Promoting resilience and wellbeing

                                                            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 ...

The Power of Kindness  “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible” Dalai Lama After a morning of rushing which included one forgotten lunch box that needed to be retrieved from home and delivered to a hungry child, I turned up five minutes late and out of breath for an appointment to get my blood taken at the local surgery.  When I entered the room, the nurse looked at me kindly and asked me if I had a busy morning. She then told me a take a few moments to catch my breath and left to get me a cold glass of water.  To my surprise my eyes started to well up, I felt like this lovely nurse, who had only just met me, had really taken the time to see me in that moment and used simple human kindness to communicate to me that she understood…. and this is the power of kindness.   The corona virus means that many of us are currently living lives that are reminiscent of the movie Groundhog Day where Bill Murray plays a cynical weather man who fi...

Why our young people benefit from household responsibilities   With us all currently sheltering at home the number of household tasks has naturally increased.   Sometimes it can feel like you have literally just tidied something up when it needs to be tidied up again.   This can be incredibly frustrating especially if you are the one who is typically picking everything up.  So, what is the best course of action when the next person leaves wet towels on the bathroom floor or the bin bag starts to overflow and nobody else seems to notice!  It turns out that chores or household responsibilities are incredibly important in terms of the role they play in development.   Dr Marty Rossmann from the University of Minnesota spent 30 years studying the same group of children and her research clearly shows that involving children in household tasks from an early age can have a positive impact later in life.   This is largely because the...

Some simple ideas to look after our own wellbeing  As our time in social isolation increases the pervasive uncertainty of this situation will continue to grow.    And while anxiety is a natural and normal (and often very helpful!) response it is only meant to happen for brief periods of time. When our bodies stress response is always on, the physiological response remains active. This means that stress is no longer helping us to feel energised and alert but is in fact becoming hugely unhelpful to our physical and emotional wellbeing.  Fortunately, there are a number of things we can do to look after our wellbeing and increase our resilience.  Here are five suggestions taken from Five Ways to Wellbeing which was developed by Nic Marks in 2008.  Connect with other people We now have compelling evidence that positive relationships contribute to a long and happy life.   The more closely we are connected to the people we love, the happier we fee...