February 10, 2022

More than just a word, “resilience” is a measurable area of growth. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or even significant sources of threat.” According to research, two thirds of any given human population demonstrates resilience through a continued ability to function after traumatic events such as 9/11. Maybe some resilience comes from a natural tendency or family culture to be optimistic — it’s not totally clear yet. But professionals have little doubt that you can build resilience, in young people especially, by adopting a growth mindset. Tools from Y4Y’s Trauma-Informed Care Click & Go, and courses in Stages of Child and Adolescent Development and Social and Emotional Learning, can help your program be intentional in nurturing resilience in your students.

A Foundation of Understanding

Your staff members probably have amazing insights and observations about child psychology after working with students in your program and previous jobs. But what kind of formal training on this topic has taken place to ensure your program offers the best individualized approach to building resilience? Here are some useful Y4Y tools and short trainings to start conversations around understanding what makes students tick:

• Understanding Development and Connecting With Children Training to Go. You can conduct this training with staff on your favorite internet platform while they sip hot cocoa at home on the couch. You’ll cover why connections with adults are so important to healthy child development, and identify strategies for building those positive, nurturing relationships with students of different ages.
• Meet students where they are developmentally when you understand where they are. Consult the Y4Y Child and Adolescent Development Matrix for those basics.
• Armed with this foundation, introduce staff to the five skill domains of social and emotional learning, then start conversations about how those skills relate to building resilience. For example, beginning with building self-awareness, talk with staff about how they’re developing a safe and welcoming environment for students to be open and honest about how they’re feeling.
• The Introduction to Social and Emotional Learning Training to Go will expand on this conversation.
• Have staff review the Y4Y Background on Trauma Research Brief to understand the threat that trauma poses to lifelong health if intervention and supports are unavailable to a child. For even more understanding, check out the Y4Y Professional Development to Teach Students of Trauma Book List.

Time to Implement

Use these Y4Y tools to put interventions into practice within your program space:

• Start by ensuring a positive environment with Y4Y’s observation checklist.
• Remembering that social and emotional skill-building is key to nurturing resilience, train staff with the Integrating Social and Emotional Learning Training to Go, and check out the Social Emotional Learning Activity Intentional Design Planner.
• Don’t forget your partners in nurturing resilience: parents and the students themselves! You can customize the observation logs and, for older students, the self-assessments, in the Assess and Reflect category of Y4Y’s stages of child and adolescent development tools. That customization can emphasize working together to set student-specific social and emotional goals according to the challenges each child is facing in their home or community.
• The Y4Y Teaching Resilience Book List and Student Trauma Book List offer descriptions of many developmentally appropriate books to read with students for inspiration. Introducing your students to characters who meet with hard times and pull through stronger and wiser is a great way to indirectly nurture resilience. Ask your school or community librarian if they have other suggestions with this goal in mind.
• Y4Y also offers a tool, Activities and Practices for Managing Stress, with simple ideas on proven methods.

Measure Success

Some of your success in nurturing resilience will be evident. The child who lost a beloved grandparent begins to smile and laugh again. The child who was in a car accident realizes that playing out his experience gains him attention and awe from peers who ask questions. Maybe he even shares his fears out loud, building his skills of self-awareness and his peers’ skills in social awareness and relationships skills through empathy. Be sure you’re noting these observations with Y4Y tools and planning for ways to measure the resilience more formally that you’ve nurtured in students.

• Review the Y4Y Rubric for Assessing Social and Emotional Competencies and be sure staff understand how best to use this tool with students.
• Download and adapt the Student Assess and Adapt Checklist from Y4Y’s course on student voice and choice to emphasize those personal growth goals.
• If your observations give you cause for concern, consult the Y4Y podcasts on trauma-informed strategies and what it means to be a mandated reporter.

Turn to Nature to Nurture Resilience

Just as those picture book characters show students different ways to persevere, you can turn to nature to nurture resilience in your students. Consider forest fires. In our limited view, we think of fire as needless destruction, and in many cases, perhaps it does have unnecessary human causes. However, even before forests became a habitat for humans, they had adapted to fire. They depend on a cycle of fire and regrowth to remain healthy. Every student, whether they’re living with mild stress to full-blown crisis, can remember this: From the ashes comes new, stronger growth.

February 10, 2022

Part of overall wellness is moving our bodies. This bit of obvious wisdom should play a role in everything you do in your program. Whether you’re offering alternatives to screen time, incorporating stretch breaks into your tutoring sessions, or building dance parties into your virtual programming, Y4Y has tips and tools to remind you to encourage students to “keep bouncing” to bounce back.

