All parents want their children to grow and thrive.  Just like the roots of a tree, early relationships lay a critical foundation for children’s healthy development, and provide a protective buffer when storm winds blow.  The Strong Roots programs were developed in partnership with parents and providers to deliver an integrated parenting and mental health curriculum that incorporates evidenced based concepts that can be configured or adapted for different audiences. The long-term objective of the Strong Roots programs is to strengthen protective factors for families with young children, from conception through early childhood, to ensure they have the resources they need to reach their full potential. These protective factors include knowledge of parenting and child development, child social-emotional competence, supportive social connections, access to concrete support in times of need, and strengthened parent and family resiliency. Our Strong Roots core curriculum offers parents a soft-safe entry into care, delivering a mental health and parenting psychoeducation, strategies for emotional and physical self-care to enhance resilience, and experiential learning opportunities to nurture parental curiosity and reflection to support responsive parenting, and can help providers create a soft-safe entry into care. 

This training will comprehensively cover Strong Roots Core concepts and allow attendees opportunities to practice delivering these concepts in an interactive format. This training includes access to the Mom Power curriculum and will satisfy the training requirement for attendees to implement Mom Power groups. Additional training may be required to implement other Strong Roots Adaptation programming. 

The Five Core Components of Strong Roots:

1. Teaching Attachment-Based Parenting Skills in an Educational Group
2. Teaching Self-Care Skills, Stress Reduction, and Mind-Body Exercises
3. Enhancing Social Supports
4. Promoting Parent-Child Interactions
5. Connecting Participants to Ongoing Care