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Supporting children and young people's wellbeing
Supporting children and young people's wellbeing

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5.1 Family centres

Family centres are community contexts that provide local support to parents, carers and children. Hedgerows Family Centre (‘Hedgerows’) supports a local community in Milton Keynes designated as one of the most deprived areas in the UK. Hedgerows offers a range of targeted services spanning health, parenting, childcare and community learning to support diverse family needs. In the next activity you will listen to the manager from Hedgerows talking about resilience and how they as a centre work with families.

Activity 5 Hedgerows

Timing: Allow about 30 minutes

Task 1

Watch the following video. Tina, the manager from Hedgerows, talks about her understanding of the term ‘resilience’ and how this concept is central to the work of the family centre. In the next task you’ll be asked a series of questions, so you might want to bear these in mind as you watch the video.

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Transcript: Tina Price talks about resilience

TINA PRICE
Resilience, for me, is about everything that we do, really, here at Hedgerows. We are here to support children, families, people in the wider community, but we really want them to come in and, down the line, hopefully they won't come back. I mean that in the nicest way possible. We want them to come back and volunteer. We want to move on and be resilient, and be successful in their own lives, so they can draw on their own strengths that they would have learned through maybe courses or through the support of the staff at the centre or other partners that we work with, so they then can then solve their own problems, their own crises, support their children, and have the confidence to do that, so they don't feel that they're not capable as a parent, that they need, you know, an agency involved in their life, when they may have had that themselves. We have many parents that go on, and children, to be resilient. In terms of parents, it might be about going back to work, being confident to do a training course, or emotionally, signpost themselves to another agency, or actually, know that they might go through a tough time, but they will come out the other side. Maybe, eventually, not take antidepressants, as many of our parents do. That would be a huge sign that they're resilient. Defining a child who's resilient is probably harder, I would say, than defining what it is for an adult. But for me, it would be a child that could actually come in and enjoy a session in nursery, be engaged, be fulfilled, but also be able to share if they're unhappy or share their emotions, so when they go to school and they come up again, it's a problem, that it's not going to define them, that they can face that challenge. So then when they go to secondary school, perhaps they're not missing time out. They're not staying at home, because something is troubling them at school. That they can go in there, face it. They're not going to end up maybe in a different school, and they can be able to complete their exams and hopefully go to university or have the job of their dreams.
End transcript: Tina Price talks about resilience
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Tina Price talks about resilience
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Task 2

Based on what you have just watched, make notes using the following questions.

  1. How does Tina describe adults from Hedgerows becoming resilient; what markers does she use to gauge this?
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  1. What behaviours, qualities and skills does Tina refer to when defining a resilient child?
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Discussion

  1. Tina describes ‘resilience’ as being at the heart of the work at Hedgerows. She explains how important it is for parents to learn how to draw on their own strengths in facing and solving life’s problems. Tina suggests that, for some parents, this might mean seeking employment, returning to work, taking an educational course or coming off medication such as antidepressants.
  2. Tina describes ‘a resilient child’ as one who is engaged and fulfilled but also able to share emotions. In a similar way to describing resilience for adults, she also suggests that a resilient child is able to face everyday challenges and issues rather than try to avoid them or be defined by them.