NVR – Non-Violent Resistance
NVR supports parents and carers in working with escalating patterns and unwanted behaviours in children and young people. It is a structural approach that aims to be empowering for families and is delivered collaboratively using tools, techniques and coaching.
...strike when the iron is cold!
Despite love, care, hard work and good intentions families can fall into challenging behaviour patterns and not know how to get out of them. Parents and carers can feel they are losing control or can feel disconnected and shut out from their child’s world. This can often lead parents into a disconnected or ‘control or be controlled’ way of relating that can result in reinforcing unwanted negative patterns in the family.
With NVR input, parents are guided through a set of core principles to help support them in the management of destructive, aggressive, controlling or risk-taking behaviours in their child or young person. NVR aims to offer parents a greater confidence in their own self-control, enabling difficult issues to be addressed in an effective manner through increasing parental presence, positive relationship gestures and a number of other interventions. These are all designed to rebuild a positive parent-child relationship.
NVR helps with:
- Identifying triggers in parents
- Helping parents to feel empowered and have choices
- Supporting parents to work together with a unified approach
- Self care
- Prioritising behaviours
- Opening up to supporters about family life
- Re-building parent child relationship
NVR helps parents to address behaviours such as:
- Aggression and anger
- Alcohol and drug use
- Eating disorders
- Disruptive and defiant behaviours
- Sibling arguments
- Anxiety behaviours
The SPACE Programme (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions) is an aspect of NVR and is designed to help parents reduce their own accommodating behaviour in the context of a child’s anxiety. This approach supports parents to cope with the child’s distress or resistance, while maintaining a supportive stance towards them. It explicitly focuses on changing parent responses to the child’s anxious states, gradually withdrawing the accommodating behaviours on which the child has come to rely. (Eli R. Lebowitz & Haim Omer)
NVR is delivered with families as part of family therapy, or as a 3 month course alongside other parents. Please ask for further details about courses.
