Overview of the "Raising Resilient Youth" Training

In this component, families are asked to examine and enhance their ability to develop and implement expectations and consequences with their children in all areas of interest and concern. Parents are taught how to include their children’s active participation in setting both expectations and consequences on a wide variety of important issues of interest or concern to the parent including alcohol and drugs. This encourages dialogue, which enhances a sense of competence, connectedness, and bonding between parent and child.

The “Raising Resilient Youth” training was formerly known as the COPES’ “Working with Youth” training. This training was designed to provide youth workers with the necessary skills, attitudes, and knowledge to successfully influence youth in making healthy decisions. School counselors, recreation facility staff, principals, teachers, and church workers were among those who received the training between 1981 and 1987. The curriculum focused on the principles of inclusion, acceptance, understanding, respect, and autonomy.

In 1988 the “Working with Youth” training was revised and renamed the “Not My Child” training. The “Not My Child” training was implemented with families as part of a federally funded research demonstration project called the “Creating Lasting Connections” project from 1989-1994 (see introduction of this manual for the research results of the CLC project). In 1997, the program was refined and renamed the COPES’ “Raising Resilient Youth” training, one of the five major components of our exciting new “Creating Lasting Family Connections” Program package.

The “Raising Resilient Youth” Rationale
The basic premises upon which the “Raising Resilient Youth” training was developed are as follows:

1. No one can control someone else’s behavior 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
2. We may influence children through open and honest communication, including listening, sharing, and modeling. We can also share knowledge, information, understanding, and love.
3. Responsibility is learned through practice.
4. Pain is a natural part of life. It is normal to feel pain.
5. When a person hurts, it helps to express feelings.
6. Everyone needs feedback from others to know and improve themselves.
7. We teach and promote self-esteem in our children by listening to their thoughts and feelings with interest, respect, and understanding even when we disagree.
8. Children respond to opportunities to contribute to their family through responsible behavior only after years of practice.
9. Developing expectations and consequences is very different from setting rules and exacting punishments because the focus is on teaching and modeling responsibility rather than appearing to be retaliating for parental disappointment.
10. Children need and deserve unconditional love, i.e., no misbehavior can cause the absolute loss of love, respect, nurture, support, or compassion.

The “Raising Resilient Youth” training operates under the overarching premise that it is possible for parents to learn more effective parenting knowledge, attitudes, and skills, if they are given the opportunity to practice and test out these skills in a safe environment; and, if practiced enough, these skills can become the natural way of responding to their children. Two inclusive dimensions of parenting addressed in the “Raising Resilient Youth” training which appear to be most important in child-rearing are a large amount of love, acceptance, and warmth of the parent toward the child, and a moderate to high level of expectations followed by the consistent application of previously negotiated consequences.

In order to realize sustained behavioral change, the training process may be enhanced if it can be repeated on a yearly basis. In fact, this belief has been strengthened through COPES’ replication of the CLC project, called The Family Network. COPES’ staff are finding that parents who previously participated in the “Raising Resilient Youth” training through the CLC program are once again attending the training in order to practice and hone their skills. The complexity and diversity of skills needed for effective parenting can be overwhelming for many parents. We have found that opportunities for repeated exposure, practice, and continued support of these skills is necessary for some parents to develop sustained behavioral outcomes. The “Raising Resilient Youth” training appears to be greatly enhanced when parents attend all three parent training modules of the “Creating Lasting Family Connections” program.

CLFC Links: