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Maria Trozzi
Child & Family Resilience Expert
Maria Trozzi
Child & Family Resilience Expert
Biography
Maria Trozzi, M.Ed., is a former assistant professor of developmental and behavioral pediatrics, at Boston University School of Medicine; co-founder and former director of the nationally renowned Good Grief Program at Boston Medical Center, a consultant to the Child Development Unit at Children’s Hospital and an author. Her credentials and expertise have established her as one of the foremost experts in the country on resilience as families, schools and communities face crises.
She has provided crisis consultation in communities throughout the country and abroad – in particular, after Columbine, Hurricane Katrina, at Ground Zero in the aftermath of 9/11, and the Boston Marathon Bombing, Navy SEALS’ Extortion 17 crisis.
Whether the crisis is a natural disaster, a school shooting, or a community impacted by the alleged betrayal of trust, Trozzi has offered adults words, strategies and experience so that they will feel better equipped to manage the information and the difficult feelings that result for their children.
She has provided individual and group consultation and training for more than a decade to Naval Special Warfare operators (SEALS) and their families pre- and post- deployment.
A frequent contributor to both print and electronic media, she is often asked to share her expertise ‘when bad things happen’ in the world that impact families and communities, including several national news programs including but not limited to CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS.
Her first book, Talking With Children About Loss, was published by Putnam-Penguin and continues to be an essential reference for parents and professionals. She has authored several chapters in pediatric and academic textbooks, as well as academic journals.
She lives in Boston and West Yarmouth and maintains a private practice dedicated to helping families face stressful life events.
Speaker Videos
Advice for Counselors
Speech Topics
Words, Strategies & Wisdom to Promote Resilience in Our Children Facing Life’s Stressful Events
Whenever bad things happen, it is normal for parents to want to protect their children. It even feels counter-intuitive to want to ‘talk’ about it, especially when we see our children hurting.
Whether the issue is a terrifying world event or closer to home, a peer’s unexpected death or an inevitable disappointment or personal shortfall, how do parents help their children face these stressful life events? How do you face it as a parent? How do you find language to help your child at any age make sense of it? What words should you avoid? How do you know if your child is struggling? How can you help your child develop resilience?
Maria will offer words and strategies and approaches for each developmental age to face some of life’s most stressful events; such as
- Grampy is in the hospital and may not get better
- If Nana can’t remember your name anymore
- My brother’s special needs take all my parents’ time
- Daddy is moving out?
These stressful life events and the unique parenting challenges in today’s complicated world impact even the youngest child and his parents. How parents face these stressors, how development informs them and guides their approach and what strategies are useful when facing difficult topics has been Maria Trozzi’s interest and expertise for twenty years.
FIVE TO THRIVE! An Enlightening Conversation About the Stresses of Parenting Young Children Today & the Surprising Brain Research for Building Resilience
Parents often worry that if they are not doing everything, they are doing nothing. But it is not necessary to do everything. Trozzi’s refreshing and honest approach focuses on just five thoughtful strategies to promote children who are both competent and confident, able to successfully navigate a complicated world.
Finding Resilience…(After Looking in all the Wrong Places)
Join Maria Trozzi for an interactive and enlightening conversation about the new stresses of parenting our children today and evidence-based strategies for building resilience. Parents need words, a developmentally informed, thoughtful approach, and their confidence shored up as they navigate the maze of decisions that will affect their child’s well-being and success. Trozzi’s refreshing and honest approach focuses on useful strategies that are often counter-intuitive for dedicated parents, but lead children to master the coping skills that promote resilience.
Some of the topics she will address:
- Creating the mix to produce an outstanding person: the surprising research
- Making informed decisions about screen time
- Dealing with life’s disappointments: when our children hurt, what to say and not to say
- Too many choices: How affluence can complicate parent decision-making
- How to ‘not hover and sleep at night’; moving towards scaffolding your children
What Prepared Me for This Journey? Finding Resilience as You Face the Challenges of Family Life While Raising a Child with a Special Need
Maria Trozzi will explore the stresses that families face as they deal with the often complicated tasks of living with a child with special needs. She has recently concluded a two-year research study, funded by a regional center for disabilities in Los Angeles County, that explores the stresses, both obvious and hidden, that can sometimes feel overwhelming and never-ending.
She will offer strategies for help parents to understand and cope, particularly at identified ‘touchpoints’ in the developmental life of their child. She will share her nationally recognized conceptual model for working with educators that helps them ‘walk in the parents’ shoes’ in order to understand and transform even the most difficult and challenging parent/educator relationships. Lastly, Maria, a typical sibling of a brother who is disabled, will offer insights for helping siblings cope with the losses and gains inherent in a family with a child with special needs.
