Do More Reading on Resiliency and Mental Health.
Good places to start doing more research on resiliency and mental health are:
- Bernard, Bonnie. Fostering Resiliency in the Family, School, and Community. Portland, OR: Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. August 1991.
- Werner, Emmy. "Protective Factors and individual Resilience, " in Handbook of Early Childhood Intervention. Edited by S.J. Meidels and J.P. Shonkoff. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Invite your mental health consultants to the next meeting of the Health Services Advisory Committee (HSAC). Have the group review the program's mental health services plan to evaluate if the current plan as written is focused on promoting mental health as opposed to responding only to mental illness or emotional distress. If health promotion takes second place in terms of emphasis and resources, consider redrafting the plan.
School-linked Services
Many schools have embraced the concepts of resiliency and are pursuing them through school-linked services initiatives. Find out if this is going on in your community. If it is, make sure Head Start is involved in these initiatives. If your local school district is not informed about what it can do to build resiliency at the school level, invite school personnel to participate in head Start's resiliency-oriented training.
Kinship Mapping
One important way that Head Start supports resiliency is to nurture and respect the important relationships in the life of every shild, whether those relationships are parents, other relatives, friends, or neighbors. It can sometimes be difficult to know who the important support people in a family's life are. One tool to identify a child's and family's network of relationships is kinship mapping. A simple example of a Head Start child's kinship map looks like this:
This diagram represents the family and caregivers of Paula, our imaginary Head Start child. Paula was born on September 2, 1992. She has a five year-old sister Ann, a 2 1/2year-old brother Simon, and her mother was pregnant when this kinship map was drawn in September 1996.
Looking at the next older generation, we see that Paula's mother is Marie. She is 28 years old (born in 1968). Paula's father, Jeff, is 32 (born in 1964). Marie and Jeff are married, as represented by the two parallel lines joining them. They were married in 1986, noted as "m86" above the lines joining them.
If we look at Marie's side of the diagram, we see that she was one of five children. She has one older brother, age 31, and sisters who are 23 and 30. A younger brother died in 1994 when he was 24.
Looking at Jeff s side of the diagram, we see that he has a younger sister living in Anchorage, Alaska, and an older brother and sister living in Oregon. His two older brothers died, one in 1952 and one in 1968.
Moving up to the next older generation, we learn that Paula has three living grandparents. Her paternal grandparents live in Sitka, Alaska. Paula's maternal grandmother is a widow who is 53 years old. This grandmother has a younger sister, and their mother, Paula's great- grandmother, is still living at age 75. All of the people on the kinship map who do not have a different community written under their name live in the same community as Paula.
To show who lives in the household with Paula, we draw a "bubble" or circle that includes the relatives who live in the house with her. These include Paula's sister and brother, her mother and father, and her maternal grandmother.
As the sample kinship map shows, the map is an economical way to capture a lot of information. The Family Wellness Project of the Alaska Head Start Health Improvement Initiative has developed an instruction manual designed to help staff develop a kinship map as part of a comprehensive family-wellness assessment. The instruction manual is straightforward, and staff in Alaska who have used kinship mapping have found it to be a useful way to keep track of complex information and invite conversation and reflection about important family relationships. Kinship maps can help Head Start programs include important people who may not be automatically considered when involving family.
Consider incorporating kinship mapping as a routine part of assessing family strengths and concerns. The Instruction Manual for The Kinship Map can be ordered for a modest cost from:
Family Wellness
Project
Prevention Associates
101 East Ninth
Avenue, Suite 7A
Anchorage, Alaska
99501
(907) 272-6925
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