When I Became a Refugee, This Became My Refuge: A Proposal for Implementing a Two-Generation Intervention Using Yoga and Narrative to Promote Mental Health in Syrian Refugee Caregivers and School Readiness in Their Preschool Children

ABSTRACT

This article represents our attempt to establish a blueprint for a comprehensive refugee intervention program to be disseminated across the globe. Specifically, we describe a proposal to conduct a two-generation intervention program that addresses the socioemotional needs of both Syrian caregivers and their preschool children who have fled the atrocities of their home country and have settled in Turkey. The goal is to improve the school readiness skills of preschool children ravaged by war, dislocation, and poverty. First, we describe a caregiver intervention, which consists of trauma-sensitive yoga; second, we describe a child intervention, which consists of a storytelling and story-acting activity. Finally, we discuss how to assess the effectiveness of this two-generation intervention program. Our hope is that this novel intervention program will be implemented in other regions experiencing an influx of refugee families who need immediate psychological services.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Palak Agrawal for assistance with references.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Geoff Goodman

Geoff Goodman, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Psychology in the Long Island University Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program, New York. He is also a licensed clinical and school psychologist with 27 years of experience in private practice in New York, treating children and adolescents as well as adults. He is certified by the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP) and is certified as both an adult and a child and adolescent psychoanalyst and Fellow of the International Psychoanalytical Association (FIPA). In 2013, Dr. Goodman was awarded the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship by the US Department of State and spent eight months in 2014 establishing and evaluating a play-based intervention program to facilitate the development of school readiness skills in preschool children in two rural village libraries in Uganda. Dr. Goodman is Coordinator of the Long Island University Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program Applied Child Research Team; Chair of the Child, Adolescent, and Family Therapy Research (CAFTR) Special Interest Group of the international Society for Psychotherapy Research; and Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Rural Village Libraries Research Network. He is former Director of the Long Island University Children’s Institute for Play Therapy and Research (CIPTAR) and former Director of the Norbert Freedman Center for Psychoanalytic Research at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York, serving on its Board of Directors. Dr. Goodman lives in Lynbrook, New York, with his wife Valeda and daughter Carlyn.

Valeda F. Dent

Valeda F. Dent, Ph.D. is Dean and Professor, University Libraries at St. John’s University in New York. She holds an M.S.W. and M.I.L.S. from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. from the Palmer School at Long Island University. Her primary research interests include the impact of chronic poverty on rural development; rural libraries in Africa and related literacy and reading habits; ethnographic approaches to understanding the user experience; and emerging technologies. Dr. Dent has published a number of books, including Qualitative Research and the Modern Library (2011) and Rural Community Libraries in Africa: Challenges and Impacts (2014) with coauthors Dr. Geoff Goodman and Dr. Michael Kevane. Dr. Dent is the Co-Founder of the Rural Village Libraries Research Network, and her work in Africa has been published in a wide variety of peer-reviewed journals and presented internationally at conferences in South Africa, China, South Korea, Argentina, the United Kingdom, Greece, Ireland, Uganda, Netherlands, Argentina, and Swaziland, to name just a few. Her work has also been cited extensively in the literature on libraries in the developing world. Dr. Dent’s collaboration with Dr. Geoff Goodman, which began in 2009, explores the overlooked impact of rural village libraries on preschoolers’ learning and school readiness skills, and in 2014 Dr. Dent and Dr. Goodman were both awarded Fulbright Scholarships which allowed them to spend eight months working in two rural village libraries in Uganda establishing an intervention program to facilitate the development of school readiness skills in preschool children. This intervention continues to run in the village of Kabubbu, with positive outcomes for the participants. In her spare time, Dr. Dent practices and teaches yoga. Dr. Dent and her husband live in New York with their 6 year old daughter Carlyn.