Get Aligned

Y4Y created an entire Click & Go on strategies for partnering with the school day in your health and wellness efforts. Your program would never offer academic supports without first checking with the school day about needs, content, and methods of delivering those supports, so why should health and wellness be any different? Check out tools to start those important conversations and initiate a partnership with your host school or district, learn about health and wellness standards that impact out-of-school time, assess your students’ specific needs, then select appropriate activities. You’ll want to be sure to get buy-in from students. After all, you’re helping them to set a lifelong habit of moving their bodies — you want to be sure it’s fun for them! Download and customize the elementary or secondary student interest inventory according to what your program can offer! Give families a voice in this partnership too with the Family Satisfaction Survey, which you can customize to fit your needs.

Take a Page From Transitions

Transitions may be those little windows in your program day when you’ve been extra intentional in building in movement. Y4Y offers a tool on transition strategies that guides you through some practices of consistency and predictability so that students can move onto something different with renewed focus. Consider using these same principles to build stretch or wiggle breaks into the middle of an activity. When there are predictable rules around those breaks, they don’t have to be an interruption, but a reset with physical and mental benefits.

Re-Create Recreation in Out-of-School Time

At the secondary level especially, recreational activities can be unique opportunities to help students bounce back. Karyl Resnick of Massachusetts shared her state’s practice of infusing social and emotional learning into sports activities. She notes, “We’ve explored research that says developing relationships can enhance student outcomes, and we’re building that finding into our sports and recreation activities. We’re doing the same with movement and mindfulness activities. To help programs infuse social and emotional learning into activities, we’re developing short videos to help grantees understand what it is, what it looks like in practice, and strategies for making it part of their activity design.” And 21^st CCLC grantee Simone Miranda of Schenectady City School District noted that her program was a saving grace during school closings: “During the pandemic, students shared with staff that they needed more physical activities and to share their feelings and emotions. The program used this information to develop a sports club and art lessons to meet the students’ needs. The sports club incorporated virtual physical activities designed by the sports specialist, which included yoga, Zumba, fitness challenges, and other physical activities. In addition, literacy was embedded in the sports club by using books written by male, female, and diverse sports athletes.” Even with programs reopened, Ms. Miranda acknowledges that physical activities are the greatest draw in her popular and successful high school program.

Allow For Bouncing Differently

Just as students have different interests when it comes to how they move their bodies, they also have different strengths and abilities. Be sure the students who might need the most bouncing back have the opportunity to bounce to their greatest ability. Helpful tools from Y4Y’s Including Students With Disabilities course include an activity planner and environmental checklist. A strengths-based approach should be considered for all students. Some students are at their best in agility activities. Others may be drawn to activities that emphasize speed or strength. You don’t have to offer 100 physical activities to find something that will work for everyone.

Show the Parallels

As you’re using physical activity in your program to help students build resilience, help them to understand that’s what you’re doing! When a student falls after attempting a layup shot, applaud them for getting back up. Challenge them to think of a time they “got back up” from something that felt like an academic failure. If a student calls out a friend to spot them while attempting a new trick on the bars or lifting a heavy weight, challenge them to think of when they leaned on a friend through heartache. You can help them frame their thinking so that not only are they bouncing out negative feelings, but they are also discovering a mind-body connection they can use to bounce back for the rest of their lives.

February 3, 2022

The data are in: “Adaptation of children in disasters depends on the resilience of interconnected systems, including families, schools, communities, and policy sectors.” Throughout the U.S., in the past two months alone, communities have faced unprecedented fires, tornados, flooding, and freezing temperatures with loss of power. The entire country is facing surges in COVID-19, and with them, more school closings and virtual learning, illness and loss, and economic impacts. Who are your partners in critical efforts to buoy students through recovery? The school district? Parents? Reflections on an invited paper in the International Journal of Psychology suggest you can use Y4Y professional development resources to arrive at common language and align practices with these partners to build student resilience as a group effort.

Safety Planning and Implementation

A Y4Y Click & Go offers a mini-lesson to bring you up to speed on the basics of safety preparedness missions, alignment with your host organization, and the roles of each staff member. The Click & Go includes podcasts that further explain safety planning, host organization plans, developing and implementing a program-specific plan, and how to practice safety with appropriate sensitivity to the emotional needs of students. There are tools to help you put it all in place. If your program is already implementing a safety plan, you can use the Click & Go to ensure common language, alignment, and clear roles among partners. These steps can strengthen what the paper cited above calls “the resilience of interconnected systems.”

