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Speaker: Karina Forrest-Perkins MHR, LADC & CEO of The Wayside House

This course is worth 5CEUs & lunch is provided!

This course was designed and developed for professional caregivers, healthcare workers, teachers, coaches, social workers and parents to become more competent, informed, caring adults. You will walk away with a short list of building resilience factors for children and youth.

We all experience stress and we all have the same type of response to the accumulation of stress. Human beings have multiple regions of our brain which contribute to our thoughts and behavior. This course will focus on the brain’s survival mechanism, limbic mechanism, and frontal and pre-frontal cortex.

You will learn about cognitive shut-down… The more prepared you become for danger, the less your body perceives you need relational skills. The more upset we become, the less sophisticated our thinking becomes.

You will learn about Neuro-synaptic development. At birth we have ~100 billion neurons with 50 trillion connections or synapses. At one year the brain has 1,000 trillion synapses. On average between the age of 0-5, children produce over 20,000 connections per second. In adulthood we produce ~400 connections per day.

Behavior, affect, attitude, capacities may not be “choices”—they may be responses to stress accumulation during development. When individuals who have grown up with high stress accumulation do not receive the support they need to balance this condition, they transmit the same problem onto the next generation and the accumulation process starts all over again.

A large portion of many health, safety and prosperity conditions is attributable to Adverse Childhood Experience: adolescent health, reproductive health, smoking, alcohol abuse, illicit drug abuse, sexual behavior, mental health, risk of revictimization, stability of relationships and performance in the workforce. Hundreds of billions of dollars annually support strategies that do not intervene early enough or that miss too many people who would benefit from them.