Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation (ECMHC) often takes place within highly stressed systems where providers, families, and children navigate the challenges of limited resources, burnout, and chronic stress. The Radically Safe Framework (RS) offers a responsive, neurodiversity-affirming, and stress-informed approach to promote safety by providing practical support, autonomy, and connection. Rooted in neuroscience, trauma research, and relational frameworks supporting attachment, our model is built on the premise that meaningful reflection and change can only occur when individuals feel safe, and that consultants and providers need responsive, practical tools to navigate the needs of overstressed systems.

Central to the framework is the concept of Radical Safety- the belief that providing emotional and physical safety requires both radical acceptance and radical support. At its core, providing Radical Safety recognizes that stress responses—whether in children, adults, or broader systems—are not failures or resistance to be managed but rather adaptive reactions to overwhelming challenges. In meeting children and adults where they are, our framework offers a strengths-based roadmap to increase capacity.

We equip practitioners to assess and respond to stress by implementing tools and concepts like stress mapping, recognizing state-dependent capacity (Perry, 2020), and identifying strategies using RS’s Three Pathways to Safety. Consultants using our framework learn to tailor strategies to reduce stress, support co-regulation by addressing stressors that impact behavior and disrupt connection, and build capacity for reflection and problem-solving.

Interventions grouped into three pathways:

1. Practical Supports: Tangible resources, accommodations, and skill-building to meet basic needs, manage demands, reduce environmental stress, and address systemic barriers.

2. Autonomy-Focused Accommodations:  Supports that empower choice, foster equity-based communication, and encourage collaborative decision-making to enhance safety and self-advocacy.

3. Connection-Based Interventions: Through connection, individuals learn to feel safe, grounded, and understood, which over time becomes an internalized resource supporting eventual self-regulation.

The Radically Safe Framework offers a mindset shift- we recognize and address underlying stressors rather than "targeting" challenging behaviors. We apply alternative, stress-informed solutions that emerge from understanding behavior in context. Our model offers evidence-informed and lived experience-informed strategies that are responsive to diverse settings, while promoting practices inclusive of different ways of processing and moving through the world.