From the Principal Team

The Changing Landscape of Parenting

On Tuesday morning, I had the opportunity to attend a talk from Dr Michael Carr-Gregg with a focus on schools, community and the evolving challenges of parenting in our society. 

It was a small audience of school leaders, which provided us all with a great chance to share experiences, questions and concerns that we are seeing as educators. 

Dr Carr-Gregg's area of expertise is parenting and so the conversation naturally moved between the challenges in schools and what we can do to support families and the many challenges being faced at home currently and what parents may be able to build their confidence and toolkit of strategies to help. 

I wanted to share some of these resources now, as I felt, as a parent, that there was some really great information that people would benefit from. 

Resilience: Our role as the 'lead re-framer' 

In the previous newsletter I wrote a little about perseverance. This skill or attribute is closely related to the 'muscle' of resilience. Researchers collectively define resilience as “the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change”, a quality that I am sure every parent recognises as being critical for their child. However, we must also recognise that in order to build this muscle, our children will necessarily experience misfortune and change in their lives. 

Dr Carr-Gregg spoke passionately about the parent's role as the 'Lead Re-framer' in their child's life: demonstrating and modelling how to recognise and handle disappointment. He spoke about 're-framing' our thinking to show that we can recognise why a change may have been necessary or better for the majority of people (even if not for us) or how a misfortune may end up being a blessing in disguise. 

In teaching we speak a lot about the value of a 'think aloud', where the teacher verbalises their thoughts when facing a challenge and tries to demonstrate for children the steps we want them to follow in their minds when addressing a similar problem. This was the first time I had heard anyone talk about this approach as a parenting strategy but I think it has a lot of value. 

Teaching children 'how to think' in a healthy and productive way, especially about the most challenging things in our lives, is a simple but powerful tool. 

Positive Parenting and Support for Parents with Children with Anxiety

One of the challenges many of us face is that the only reference we have for parenting is what we experienced as a child. This is fine, I suppose, if we had extremely competent and enlightened parents but the reality is that for most families, everyone is fumbling their way through. This is just as true of us today as it was for our parents. 

One of the strongly recommended resources to help parents build their skills and toolkit for positive parenting is the Triple P Parenting modules. These have been highly recommended for a number of years but previously required a payment to access. 

The courses for Parenting Children Under 12 Years and Parenting Children with Anxiety are now free to access and provide a rich resource for parents to become more confident and understanding of the stage of development their child is experiencing. 

Working on Digital Agreements

Of course, one of the significant challenges parents face today is that of managing and balancing the healthy use of digital technology and social media. 

The eSmart Digital Licence+ is now free to access and Dr Carr-Gregg recommends that it is especially beneficial when parents work through the modules with their child. 

This may be especially helpful in developing a shared understanding about what will and won't be acceptable behaviour as you approach the age at which a child may have their first phone or social media account. 

The school is registered and students from Years 3 to 6 have an account ready to be used. We will be incorporating some of this learning in our core curriculum, but we are keen to have families access this resource with their child, too. 

If you would like your child's login details now, please let your teacher know and we'll send them through. 

Learn more about the eSmart Digital Licence+

Celebrating Fathers

This Sunday we celebrate Fathers Day and the role of the special people in our lives who perform the role of parents and carers.

Thank you to the many parents who volunteered their time and services for the Fathers Day stall, providing children with an opportunity to provide something as a special gift from them to the special person in their lives.  

A special thank you to Jodie Murphy (event organiser of the Mothers and Fathers Day stalls) and the PFA for organising the event and helping to raise essential funds for our school to use to enrich our offerings to students. 

We are thrilled to announce that we are inviting fathers to participate in a special event designed to increase the connection between the school and fathers, helping Dads to become more involved in their child's schooling and to promote further positive parenting opportunities. 

The following message has been distributed to families via Compass this afternoon and we encourage all fathers to try and get involved in what will be an ongoing community group.