Often parents who are struggling to connect with their child find it difficult to find any real measure of hope. In this brief video, Dr. Karyn Purvis talks about the importance for parents to find even a single point of connection as way to start building a bridge so that they can begin to reach their child.
Children from hard places are often impacted in many different ways by their histories. One of the most profound, yet often overlooked, is the way in which these children’s sensory processing is affected.
The new educational video, A Sensory World: Making Sense of Sensory Disorders, produced by the TCU Institute of Child Development features Dr. Karyn Purvis and offers insights about how sensory processing disorders make it difficult for many children to function at home and school, and can be the underlying cause of behavioral problems. The video provides parents and professionals with the insights they need to learn to recognize signs of sensory disorders as well as the practical strategies to help parents and children effectively deal with the them. In addition, child development researchers Dr. Karyn Purvis and Dr. David Cross, and Carol Kranowitz, author of The Out-of-Sync Child, provide a number of playful activities to help children improve their self-esteem and overcome everyday struggles that hamper their success.
For many, the adoption process begins by surveying agency information, evaluating financial considerations and tackling mountains of paperwork, all while working through a complex array of questions, doubts and even fears. One important, but often overlooked, aspect is the need to engage the adoption journey from the “inside out” – through ongoing, honest self-reflection and self-evaluation.
Parents often focus much of their attention on obtaining the right skills and strategies to effectively deal with misbehavior — and this is for good reason. All parents of children from hard places need to understand how to address misbehavior in ways that correct while still connecting. But parents also need to understand the importance of setting their child up to succeed.
In this brief video, Dr. Purvis explains why it is important for parents to set thier child up to succeed, and she talks about some practical ways parents can begin to do that.
Created To Connect: A Christian’s Guide to The Connected Child is a study guide created by Dr. Karyn Purvis and Michael & Amy Monroe to help illuminate the biblical principles that serve as the foundation for the philosophy and the interventions detailed in Dr. Purvis’ book, The Connected Child. This study guide is designed to help adoptive and foster parents better understand how to build strong and lasting connections with their children, and is ideal for use in small groups as well as by individuals or couples.
As part of our ongoing Common Questions & Concerns series, we address behavior and discipline issues that many children from hard places often encounter at school:
Question: My child is struggling in the classroom and is being sent to the principal’s office on a regular basis. He refuses to do some of the art class activities, has melt-downs in music class and withdraws during some class activities. To make things worse, standing in the school lunch line today he punched a child in the stomach and was sent to the prinicipal’s office to sit for the rest of the afternoon (nearly 3 hours!). What can I do?
Watch The Connecting Link: What Parents Need to Bring Healing to Their Children, delivered at the 2009 Tapestry Adoption & Foster Care Conference.
We were made to connect – with each other, with creation and with our Creator. As a result, one of the greatest gifts that parents can give to their children is a strong and lasting sense of connection. In The Connecting Link: What Parents Need to Bring Healing to Their Children, delivered at the 2009 Tapestry Adoption & Foster Care Conference, Dr. Purvis focuses on this important topic.
In this talk, Dr. Purvis provides parents with a better understanding of why children from hard places use distancing strategies, and how they can help their children replace those strategies by giving them voice, empowering them to make choices and helping them rediscover their inherent preciousness. In addition, Dr. Purvis challenges parents to better understand what they bring to the relationship, and to look at their own past hurts and loss with honesty and forgiveness.
Finding the Real Child, from the Spring 2006 issue of The TCU Magazine, details the remarkable story of Kristen. This story of hope illustrates well the healing power of parent/child connections. The article also offers a brief history of TCU’s Institute of Child Development, and provides an overview of the Institute’s work to help children and parents.
“Children from Hard Places.” This is the phrase used by Dr. Purvis and others to describe children that have experienced some type of abuse, neglect or trauma during their lives (including prenatal exposure to substances or high levels stress, difficult labor or birth before or medical trauma). Obviously, this phrase applies to most children who were adopted or spent time in foster care.
audio recording of this presentation (mp3 file)