From the Counsellor

What we Focus on Grows 

It may come as little surprise to most parents; when you ask your child “how was your day?”, you may be often met with a negative response! The good news is that we can help our children to counteract this negativity bias (defined as a tendency to focus on, learn from, and use negative information much more than positive information). Negativity bias is particularly evident when despite experiencing several good or positive events in a day, our disposition to focus on the negative can result in us ruminating over small insignificant everyday events. An additional example of negativity bias in action is from research demonstrating that on average we have been found to attend more to and experience stronger reactions to negative news in the media than positive news.

By focusing on what went well in any given situation, we can savour the good and help to retrain our brain to look for the positives, not only the negatives. This relates to the idea of neuroplasticity which is the brain’s ability to change itself in response to experience or learning.

Try this!

• Talk to your child about their changing brain, and how ‘what you focus on grows’ 
• Each evening, spend time to reflect with your child on three things that went well in their day and why. Where appropriate, you may like to highlight any strengths that your child used along the way (e.g., being brave in a class presentation, showing kindness to a friend). You may like to share this at the dinner table, or before bedtime. 

Here are a couple of helpful resources:

The Harvard Graduate School of Education article on ‘The Biology of Positive Habits’ includes excellent mindfulness exercises to build positive habits over time https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/16/03/biology-positive-habits

Dr Rick Hansen’s article “How to grow the good in your brain” https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_grow_the_good_in_your_brain

Take care,

Georgina

School Counsellor