Dr. Michael Ungar

Working with Children, Youth and Families with Complex Needs: Skills to Build Resilience

When working with children and adolescents from emotionally turbulent or physically dangerous backgrounds, and their families, we often focus too narrowly on the individual’s complex needs and problems—like delinquency, anxiety or conflict with caregivers—and miss the broader sources of healing and resilience in young people’s lives.

• This workshop will present a strengths-focused, resistance-proof model for clinical and community work that makes therapeutic interventions more effective and change more sustainable.
• This keynote also demonstrates 20 skills that mental health professionals and educators can use to nurture the resilience of those with whom they work.
• Why audience members need to work just as hard changing the environments that surround children as we do changing children themselves.
• Workshop participants will learn how to identify and enhance access to protective and promotive processes that exert a positive influence on young people’s wellbeing.
• How to contract to achieve useful therapeutic goals that are culturally meaningful.
• Participants will leave knowing how to help their clients successfully transition their success in clinical, residential and community settings back into their “real-life” social environments at home.

Nurturing Resilience: Finding the Personal Qualities and Social Supports We Need to Thrive

Throughout this fast-paced, story-filled workshop/keynote, Dr. Ungar will show that resilience is much more than just personal ruggedness in the face of adversity.

It is instead a reflection of how well individuals, families, educators and employers work together to create opportunities for us to find our way to the resources we need for well-being while making those resources available in ways that we experience as meaningful.

Audience takeaways:

• Twelve factors that make us more resilient as adults will be discussed, along with practical tools participants can use to find the resources they need to cope successfully in culturally and contextually relevant ways, even during a pandemic.
• Dr. Ungar will also show how factors can help the people we work with achieve their life goals, and the value of continuing education as a resource for resilience.
• Dr. Ungar will talk about vicarious resilience, the positive impact we experience as helpers when we nurture resilience in others.

The Risk-Taker’s Advantage: How to Make Kids More Resilient by not Over-protecting Them

Though the stats tell us that children today are safer than ever before in history, parents are failing to give them what Michael has called ‘the risk-taker’s advantage.’ The results are a generation of bubblewrapped kids with anxiety disorders, an inflated sense of entitlement, or misguided efforts to find their own rites of passage into adulthood, often with catastrophic results.

Based on his best-selling book, Too Safe For Their Own Good, Michael shows us how to help families and schools stop being overprotective and provide kids with what they need to grow up well.

Audience takeaways:

• A very amusing, and at times, shocking presentation that debunks common myths regarding the things that put children at risk.
• Practical ways educators, life coaches and therapists can help families and schools reconsider children’s developmental needs and offer them more risk and responsibility.
• To laugh and be inspired by stories of schools and communities that have helped parents give their children the risk-taker’s advantage.

Diagnosing” Resilience Across Cultures and Contexts: Seeing the Positives in Young People Even When There are Serious Problems

With growing interest in resilience among mental health care providers, there is a need for a simple way to think about the complex interactions that predict which children will do well despite the seriousness of the challenges they face.

Using case examples of children who have been exposed to high levels of adversity such as family violence, mental illness of a child or caregiver, natural disasters, forced migration, poverty, racism and other types of social marginalization and political conflict, Michael will show how we can assess childhood resilience and use that assessment to guide practice.

Audience takeaways:

• Speaker Michael Ungar will show that by “diagnosing” resilience, we are in a better position to design interventions that are sensitive to the individual, family, school and community factors that influence a child’s wellbeing.
• Seven factors common to children who cope well under adversity and avoid problems like depression, PTSD, and delinquency will be discussed.
• This presentation will also explore ways we can intervene to help children cope by changing the social and physical environments that surround them.

Nurturing Resilience through a Strong [Community/Organization]*

Throughout this fast-paced, story-filled presentation, Dr. Ungar will show that resilience is much more than our personal capacity to overcome adversity.

It is instead a reflection of how well individuals, families, employers and communities work together to create opportunities for people to navigate their way to the resources they need for well-being while making those resources available in ways that people experience as meaningful.

His work around the world suggests the need for a culturally sensitive interpretation of what resilience means to people from diverse backgrounds living in diverse communities.

Audience takeaways:

• Dr. Ungar will end with ideas for how [communities/organizations] can make resilience-promoting resources more available and accessible to everyone.