Psychoeducation as resilience-building for asylum-children with traumatized parents
The Red Cross in Denmark are receiving most of the people applying for asylum in Denmark since 1984. We are a group of psychologists and social-workers who have been working with the challenge of saving peoples natural resilience through different approaches and psycho-social work.
We would like to present our recent work on the group sessions of psycho-education to children from two to six years. These are all children who have spend a lot of their years (if not all of them) as asylum seekers in different camps in Norhtern Europe and mostly Denmark. They all have parents who find it imposssible to accept to go back to their countries of origin. Many parents are heavily traumatized and suffering from complex trauma and fatigue as a result of many years in exile and no future.
The main topics of this presentation will be : Resilience in traumatized children and their family, how can we meet, maintain and understand it? Living circumstances of children in camps; Group ativities, how to organize and prevail them. How can we support the parents? Psycho-education, how do we define and understand this method of psycho-social work for this group? Joyful playing; Outcome studies; Theories of community psychology and development psychology, which can help us understand the importance of this work with even small children.
