Wellbeing

Resilience is one of our 5Rs and our students define it as “Trying our hardest, bouncing back and never giving up”. Our BBPS Wellbeing Support Plan (on website) defines resilience as 'self-management: managing emotions and goal setting. 

We can grow a child’s resilience by building a shared understanding of what resilience looks like, sounds like, feels like; fostering supportive relationships between adult and child; encouraging autonomy and responsibility; focusing on strategies to manage emotions; and creating opportunities for personal challenge.  Children begin to...

• become aware of how different emotions affect their behaviour
• understand the characteristics of positive goals
• express emotions appropriately (nonverbally and verbally)
• persevere in the face of set-backs
• set realistic short and long term goals

By drawing on resources from both The Resilience Project and Respectful Relationships, Social and Emotional Learning within the classroom explores concepts of coping skills, positive thinking and self-confidence.

Go to BeYou for more information about the importance of building resilience in terms of long term mental health.

Resilience Youth Survey: This week students in grades 3-6 completed our annual RYS, a survey that provides data to our school on our student’s overall levels of resilience in terms of their strengths and challenges.

Below is summary of the 2021 Bayside Results – school specific data was shared in 2021, and we look forward to sharing this year’s data when it is received.

Children and young people’s resilience is enhanced when they:

• are loved by someone unconditionally
• have an older person outside the home they can talk to about problems and feelings
• are praised for doing things on their own and striving to achieve
• can count on their family being there when needed
• know someone they want to be like
• believe things will turn out all right
• have a sense of a power greater than themselves
• are willing to try new things
• feel that what they do makes a difference in how things turn out
• like themselves
• can focus on a task and stay with it
• have a sense of humour make goals and plans, both short and longer-term.

Here are some useful tips to consider when thinking about how you are building your child’s resilience at home: (adapted from excerpt of 'Beyond Blue: Building Resilience in children aged 0-12 - a practice guide' Downloadable here )

Coping Skills

• Let children experience their emotions – acknowledge how they feel, help them put words to feelings. 
• Encourage the experience of failure rather than protect them from it. When they do fail at something, help them put the failure into perspective. 
• Use role play and have pre-conversations about how to handle difficult situations. 
• When your child experiences disappointment (e.g. they are not selected for something), acknowledge their emotions and ask them what strategy they used to respond rather than react.
• Model failure and share personal stories of disappointment.
• Don’t go in and rescue them!

Positive Thinking

• Have positive conversations with each other, for example: “What’s the best thing that happened today?” 
• When your child tells you about something that didn’t go well in the day, ask for two positives first.
• Suggest more helpful self-talk if your child is talking negatively – for example, if your child says, “I’m going to die of embarrassment speaking in front of my class”, help them reframe it to something like, “Public speaking isn’t my favourite thing, but I’ll be able to cope”. 
• Model calm and rational problem-solving with the other adults in your life. This teaches children what problem-solving looks like. It also teaches them that problems and issues can be worked through in a calm and rational way. 
• Model healthy thinking when facing challenges of your own. You can do this by thanking other people for their support or thinking out loud “Things will get better soon and I can cope with this”. This shows that you expect that good things are possible. 
• Your child is more likely to feel positive if he or she can see that difficult times are a part of life, that they’ll pass, and that things will get better. You might be able to help your child with this by talking about how you, people you know, or even famous people have gone through difficult times.
• Celebrate examples of people persevering, showing resilience, great sportsmanship, courage – rather than just those who come first or achieve the most. 

Self Confidence

• Praise your child for doing things on their own
• Encourage a ‘have a go’ attitude by listening and validating children’s concerns while encouraging problem-solving and help-seeking when necessary
• Acknowledge effort over achievement
• Allow for age-appropriate risk-taking and experimentation by children. Keep things on track
• Set up and stick to family routines. These can relate to eating, sleeping, family activities and rituals. Routines help things flow more smoothly, for example having a clear routine for each morning before school. 
• Encourage healthy exercise and activities that involve connection with others. 
• Encourage children to connect to community through simple things like participating in community events, working bees etc.