Resilience Builder Program for Children and Adolescents: Enhancing Social Competence and Self-Regulation: A Cognitive-Behavioral Group Approach

This cognitive-behavioral group approach is designed to help students bounce back from and deal with the hardships, difficulties, and challenges in their lives. Participants learn to focus on what they do well and develop protective factors that promote resilience. Fun-to-do group sessions address the social/interpersonal aspects of growing up. The sessions are designed to increase confidence, self-esteem, self-control, and the use of coping strategies to deal with issues such as fitting-in and finding academic and social success. Specific resilience, leadership, and social competence skills are emphasized each week, using discussion, role-plays, or other age-appropriate techniques. Topics covered include being proactive, personal space awareness, problem solving, anger/anxiety management, self-regulation, friendship skills, starting and maintaining conversations, and understanding the impact of one's behavior on others. Relaxation and self-regulation techniques help group members increase awareness of thoughts, body, and emotions through calm breathing, visualization, progressive muscle relaxation, or yoga. Homework assignments and community field trips are utilized to reinforce the positive gains seen in the group setting and expand them for use in the world outside of group. Through the included parent letters, parents are given information about the specific skill being addressed; ideas to encourage and foster development; and recommendations for additional readings.

Mary Karapetian Alvord, Ph.D., is a psychologist and Director of Alvord, Baker & Associates, LLC, located in Rockville and Silver Spring, Maryland. She specializes in the treatment of anxiety disorders in children and adults, and ADHD and problems of emotional and behavioral regulation in children and teens. With more than 30 years of experience, Dr. Alvord's focus has been on resilience and strength-based approaches and she has co-authored articles on these subjects. She is frequently interviewed by national media outlets on topics ranging on stress, anxiety, and social competence, to coping with adversity. Dr. Alvord was honored as the first recipient of the American Psychological Association's Presidential Innovative Practice Citation (2009). Dr. Alvord has recently become an Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. Bonnie Zucker, Psy.D, is a licensed psychologist in private practice at Alvord, Baker, & Associates in Rockville, Maryland and at the National Center for the Treatment of Phobias, Anxiety, and Depression. She also authored Anxiety-Free Kids and Take Control of OCD and was named one of Washingtonian Magazine's Top Therapists in the fields of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Troubled Child, Troubled Adolescent, OCD, & Phobias in 2009. In addition to treating children and their families, Dr. Zucker is active in conducting trainings on CBT for other mental health professionals. Judy Johnson Grados, Psy.D, is a licensed psychologist in private practice in Baltimore, Maryland. With over a decade of experience facilitating groups, including several years working with Alvord, Baker & Associates, Dr. Grados specializes in social skills training and the treatment of anxiety disorders in children and adolescents. Dr. Grados earned her Doctoral Degree in clinical psychology from Indiana State University and has completed post-doctoral work in children s mental health services in the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.