Assistant Principal's Report

Helping our Children Build Long Term Happiness Part 4

Welcome to Part 4 of a series of newsletter articles about how we can implement and teach happiness habits and practices through the acronym ‘FLOURISH’. As I mentioned in previous newsletter articles, we spend a lot of time supporting our children to ensure they get enough sleep, eat the right foods, get enough exercise and are academically on the right path. Wanting our children to be happy and mentally healthy are equally important. We know that if someone is happy, they generally perform better in many other aspects of their lives. 

This week I have taught a few classes with Inquiry Learning Units focussing on the influence of media on society. It is amazing what our students know about the media landscape and in particular global issues that are having both direct and indirect impacts on our community. So with all this going on, what can we do to equip the young members of our families with the skills and strategies to secure long term happiness? Even though our current generation have many local and global challenges to be aware of like no generation ever has before, families can still have a positive impact on long term happiness. 

Once again I refer to the Parenting Ideas website for guidance and long term happiness. In the article ‘Helping kids build lasting happiness’ by Dr. Jodie Richardson, it highlights how we can teach happiness by implementing and teaching happiness habits and practices using the acronym ‘FLOURISH’. This stands for:

- Flow

- Laughter and Play

- Optimism

- Unite for Family meals

- Relationships

- Intensive exercise

-Self Regulation 

- Helping Others

For this fortnight we will look at Self-Regulation and Helping Others.

Self-Regulation

A child’s ability to self-regulate is an extremely important tool in the happiness tool kit. Self-regulation is when a child can understand and manage their own behaviour and reactions. From a whole school perspective, this is a strategy we work towards with our students on a daily basis. Their ability to understand how they are feeling, how to balance home learning, screen time, sleep quality, diet and socialisation and what they can do to address it predicts their ability to cope better with frustration and stress. You can help you’re your child build self-regulation skills in a variety of life domains such as diet, sleep and home learning through modelling good behaviours and teaching them how to balance these important aspects of daily life. In the Welsh household we continually help our children regulate their energy levels to understand when they might need to eat an extra piece of fruit or go to bed a bit earlier. As parents these are life skills we would all like to instil in our children.

Helping Others

Being kind makes children happy and you can nurture kindness in your child through what you do in a consistent manner. Once again if you are modelling kindness to your children, what they can see has a powerful impact. Demonstrating acts of kindness such as genuine compliments, handwritten thankyou notes or cards, using appropriate manners when interacting with new people or even picking up rubbish are all acts of kindness you can role model. To know there’s a lot you can do to promote a sense of happiness in children and young people through something as simple as a small act of kindness is very comforting. 

The FLOURISH acronym is a reminder of a powerful framework you can use to boost your kids’ wellbeing and content over the long-term. I hope that this series of newsletter entries have helped quip you and your family with additional strategies to promote happiness in your children. 

In upcoming entries I plan to continue to focus on mental health and wellbeing and to highlight things we can do from a family perspective to promote positive mental health in our children. 

Mr Welsh 

Assistant Principal Wellbeing