Brief Overview and Competencies – Building Resilience for Kinship Caregivers

Brief Overview:
Understand the importance of self-care and practical ideas on how to do it; understand signs of stress and burnout; recognize the importance of parents who are providing kinship care to maintain their mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being; understand what parental resiliency is and why it is important; understand how caring for children who have experienced trauma, separation or loss can impact your own well-being; understand the behaviors that foster a protective environment for parents and children.

Knowledge Competencies:
• Understand why maintaining physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being contributes to successful kinship parenting.
• Know the signs of caregiver stress and burnout.
• Understands why self-care is a necessary component of good parenting and essential to strengthening resiliency.
• Understands parent resiliency is the ability to recover quickly after encountering a difficult or tough situation.
• Know how the trauma, separation, and loss that the children have experienced can impact the kinship caregiver.
• Know strategies to implement self-care.
• Understand behaviors that foster a protective environment for parents and children.

Attitude Competencies:
• Believe self-care is an integral part of being an effective parent.
• Committed to the idea of prioritizing children’s needs while balancing ways to meet their own.
• Believe resiliency is important to the success of kinship caregivers.