Promoting resilience and wellbeing

  Imagine this scenario – your teenager goes to a party at the next-door neighbour’s and doesn’t get in until 2am.   Unfortunately, the next morning you are all committed to helping your sister move house and must be there at 8am.   We all know how this plays out…. and it’s not fun.   Sleep deprived teenagers (and humans generally) do not function well. It is now widely accepted that our teens need nine hours sleep a night.   It is also widely accepted that a large majority of teens are not getting anywhere close to nine hours sleep.   This is happening for a multitude of reasons.   We live in a culture that does not value sleep.   It is often perceived as the opposite of productivity and as a society this is what we privilege.   Slogans like “I can sleep when I am dead” and subtle (or not so subtle) competition about who worked the longest hours are everywhere.   And this is before we even begin to talk about screens and the very sign...

  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 ...

About twenty years ago a Harvard professor called Amy Edmundson did some fascinating research into team effectiveness.  She wanted to answer the question, what makes some teams more effective than others.  Edmundson expected to find that higher performing teams made fewer mistakes but instead found that the best teams reported a higher number of mistakes when compared to less effective teams.  The conclusion she drew from this research is that higher performing teams felt much more able to speak about and report their errors.  Essentially these teams had what psychologists call psychological safety “ a belief that nobody will be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking”.   Within a work setting when everyone feels able to speak up and contribute this leads to fewer mistakes and better performance regardless of what kind of organisation you work in.  Some p...

Can any of you remember Kevin and Perry? It is a sketch from Harry Enfield based on two emerging adolescents.  In one of the most memorable episodes Kevin is very excited about the prospect of turning 13.  The family gather in the living room and eagerly watch the clock strike midnight on the day of Kevin’s 13 th birthday.  Within seconds his parents watch in utter dismay as their child appears to suddenly lose all sense of rational thought, his dress sense changes and he almost immediately starts to criticise his parents for all their short comings.   While we all know the emergence of adolescence does not happen overnight (and happens well before 13) the very significant changes that come with adolescence can often catch us completely off guard.  Our understanding of adolescence has changed a lot over the past 25 years and we now know that most of the changes in adolescence are driven by a massive reconstruction project in the teenage brain.  I have...

  When children feel anxious about being away from their parents and carers this can sometimes be called separation anxiety.   And while this is a very uncomfortable feeling it is also a vital one.   The main job of separation anxiety is to keep our important people close to us.   S mall humans, in particular,  are very dependent on the kindness and care of others for survival.   Separation anxiety keeps small humans  close to big humans until they are ready and able to manage things by themselves. The reason separation anxiety creates such havoc is when and where is shows up! Specifically, when it decides to show up in situations that are perfectly safe and stops our young people from doing the things that are important for their development.      Separation anxiety can feel dreadful for our young people and as a parent this is hard.   But if we feel confident that the situation is safe it is SO important that we support ...

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. What does it mean if the vastness of human emotion and experience can only be expressed as mad, sad or happy”. Ludwig Wittgenstein in Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart If you take a moment to stop and think about how you are feeling you will often come up with one of three words happy, sad, or angry.  This is the average number of emotions named by over 7 thousand people in Brown’s research.  Surprised? I was. It made me wonder about all the other emotions, frightened, joyful, disappointed frustrated, bored … where were they.  In her brilliant book, Atlas of the Heart, Brown identifies 87 emotions and is emphatically clear that this is not an exhaustive list.  So why do people, on average, identify just three? Brown suggests that we use these three emotions, happy, sad, and angry to categorise our experiences very broadly.  And this makes sense to me, often when I feel frustrated, I will label this as angry....

    Low mood is complicated.  It has been the subject of thousands of clinical studies and all sorts of contributing factors have been identified, biological, psychological, social, behavioural…..     One of the theories I find particularly helpful when thinking about low mood comes from Stephen Ilardi, a professor of clinical psychology in the United States.    He suggests that low mood can be understood in the context of our stress response never having the opportunity to switch off.  As you know our brains have evolved with a survival system commonly referred to as the fight/flight/freeze (FFF) response.  This system evolved because for much of our time on this planet our ancestors were trying to survive in very hostile environments.   A typical scenario might look something like this, we come out of our cave and immediately spot a sabre-toothed tiger.  Our FFF system is activated, we fight or flee, the threat pass...

  So, we all know the scenario, we have a child who is completely overwhelmed by whatever big feeling has shown up – anxiety, frustration, anger.     Their lid is flipped and their body is surging with a whole host of neurochemicals.   This situation can feel very overwhelming and often we feel stumped about how to respond. The most helpful thing in this situation is connection.   Connection is OUR SUPERPOWER in the face of any overwhelming emotion because until your child feels connected and their lid is back online it is almost impossible for them to follow what you are asking them to do.  Shouting or shaming will further activate the threat response ensuring the thinking brain remains offline while warm words and physical connection sends a message to the brain that they are safe   - this calms down the neurological surge in their bodies and essentially helps our kids to move from “I am in danger” to “I am safe”.   And this doesn’t need to ...

Are you the oldest, the youngest or in the middle? And does it matter? The honest answer is we don’t know.  While there are certainly traits and possible advantages and disadvantages of birth order most research now suggests that inherited temperaments have more influence on our personality than our position in our families. Although interestingly the research also suggests that we as parents have more influence over our children’s experience of their position in the family than we previously thought.  So, holding all of that in mind what do we know about the statistics on birth order First born I guess the first obvious thing we know about first born children is that they are the only children who have the full attention of their parents even if this is for a very short period.  The oldest child tends to be the most responsible of our children, often working hard to do things well.  They see their parent’s competence and want to copy what they see.  From this p...