Understanding & Strategies for Behavior Management
Tweens, Teens, & Young Adults

This supplemental curriculum is only available as part of the Kinship Interactive Training & Support Curriculum Package.

This curriculum will offer an overview of trauma-informed parenting strategies, for tweens and teens living with kinship or relative caregivers. Topics include how trauma, prenatal substance exposure, or neurodiversity impacts a child’s brain and behaviors caregivers might expect to see. Caregivers will learn why co-regulation is a necessary tool for ongoing learning of foundational skills for eventual self-regulation and how to implement co-regulation strategies in parenting. They will also learn specific strategies to apply to the most common challenging behaviors tweens and teens experience, such as emotional dysregulation, lagging social skills, lying, or stealing. With this information, caregivers will then learn practical strategies to build trust with the tween or teen in their home, along with life skills to help them self-regulate and build a healthy self-identity despite the trauma they have experienced.

Relative caregivers will leave this meeting with a better understanding of the following topics.

• What co-regulation is and why it is necessary for developing self-regulation.
• How trauma impacts a child’s ability to learn self-regulation.
• The specific strategies that can help teach co-regulation then self-regulation.
• Common behavioral challenges and strategies when raising tweens or teens impacted by trauma.

*This curriculum includes a video, facilitator guide, and handouts.