Through consulting contracts, Dan provides schools with one hour evening sessions designed to educate parents on the Nurtured Heart Approach and its implementation in their child’s school as a social curriculum. This session is the first of two EVENTS designed to reach both school and home. Event-2 focuses specifically on the unique needs of family and is designed to put the same powerful tools that Dan trains teachers and administrators with into the hands of parents.
Event-2, the 4 hour Parent Workshop
The first hour is about the parent paradigm shift and factors that prevent most adults from focusing on the positive character and effort of their children. Crucial concepts like exchanging energy, adults as the prize, and video game therapy are introduced and lay the ground work for other techniques and strategies. Dan also differentiates between an approach versus a program and why it is for all children not just for children with challenges. In the following 3 hours Dan discusses, in detail, backed with moving parent testimonies, three tenets of the Nurtured Heart Approach along with strategies that develop inner wealth through internal motivation rather than external reinforcement. Those three tenets are:
- Energizing success in a very positive way.
- Differentiating between praise and encouragement
- De-Energizing problems - taking the drama and frustration out of discipline
- Strictness. Creating clear rules and expectations to give children the best possible chance of succeeding as well as focusing on learning and recovering from mistakes rather than just "doing time for the crime"
The goals and objectives of this workshop are to provide parents with tangible skills and understanding that will allow them to immediately start implementing the NHA in their home.
Dan calls his Parent Workshops Events because the information, insight, and motivation gained, provides parents with life changing principles and skills that dramatically alter, in powerful and positive ways, the way parents view their children, and in turn, the way children view themselves.
According to the 1999 Surgeon General’s report:
Children must be seen in the context of their social environments—that is, family and peer group, as well as that of their larger physical and cultural surroundings… with the aim of understanding and predicting the forces that will keep children and adolescents mentally healthy and maintain them on course to become mentally healthy adults… Childhood is characterized by periods of transition and reorganization, making it critical to access the mental health of children and adolescents in the context of familial, social, and cultural expectations about age appropriate thoughts, emotions, and behavior.
Children’s mental health professionals indicate it is best to address the mental health needs of children in school, at home and within the community environment. Not only is it important to distinguish the mental health needs of children from those of adults, but research indicates that it is best to begin focusing on the issue as early – and as quickly – as possible.
Based on Dan’s education and master’s degree in Clinical Psychology, experience working in mental health facilities, and advanced training in the Nurtured Heart Approach, Dan is uniquely equipped and dedicated to bringing the NHA into both schools and homes.
