The Building Resilience Program: Examining Self-Regulation, Behavior, and Resilience in Under-Resourced Preschoolers With ACEs

"The BRP manual includes eight modules delivered over eight weeks: introduction to resilience, identifying and communicating emotions, emotional regulation, coping strategies for self-regulation (2 parts), breath awareness/meditation, applying positive coping strategies, and review/group session with caregiver. Sessions utilize play as the primary occupation, introducing resiliency concepts through 40-60 minute sessions three times each week to provide repetition and application of concepts with multiple opportunities to review, repeat and apply.~Each BRP session will be implemented by two occupational therapists, one occupational therapy student, and one YWCA staff member. Group size has been determined to approach therapeutic limits with 8-10 students, requiring this staffing ratio for optimal intervention delivery."

The School Readiness protocol supplements existing preschool curriculum while mitigating positive researcher interaction effects. Sessions start with a song and warm-up, including active listening, sharing and turn-taking while targeting different domains each week: perceptual motor, fine motor (tool use), fine motor (coloring), problem solving, teamwork, coordination and motor planning, problem solving (teams), and gross and fine motor (teams). These skills were selected based on feasibility study observations and designed not to overlap with social-emotional skills embedded in the BRP.