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National Family Resiliency Program
The National Family Resiliency Program offers parents a non-adversarial and supportive way to guide their children through the challenging, painful, and often confusing process of separation and divorce. The program assists parents who wish to act as informed, responsible decision-makers for their children, and are committed to establish strong and loving parent-child relationships and respectful relationships between parents.
Throughout this comprehensive program, which is tailored specifically to meet the needs of the individual family, NFRC mental health professionals, judges, attorneys, mediators, educators, and specialists in the community join together to provide a constellation of services at one location to help the family make child-focused decisions and to ensure loving, healthy relationships between parents and children.
Families participating in the National Family Resiliency Program embark upon a series of educational, counseling and mediation experiences, including:
- Orientation and Divorce Education: there is so much to learn about choices parents have and how they end their relationship and remain loving, responsible parents. Books, videotapes and educational classes for parents (and separate classes for children) inform parents about how to go through a difficult time in the healthiest, child and family focused way possible.
- Family Action Planning: parents and children work with a trained therapist to determine what services will be most helpful to parents and children. Often at different points in coping with loss and change, different kinds of counseling and educational programs may be indicated. Together with a therapist, parents discuss their family's past and current relationships to best determine how to help each family member.
- Family Reconciliation: which involves the necessary steps to heal from past wounds and begin a healthy reconciliation in order to preserve the traditional family structure.
- Individual, Family and Group Counseling: which gives everyone in the family the support they need to heal and cope so they can focus on what truly matters for themselves and their family.
- Co-Parenting, Parenting Agreement, and Planning Program: which helps parents reach agreement on all divorce-related issues and child-rearing decisions, as well as prepare and file the required legal documents associated with those agreements. An important part of this part of the program is establishing a process for future renegotiation as necessary. As a result, the potential for future conflicts are minimized or avoided altogether.
Through the National Family Resiliency Program, parents are able to:
- Jointly maintain control over decisions that affect their children, rather than giving up that right to total strangers, lawyers and judges.
- Avoid the significant and long-lasting financial and emotional costs of traditional separation and divorce procedures.
- Focus on behaviors and actions that are truly in the best interest of their children
- Begin the healing process and move on with their lives.
Because of its unique comprehensive and proven approach to resolution and healing, this program is quickly becoming a model for a nationwide program and is being considered for international use. It was featured in The Washington Post, and received national recognition in May 2001, when the Association of Family, Court and Community Professionals (AFCC) awarded Risa Garon, NFRC Executive Director, the Irwin Cantor Award for Innovative Programming.
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