Social Worker

A Word from the Social Worker

Hello Parents and Families of OLA

A little while ago I attended a talk presented by Dr Helen Street titled ‘Better than OK: Helping Young People to Flourish at School and Beyond’.

So what does it mean to flourish and how can we help our kids achieve this at school? How can we support their wellbeing? How can we help to find a way for our kids to be connected to life and what they are doing?

Dr Street describes flourishing as a combination of feeling well and doing well. She emphasised that being successful is not the same as flourishing (if anyone has read Andre Agassi’s autobiography you will know that while he was a successful tennis player he did not flourish – he hated tennis!).

According to Dr Street there are 6 ways in which we can better support children to flourish. Very briefly these are:

1. Play – life is becoming very reactive and losing creativity. Children need more free time to find out what engages them. Dr Street emphasised that the play needs to be self-directive and children need to have choice and control when they play. They need to play to learn.
2. Mastery and Mistakes – we need to let our children make more mistakes and they will become more creative. Many inventions are the result of mistakes (The Slinky, Penicllin, and even Potato Chips!). To master something means that children will have to expect obstacles and mistakes and learn to be tolerant of these mistakes.
3. Diversity and Strengths – Dr Street says that we need to focus on strengths; the things that children enjoy and finding their passion. This will help to build their confidence and resilience and then allow them to work on the things that they are struggling with. Here Dr Street spoke about positive education and embedding ideas of wellbeing into education and everyday life. She stressed that we need to acknowledge that a school is a group of very diverse people and kids need to be allowed to learn in their own way and time.
4. Health and Lifestyle – a bit of a no brainer! We all need adequate sleep, a healthy diet and exercise. Dr Street did emphasise that sleep helps to consolidate learning and that primary school aged children need 10-11 hours of sleep a night.
5. Motivation – Here Dr Street talked about the difference between intrinsic motivation (when behaviour is driven by internal rewards) and extrinsic motivation (behaviour is driven by external rewards or to avoid negative consequences). Intrinsic motivation is about finding the joy in the things we do. In her research, Dr Street has found that reward systems (extrinsic motivation) do not work. They are about short term compliance only. Rewards are not part of the process of what we are doing. We need to find ways that create a positive emotional connection; that make kids feel good about themselves (I am still not sure how to intrinsically motivate my kids to pick up their Lego but I am working on it!).
6. Effective Communication – Dr Street spoke about how we can communicate better with our kids. If they have made a mistake the things that don’t work very well are: telling off, long involved explanations (guilty!), minimalising the problem. Apparently we need to acknowledge the extent of the problem and make sure they feel that they still belong in the world. When we communicate we can use social stories, we need to listen (and pick out details), empathise, ask for guidance (How can I help you? What do you need from me?), avoid solutions, be a cheer squad and finally, if the conversation/discussion (argument) is going nowhere, Dr Street suggests shutting it down but offer them the last word.

This is a very brief outline of some of the information that was presented but I thought you might find it interesting. I am in no way a perfect parent – far from it but I do try to do the best I can and sometimes doing some reading or going to a talk helps to re-energise and reassure me that we are all doing ok!

I have couple of Dr Helen Streets’ books which I would be more than happy to loan to anyone who is interested.  You might like to visit positivetimes.com.au for some related articles. There is a great one on allowing your kids to be bored (now I don’t feel so bad about ignoring mine until they find something to do).

Good luck! And as always don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or concerns.

Positive Parenting Pop Up Series

Claire Orange is a very engaging speaker and incredible parenting expert. She is on Channel 9 news every Wednesday afternoon and she will be presenting this seminar in the coming weeks.

Anxiety in Kids Seminar

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Juliet Lennon

Social Worker