Relational wealth: What is it and why does it matter?

Through the summer months we often wonder how best to support our young people. How can we use this unstructured time to build up their life skills and resilience? Should we book summer camps? Should we travel and let them experience different cultures and different climates? Should we leave them at home, allow them to get bored and sit back and watch their creativity emerge?

Of course, our children will benefit from all the above, structured and unstructured time is important as is exposure to different people and places. BUT what really matters for all our children is their relationships with the people who really care about them – their family, their cousins, their uncles, their aunties, their grandparents, their community, close family friends…. these are the people who contribute to their relational wealth.

Relational wealth is a relatively new concept from Dr Bruce Perry, an American Psychiatrist who writes extensively on resilience and trauma. Relational wealth is essentially what it says on the tin, it is being connected to our extended family, knowing our neighbours…fundamentally having close positive relationships with people we can reply on.

This matters because when our children (or ourselves) experience inevitable adversity…. being bullied at school, experiencing a physical injury, managing a difficult transition … their ability to tolerate this adversity is directly related to how connected they feel to the people around them. Dr Perry suggests that this connectedness is driven by two things

1. The basic skills to make and maintain relationships

2. The relational opportunities we are exposed to

In previous generations families lived in multigenerational units, grandparents, parents, and children all living together and providing opportunities for rich social interactions. In the modern world our households are much smaller, I am guessing most of you reading this live with fewer than five other people. If we add this reduction in household numbers to the significant influence of screens, we can all recognise the lost opportunity for connection.

So, this summer, alongside all the other things, make sure you create opportunities for your children to spent time with the people who love them the most. Let them stay with their grandparents, go crabbing with their auntie, be part of the community project. By doing this you are investing in their relational wealth and ultimately increasing their resilience to manage the inevitable ebb and flow of life.

Comments

The multitasking fallacy

Ever wonder how your kids manage to spend 6 hours online on a normal Tuesday? They have school for at least 6 hours, they play football, they eat dinner, do their homework, and maybe even watch a bit of TV! They do it because they multitask. They are on their phones while travelling to school, they are on their phone while eating their lunch, they are on their phones while they are writing their English essay, they might even be on their phones while they brush their teeth before going to bed. We are a population of multitaskers - watching something on the TV while scrolling Instagram, cooking dinner and shouting solutions to maths problems over our shoulder. And our kids are no different, they often spent their entire day multi-tasking. The thing about multi-tasking is that it FEELS hugely effective but is actually hugely ineffective. Working on a report for work and simultaneously answering emails often makes us feel good but in fact what it means is that we are doing

Understanding the connection between anger and self worth

I was listening to podcast yesterday with Dr Becky Kennedy, the author of Good Inside, and she said this “Anger is a sign that we have preserved access to our self-worth.” When we have a high level of self-worth and we do not have access to the things we need we feel angry. She talked about having a “healthy entitlement” to what you want and need which is intimately connected to feeling worthy. Psychologists often consider anger to be a secondary emotion. Anger is often what we see when people are feeling any number of other emotions – shame, humiliation, grief. Anger is often easier to express than shame or humiliation. It is often easier to say “I’m so livid about what happen” than “I feel really ashamed about what happened”. Brene Brown in her beautiful book Atlas of the Heart suggests that as many as 20 of the 87 emotions she identifies in the book are likely to present as anger. How we manage our emotions is influenced by our upbringing. In many households

Most Generous Interpretation (Dr Becky Kennedy)

Dr Becky Kennedy, a clinical psychologist based in the US, has coined the term Most Generous Interpretation. This concept stems from the basic idea that we are all good inside. Adapting this concept creates space for us to be curious about other people’s behaviour and supports us to shift from “what is wrong with you” to “why is this behaviour happening”. So how do we take this idea and make it applicable in our everyday relationship moments? Essentially, we do this by asking one simple question “What is my most generous interpretation of what just happened.” Imagine the scenario – you have just arrived home after a long day at work, you come in the front door and your daughter asks if you have remembered to pick up her book from the library. You have completely forgotten and apologise to your daughter. Your daughter starts shouting at you “you are rubbish, you never think about me, I hate you” So how do we respond. For most of us this will activate our own threat response

Promoting resilience and wellbeing

Search This Blog