Building Skills for Life

Building Skills for Life

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been having lots of conversations with students, families and staff about a really important question: How do we prepare our children with the skills they need for life?

One thing our staff are noticing is a significant decline in students’ persistence, resilience and willingness to keep going when things feel difficult, frustrating or uncomfortable. 

This is concerning, because learning to manage challenges and persist when things don’t go our way are critical skills — at school and well beyond it.

At school, we are making deliberate efforts to create opportunities for students to struggle safely, problem-solve, persist and experience success after challenge. But these skills start developing from a very young age, and families have an incredibly important role to play.

Sometimes, one of the best ways we can help children is not to make things easier, but to support them to discover that they can do hard things.