The Power of Yes

 Are you familiar with the term TBRI? It stands for Trust-Based Relational Intervention.  Karyn Purvis is credited with its creation, and you can check her and her ideas out at the links below.  It is worth your time.  While taught to adults who love kids from hard places, the ideas apply broadly and are helpful across the board.

One of the ideas I learned was the notion of yes. I will speak in generalities, but concrete information is available in those links.  Basically, we all need to hear a mammoth number of yeses in our first years. This sets us up to develop successfully through the stages of early childhood.  It touches on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Erikson’s Stages of Development.

Maslow teaches that until the basic needs are met (along the lines of shelter, food, and security), we cannot develop at higher levels (like academics and morality). You can check out more at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

Erikson teaches that in the first five years, kids need to learn that they can trust their caregivers, that they are themselves capable people, and have a purpose. More on Erikson’s stages can be found here. Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development - StatPearls - NCBI Bookshelf

The idea is that kids need to hear yes (in word and action) thousands of times for them to move through these critical stages of development successfully.  Meaning that they will be equipped to tackle the next stages with confidence and a sense of self-efficacy.  The stages build on one another, and without firm foundations, they are left limping through life.  In short, the yeses count.

Kids from hard places, who’ve experienced trauma, abuse, and/or neglect, lack the necessary number of yeses. To build their resiliency and provide them with what they need to continue to grow, we need to make up for the loss of yes in their lives. How do we make up for all the yeses? 

It’s a big and essential task. In the TBRI training, we learn to do our best to create opportunities for yes.  An example is to have snacks available all the time, but require the children to ask for them—so that you can tell them yes! To help children feel safe with us as caregivers, we need to find ways to provide nurturing that they either missed entirely or lost when they were removed from their first caregivers.  That can mean massages and snuggles.  It might also mean feeding the kids—in a straightforward manner or playfully like throwing popcorn for them to catch in their mouths. 

In my family, I am still very hands-on in the bathroom with bathing and toileting.  They need the extra touch time and nurturing that comes from applying lotion and assuring basic hygiene practices are followed.  I frequently feed my youngest and try to give a cup of milk to her on demand.  She needs this the way an infant does. 

Because that is another thing we learned. When kids come from sustained trauma, new caregivers need to cut their chronological age in half (and round down!) to understand where they may be developmentally.  That means the two-, five-, and seven-year-olds who arrived in our lives were more like one, two, and three! 

This drives home the wisdom of a friend who was comforting me when we had had the girls for about ten months.  She told me we had ten-month-old triplets who happened to be two, six, and eight. This was the most accurate (though seemingly paradoxical) description of our situation.

https://youtu.be/7vjVpRffgHQ?si=w9IcgVVUa9zjEOU4

Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development