Good Grief: Building Resiliency in Children & Families Facing Losses
Using an interactive format, Maria Trozzi will explore the psychosocial issues that challenge children who must face the inevitable losses of childhood as well as the less predictable losses that many children will face as they grow up; such as family illness, divorce, disabilities, transitions, incarceration, foster care and adoption and community tragedies.
More specifically:
- How professionals can assist children and their families facing a death
- The critical issues that the schools must identify to respond to their community losses in a way that promotes resilience, especially when the death is unanticipated, multiple, stigmatic (using Case studies from Columbine and the World Trade Center)
- The hidden dynamics of grief embedded in the foster care/adoption system; specifically, moving from a triangulation model to a cooperative model, identifying our biases that interfere with advocating for the child, specific language that assists the child whose losses are many and complicated; assisting all caregivers with the oxymoronic task of promoting ‘temporary attachment’ and finally, exploring strategies that promote attachment and minimize disruptions
- Describing a new model for Special Education Teams that responds to the parental grief that ‘keeps on giving’ throughout the developmental life of their child with a disability and identifies strategies that the Team can employ that ameliorates the ‘tension’ and promotes better shared decision making.
Developmentally Appropriate “Disasters”: A Conversation with Maria Trozzi on Navigating Agency, Big Feelings & Resilience with Your Middle Schooler
How do 11–14-year-olds navigate the predictable but exquisitely challenging developmental period between childhood and adolescence? The changes are cognitive, physical, emotional, and social and ask the questions, “Who am I now? How do I belong? “
Maria’s timely conversation with parents of middle school children creates a map to navigate their pivotal role in addressing new expectations and reliable strategies that support their child’s healthy development.
Parents often speak about being bewildered about what happened to their joyful and easy 10 year-old.
How do they support these inevitable changes and help lead their child to manage big feelings, develop agency, and problem solve?
How can parents navigate their even more demanding role…. to push (or not), how and why to redefine their expectations; when to ‘stay out of it’ and when and how to intervene? Also, how do the ‘ghosts of their nursery’ inform parents’ dreams and disappointments in their child?
With humor, wisdom and pathos, Maria offers parents developmentally informed useful strategies and reliable expectations for parenting during their child’s critical period of ‘becoming and belonging’.
Perfect Timing: Discovering Our Best Life
Third chapter, encore!, the second half…. These well-worn phrases describe a phase of life for which we may feel ill-equipped to optimize for success… more open days on our calendars, more gentle reminders of our aging bodies (and spirits)….less relevance in the daily world spin… more quiet anxiety about maximizing opportunities that give us happiness, birthday reminders of time moving too fast: put bluntly, the aging process.
Join Maria Trozzi this evening as she maps out an achievable guide for all of us to find our best life in its second half.
From research and clinical experience, with insight, compassion and humor, she will explore the challenges and hidden opportunities that come with aging:
- Considering our impact, our relevance, our losses, our gains in context
- The special case of ‘strivers’ (that’s most of us!)
- Why chasing happiness is over-rated
How neuroscience and social science can unlock the surprising power of:
- Using our ‘crystallized’ intelligence
- Actively choosing new habits, and retiring others
- Taming our anxiety about ‘what if’ that holds us back
Letting go….or the myth of being in control
- “I feel badly about my ‘sagging (fill in any body part)” and other physical reminders in the mirror
- How facing our mortality offers us a gift…
WORKSHOP OFFERING: A Prescription for Resilience When We Hurt
For those who are grieving a significant loss
Space is limited to 15
Typically, the ‘banana bread brigade’ comes to a screeching halt at the start of the fifth month following the death of a spouse or significant person in our life.
The new road ahead can make us feel anxious and isolated.
How do we embrace our past life that was ‘lived well’, define an unknown path, practice our ‘new normal’ walk, and even anticipate a future with hope and excitement?
Recognized resilience expert and author, Maria Trozzi, has treated grieving adults for more than three decades and believes that grief has the power to transform our lives.
With pathos and humor, Maria will share her expertise and experience as she gently leads us to consider strategies and explore strengths that when practiced, can lead us to a meaningful and robust future.
- A few of the questions that we will answer:
- Who am I without you? Because of you? Before you?
- What can I expect from others, my children, my married friends?
- How do I manage….
Long evenings at home
Disappointments with ‘lunch’ invites that used to be ‘dinner’ invites
Worries about navigating aging and illness now
Habits that are no longer working for me
This workshop promises to make us think ‘outside the box’ about how, when faced with a life without our loved one, we can courageously create an updated vision of ‘our best selves’.
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