Spotting and Strengthening Resiliency Skills from Early Childhood Erasmus Project

Project Title

Spotting and Strengthening Resiliency Skills from Early Childhood

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy) ; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Health and wellbeing

Project Summary

The first researches on resilience were implemented in the 1970s and focused on longitudinal examination of flexibility to stress. Back then the definition was mainly used in mechanics and physics, after that psychology started to make researches on flexibility and endurance of the personality in face of trauma, prolonged stress etc. Resiliency researches after 2000 first focused on resilience as a personality skill, but later started to take into consideration environmental impacts on coping mechanism as well; at the moment the newest researches combine these informations and handle resiliency as an ecologic mechanism.
To this day, there’s no exact definition on resiliency. Its attributions are scattered among several social science definitions and within the mindfulness movement as well, since the expansion of pop culture psychology. Resiliency shows connections to definitions such as hardiness, thriving or posttraumatic growht but also includes beneficial environmental factors so the resilient individual doesn’t just cope with stress on its own despite everything but has several environmental factors that help them coping.

Since mental disorders in both adults and teenagers are more and more common and according to WHO’s 2015 research it has a co-morbidity factor as well (people with mental disorders die 20 year younger than others) it has utmost urgency to strengthen environmental and personality factors that can help create healthy coping mechanism with stress. It’s even more important knowing that the everchanging labour market, demanding educational system and global warming all put children and adolescent into a highly stressful situation (see e.g. eco-anxiety).

In our project the partnership will collect best practices of helping strengthening these beneficial factors from several social fields (e.g. social sciences, pedagogy, early childhood development, mentoring, non-formal teaching techniques etc.) and create an easily adaptable method of training children to cope with stress and to empower them to face changes in life.

To perfect the method, every participant will gather groups of individuals (70 through the project in 3 countries) who work or intend to work with youth in the future and engage them in pilot training activities throughout the project. The groups will participate in a 3 day long training where they learn about how to raise resiliency and how to build this knowledge into their daily practice with children through non-formal learning practices. Then they try out these exercises with children and send constant feedback on how they work in practice with different groups of children. To help giving the project participants feedback we create guidelines beforehand on what to examine during these excersises, so the received information will be easier to process.

The best practices collection and the training materials will be complemented with a research on how to spot resiliency skills and attributions in early childhood so academic professionals will also be able to use our results and research methods on how to be empowered from early childhood, developing healthy coping mechanisms in face of traumas, stress and sudden changes that await everyone in life.

We will also create a 20 pages long advisory for national policy makers and influencers in all three participating countries and hand it over to leading organizations in pedagogy and youth social services.

During the multiplication events, we also intend to reach 30 youth workers, policy makers and policy influencers to introduce them to our method, the research’s results and to multiply the impact of the policy recommendations so resiliency skills can be strengthened in several different fields outside of education as well.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 70397 Eur

Project Coordinator

Országos Tranzitfoglalkoztatási Egyesület & Country: HU

Project Partners

• PRESOVSKA UNIVERZITA V PRESOVE
• Universitatea Crestina Partium