Promoting resilience and wellbeing

  There is no joy without gratitude Brene Brown As we come to the end of an incredibely difficult year it feels really hard to look back with anything remotely close to gratitude.   The losses we all experienced and continue to experience are hard to accept and many of us are currently experiencing fatigue, low mood and significant episodes of anxiety.   When we are in the midst of a global pandemic, that seems to be getting progressively worse rather than better, turning our attention to the things we are grateful for is hard. And yet this is probably one of the most important things we can do in terms of our wellbeing. Dr Robert Emmons who is a leading gratitude researcher says “crisis can make us more grateful and gratitude can also help us to cope with crisis.   Consciously cultivating an attitude of gratitude builds up a sort of psychological immune system that can cushion us when we fall”.   Our brains are wired with something called a negativity b...

Coming to the end of the summer is always difficult, no more long bright evenings, no more sea swimming and no more socialising in the safety of our gardens.  This year we are all going to feel this much more acutely.    The second lockdown feels daunting, it’s no longer a novelty and sadly the darker evening and colder winds make it more difficult to feel optimistic about our ability to manage this second time around.     What many of us normally do in these situations is to reach for what research call quick fixes, eating more of our favourite foods, spending more time indoors on screens and generally hunkering down and going into hibernation mode.   And all of this is understandable, especially given the extraordinary impact COVID 19 has on what we can and can’t do.   However, what we know from the science is that now, perhaps more than ever, we need to be very mindful of keeping our wellbeing topped up.    Here are five simple ideas f...

  If you are a parent or carer of a child who is old enough to attend school, you are probably well aware of the friction that screen time can create within any family unit.   As parents/carers it is an extremely difficult area to navigate and we can become overwhelmed with the often-conflicting advice that we are offered.   In considering this topic we firstly need to think about what we mean when we talk about screen time.   This is a generic term used by the media that actually covers all manner of devices such as television, smart phones, tablets, computers, video game screens.   The term is further complicated by the fact that there is an infinite number of ways you can engage with each of these devices, completing online work, communicating with our friends, recording our steps, looking up a recipe, playing video games just to mention a few.   How much time is too much? Unfortunately, here is no easy answer to this question. The research would s...

                                                            Anxiety is extremely contagious                                                                            but so is calm                                                                                                       ...

                                                    "Just show up, be brave, be kind, rest, try again"                                                                                                                         Glennon Doyle   After almost 6 months out of school it can feel very daunting to contemplate the return to school. Many children and young people will be feeling anxious about the prospect and will worry about many things…. will my friends still want ...

  Raising Independent Children It is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them successful human beings                        Ann Landers You know the scenario, you are supporting your teenage child to start a new school and without meaning to you are very helpfully arranging their bag the night before and making suggestion after suggestion about what they might have for lunch, which bus they will get home and what time they will start their homework.    Letting go of our young people is hard but it is also the thing that we desperately want for each and every one of our children.   Which is why it is remarkable to observe (and participate in!) the steady increase in what the media often refers to as helicopter parenting.   This term essentially reflects a parent’s desire to...

  “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better”                                     Maya Angelou   Supporting our children to celebrate diversity Following the heart-breaking death of George Floyd, we are all reminded of the fundamental importance of raising the next generation of children to not just accept difference and diversity but to celebrate it.   The research suggests that children as young as 5 will already display bias towards other groups of people.   Dr Danielle Perszyk, a psychologist based at Northwestern University in the United States, observed that young children are astute observers of the social world and are exquisitely sensitive to the interactions they observe in the world around them.   These observations impact directl...

Repair Repair Repair  As parents there are so many things we worry about.   We worry about giving our children enough attention, we worry about giving them too much attention, we worry about their routine being too structured, we worry about their routine not being structured enough.   And most of all we worry about how we respond to our children in those moments when we lose our temper and end up shouting or even yelling at our children.  Yelling is frightening and confusing for children.   It activates their threat response which means they become overwhelmed with big feelings making it much more likely that they will either start to fight back (reactive mode) or withdraw (shut down mode) altogether.   The situation is also incredibly confusing for children because when children (and adults) feel frightened they are biologically programmed to go to their primary caregiver for comfort, it is extremely unsettling if this is also the person ...