Partnership and Communication

Many Y4Y resources can be tapped to reinforce the strength of your community and family partnerships, both from a structural perspective — like aligned policies and practices — and from a social perspective — like shared culture and climate. Check out these partnership- and communication-building tools:

• Reaching Out to Families
• Family Engagement Communication and Record Keeping
• Communicate With Families (video)
• Benefits of Family Engagement (video)
• Communication With Families About Safety
• Communicating With Schools Training Starter
• Strategies for Creating a Positive Learning Environment

Cross-organizational trainings and regular reminders can help you keep everyone on the same page. Program leaders can review the Y4Y trainings listed below and pull out the most relevant information to share with staff and partners:

• Effective Workplace Communication
• Strengthening Connections With Families and Communities (webinar)
• Connecting Families to Supports

Student Well-Being

With all your adult-to-adult group efforts strengthened, you’ll be ready to decide together what student well-being looks like and how priorities are set. Remember to assign those priorities according to school- and student-level data in your district. At this moment in history, those data may well include the number of homes destroyed, loved ones lost, or students living with food insecurity. Revisit the vast collection of Y4Y data collection tools if you’re unsure how to carry out this critical step. Then, use the tools below to shape the priorities of your group effort in ways that are developmentally appropriate, honor social and emotional growth, and acknowledge the likely presence and impact of trauma:

• Child and Adolescent Development Matrix
• Mapping Assets for Social and Emotional Learning
• Trauma-Informed Care (Click & Go)
• Health and Wellness: Partnering With the School Day (Click & Go)

As with building communication among partners, consider cross-organizational training on student well-being with Y4Y resources like these:

• Building a Strong Program Team (focused on child and adolescent development)
• Partnering With Families for Healthy Child Development
• Introduction to Social and Emotional Learning
• Integrating Social and Emotional Learning

The proverb It takes a village to raise a child has evidence behind it today. The question your community needs to ask itself is: What does “raise” mean? One thing you’re sure to agree on is this: You can’t put children in a bubble. You can’t protect them from tough times. What you can do is prepare them for tough times with supports that build their resilience — their ability to learn and grow from those tough times. A look at the data confirms that when you do this as a community, you’ll have the greatest chance for success.

January 20, 2022

The students in your program are not likely to be “spoiled” at home, though you might find they’re occasionally “indulged” by parents wishing they could make their lives just a little easier. With a quick review of the milestone matrix prepared by Y4Y to accompany the new Stages of Child and Adolescent Development course, you’ll gain some basic ideas of what students need most from the adults in their lives at various stages of development. Use these tips and additional Y4Y tools to explore those areas where your program can offer students the royal treatment by supporting healthy growth and development for the best possible life outcomes.

Students ages 4-6 are improving their fine motor skills, are beginning to understand cause and effect, and want to show off their skills. Ways to support these areas of development include

• Establishing a program space rich with materials that “grow with” young peoples’ motor development, like crayons and paint brushes in different sizes.
• Asking many leading questions, even ones that are not lesson-oriented, like “What could happen if I don’t tie this long shoelace of mine?”
• Creating opportunities to show off talents great and small, reminding students to encourage one another and not always take a competitive position. For example: a hopping-on-one-foot “break” (not contest) could be a nice way to take a breather from academics. You can call out different students for how creatively or slowly they hop as well as the student who hops the longest.

Check out Y4Y’s Facilitating Positive Youth Development in Summer Learning Training to Go.

Students ages 6-9 may become more physical in their games, are beginning to read to learn once they’ve learned to read, and are beginning to identify their own personality traits in comparison with others. Ways to support these areas of development include

• Offering a variety of options during outdoor playtime with established safety ground rules and the opportunity to play contact sports to the degree all participants are comfortable.
• Coordinating with school partners like the librarian to offer interesting reading material that supports academics. Offer “fact treasure hunt” activities.
• Providing daily reflection opportunities. Choose an adjective each day like “confident,” “strong,” or “smart,” and ask students to remember a moment in their day when they saw this trait in themselves.

Check out Y4Y’s Effective Questioning literacy tool and Best Practices for Mindfulness tool.

Students ages 9-12 are developing faster reaction times, experiencing a rise in self-esteem as interest-based peer groups emerge, and are increasingly able to monitor and direct their own progress toward a long-term goal. Ways to support these areas of development include

• Interspersing “rapid-fire” quizzing as a study strategy for students who enjoy that activity and are not stressed by it.
• Offering icebreaker activities throughout the year to help students continually look for things in common with all their peers. Challenge them to make “unexpected” connections.
• Allowing long-term group projects to be centered on student voice and choice and student-driven goal setting.

