How the Five Protective Factors Can Help Families During the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has required family-serving organizations to employ all the tools they can to help families get through challenging times.

One of the best tools for helping families weather the pandemic is the Five Protective Factors. If you’re not familiar with the protective factors, they are:

• Parental resilience
• Social connections
• Knowledge of parenting and child development
• Concrete support in times of need
• Social and emotional competence of children

For guidance on how you can use the protective factors to help families during the pandemic, visit this webpage of the Georgia Department of Family and Children Services’ State of Hope Initiative. The goal of the initiative is to create communities throughout Georgia where children are safe, thriving, and full of hope.

Click here for more resources on the protective factors including how to promote them to parents and families that face different challenges (e.g. at-risk families and pregnant and parenting teens).

Did you know that an evaluation of National Fatherhood Initiative’s 24/7 Dad^® program found that it builds the protective factors? Click here to read a blog post about the evaluation which includes an overview of the evaluation findings and a link to download the evaluation report.

Did you know that NFI has a free ebook on how to apply the Five Protective Factors with dads? Click here to download it.