dreams.

Concrete Supports in Times of Need 

As a professional working with families, your role is not just to provide referrals to needed services, but to identify any barriers the families may have in accessing those services. Such help may entail: 

• Encouraging help seeking behavior
• Working with the family to understand their past experience with service systems and any stigma they attach to certain services
• Helping the family to navigate complex systems by explaining eligibility requirements, filling out forms or making a warm handoff to an individual who can help them negotiate getting access to the services they need
• Helping the parent understand their role as an advocate for themselves and their child 

Questions to Ask 

• What do you need to _________ (stay in your house, keep your job, pay your heating bill etc.)?
• What have you done to handle the problem? Has this worked?
• Are there community groups or local services that you have worked with in the past? What has your experience accessing their services been like?
• Are there specific barriers that have made it difficult for you to access services in the past?
• How does dealing with these issues impact the way you parent?

Activities to Do With Parents 

• Ask the parent to identify one concrete need that, if met, would lighten his or her burden. Come up with a list of at least three possible avenues to get that need met (e.g., agencies to approach, people to ask for help, cutting back on other expenses). 

Social Emotional Competence of Children 

It is important to increase parents’ awareness of the importance of early relationships and of their role in nurturing their child’s social-emotional development. You can help by: 

• Modeling developmentally appropriate interactions with children that help them to recognize and manage their emotions and build other social and emotional skills
• Connecting families to resources that can help support their children’s social-emotional development
• Staying attuned to trauma and how it impacts the child’s behaviors and relationships, including taking time to explain and discuss children’s behavior with parents when they are “acting out” due to trauma

Questions to Ask 

• How is the emotional relationship between you and your child?
• How do you express love and affection to your child?
• How do you help your child express his or her emotions?
• In what situations are your child’s emotions hard for you to deal with?

Activities to Do With Parents 

• Have the parent sketch out (or write out) an interaction with their child. Begin with an experience that typically makes the child happy, sad, frustrated, or angry. Then have the parent illustrate or describe what the child does when he or she feels those emotions, how the parent responds, and how the child responds. Identify and talk through positive or negative patterns in the interaction.
• Ask the parent to think of an adult who they loved as a child. What was it about the relationship with that adult that made it so important? Ask them what elements of that relationship they can replicate in their relationship with their child(ren). 

Adapted from Protective Factors Action Sheets by Center for the Study of Social Policy, n.d., https://cssp.org/ideas-in-action/our-work/projects/protective-factors-action-sheets/