Check out Y4Y’s Icebreaker Activities and Student Goal Setting and Reflection – Middle School.

Students ages 12-15 are completing puberty, growing critical of adults and siblings, may thrive on conflict ranging from intellectual debate to serious rebellion, and becoming anxious for the future. Ways to support these areas of development include

• Firmly establishing your program as a safe space for different opinions and life experiences while fostering constructive debates about society and the world around your students.
• Forging deeper trust and connections with students while maintaining healthy boundaries between adults and teens.
• Offering a wide variety of career pathway activities to broaden students’ horizons and help them to envision themselves as successful adults.

Check out Y4Y’s Incorporating Multiple Viewpoints Checklist and Career Pathways Activity Design Guidebook.

Students ages 15-18 are physically mature or nearly so, likely to be feeling strong emotions like anger or loneliness even if those emotions aren’t always obvious, and are increasingly able to take everything they’ve learned to make decisions about their future. Ways to support these areas of development include

• Encouraging initiative and leadership skills in your program and beyond.
• Continuing to educate students on all aspects of lifelong health and wellness, centered on better understanding themselves and their own needs, and making good choices in much more “adult” arenas.
• Offering guidance through the practical aspects of career pathway choices such as test prep, college or apprenticeship applications, or speaking with military recruiters.

Check out Y4Y’s Youth Leadership Roles tool and Student Self-Assessment: Late Adolescence.

No Such Thing as a Spoiled Child

It may be decades before we can successfully remove the term “spoiled” from the long list of adjectives we might use for children. But as a youth worker, you understand better than most that term simply means that expectations on a child do not match what is developmentally appropriate for them. Often you are aware of why this might be the case for the students in your program. But raising these princes and princesses to be their best selves is an honor you share with their parents, so remember to team up with tools like Y4Y’s Sample Caregiver Survey and Partnering With Families for Healthy Child Development Training to Go.

One day your students will rule the world. We’ll all benefit from them ruling wisely.

September 21, 2021

Heading into what’s traditionally flu season, your host organization is likely stepping up its safety practices to ensure a healthy winter. Throughout August, the U.S. Department of Education (the Department) released resources and reminders to start the year out right. Be sure to review them along with Y4Y resources to help you “brave” the rest of the program year.

To start, check out the Department’s comprehensive list of COVID-19 resources and the Return to School Roadmap.

The Department responded to questions about enforcement of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) — which promises all a free appropriate public education (FAPE) — during these unpredictable times. The Department issued a letter to state education agencies (SEAs) noting that it reaffirms a commitment to the legislation. What does this mean in your 21^st CCLC program? As an entity receiving federal funds, you want to be sure your students with disabilities are not disproportionately impacted. Consult Y4Y’s resources in the course on including students with disabilities, such as the Federal State Law Fillable Document, to be sure you’re up to speed with any modifications your state might have made in response to COVID-19 measures. While you continue to make modifications to your program space with infection safety in mind, don’t forget to review the Environmental Checklist to be sure you’re still accommodating those students with disabilities.

While it does stand firm on IDEA, be sure to review the Department’s list of Waivers and Flexibility, and know that as you have pockets of students going in and out of quarantine, your state may offer generous flexibility around school-time 21^st CCLC programming. Y4Y hosted and archived many webinars and published contributions from practitioners around the country who managed to meet their students where they were throughout the last school year. Check out 21^st CCLC Programs in a Virtual World Part I and Part 2, and podcasts on engaging students virtually, successful virtual STEAM programming and one program’s student-driven “netiquette” policies.

In response to questions around school openings and civil rights, the Department prepared a civil rights Q&A document. Has the question of civil rights come up in your program space? Don’t be afraid of this conversation! Instead, use the opportunity to help students understand how our government works, both on the national and local levels. Y4Y’s Civic Learning and Engagement course and resources like the Investigating Issues in Your Community tool can help you turn a hot-button topic into a teaching moment.

Know that a focus on wellness — both physical and mental — is a priority for everyone this year. The Department published a list of resources, but catering to your 21^st CCLC program specifically, tools within the Y4Y’s Health and Wellness: Partnering With the School Day Click & Go can make it easy to work with the professionals who know your students as well as you do to fill in the wellness gaps you discover together. In some cases, your program may even be connecting families with health care or other related services. Now is a good time for staff to brush up on their understanding of how important all types of family engagement are in 21^st CCLC programs with Y4Y’s Training to Go on connecting families to supports.

“Wellness” means different things to different people, especially in 2021, but we know your concern for students’ wellness covers all definitions: physical, mental and academic. We’re here to help. Just take your dose of Y4Y and call us in the morning!