Go Beyond the Webinar| SS4MF Kids Serve Too! Series| Safe and Sound: Caring in Our Community

On January 17, 2019, our second webinar in the five-part Kids Serve Too! Series, was brought to you by OneOp (MFLN) and Sesame Street for Military Families (SS4MF). MFLN’s Family Development concentration area took the helm to host this particular webinar on the impact of childhood trauma and community violence.

Sabrina Huda and Antonio Freitas of Sesame Workshop facilitated part two of this series and provided tons of great resources focused on preventing trauma and violence in communities, as well as shared strategies and activities to help children cope.

Here are some of the highlights of this latest Kids Serve Too! Series webinar:

• A brief overview of Sesame Street for Military Families including the topics they cover they cover on their website.
• The introduction of Sesame Street in Communities, the sister site of SS4MF. Talked over the site features and topic content that they specifically focus on.
• Antonio and Sabrina talked about the history of Sesame Street in Communities and their mission to address childhood trauma and community violence.
• They went over the common signs of stress that children might exhibit after a traumatic event and ways for adults to help.
• They shared six strategies that families can implement to help kids cope after a traumatic event and provided resources they have on their site.

Several resources and ideas on how to help children cope with trauma were included in the chat pod during our live webinar. These ideas included:

• Using stuffed animals and children’s books to help relay messages of understanding and comfort.
• Sabrina Huda shared some great activities. One of those is a video called “Give yourself a Hug.” Another is simply called “Breathe” and teaches kids how to do deep belly breathing!
• A final activity was shared that stressed the importance of parents taking care of themselves called “Self-Care: Digging Deep.”

In case you missed it, be sure to watch our archived version of this fantastic webinar here: “Safe and Sound: Caring in Our Community.” This is part 2 in our Kids Serve Too! Series, with part 3-5 still to come! Be sure to subscribe to our mailing list for this series on the homepage here. Finally, to get caught up, here is the link to part one of the series, “Sesame Street Overview on Military Resources.”