Nurtured Heart Approach - Overview
The Nurtured Heart Approach (NHA)
What is the Nurtured Heart Approach?
The NHA is a training program created by family therapist Howard Glasser, which has been successfully utilized in hundreds of schools and thousands of classrooms and homes.
It is a teaching and parenting approach that is a reversal from traditional punishment as a response to misbehavior.
Some of the benefits and results that have been achieved by teachers and parents with children and teens include:
- Trains adults in using positive responses to negative behavior
- Works effectively with challenging and intense temperaments
- Gives attention and rewards to positive characteristics and behavior
- Replaces the adult’s “negative energy” response to negative behavior
- Purposes to identify and reinforce each child’s underlying emotional needs
- Promotes positive self esteem and a renewed feeling of competence and self-control
- Energizes the child’s desire for significance and continuing success
- Improves and repairs adult-child relationships through closer emotional connections
How can Parent Workshops benefit families?
- Quickly promotes knowledge and application of the NHA approach
- Empowers parents to consciously create and energize success
- Utilizes proven methods of providing consequences when rules are broken without energizing negativity
- Trains parents in fostering an overall pattern of positive interactions with each other
- Significantly reduces adult’s stress and time required for disciplining challenging children
- Enhances feelings of competence and success as a parent
- Helps children learn to meet their own needs for love, significance and autonomy through positive ways of thinking and behaving
- Increases child’s success in positive social interactions and making friends
- Improves child’s potential for academic achievement
How can Schools benefit from training?
- Greater levels of behavioral and academic achievement
- Significant reduction in teacher turnover (from over 50% to less than 5% in one case!)
- Improves childrens’on-task behavior and reduces classroom disruption
- Reduces student suspensions and dropouts
- Reduces the number of referrals for counseling or medication
- Increases teacher productivity and satisfaction
- Reduces teacher frustration and burnout