Student Wellbeing

Buddy Run

Friendship Groups

At last week’s Friendship Group Session

our focus for the session was:

Help-Seeking

Learning Intention:

We are learning the importance of seeking help when dealing with problems that are too big to solve alone.

Success Criteria:

I can demonstrate ways to interact with and care for others.

I can identify 5 people in my life who can help me.

Children can experience all kinds of challenges as they grow and develop. The help-seeking behaviours of children are fundamental to their mental health and wellbeing.

Encouraging and fostering help-seeking behaviours is one way to improve mental health and wellbeing.

It is important to work with children to make sure they are aware about help-seeking avenues and are confident to seek help from an appropriate source when needed.

Different children will feel problems differently and so there will be times when one child may want to seek help and another may feel OK going it alone or with support from a friend.

When it is a question of safety or an ongoing distressing problem or situation of injustice, then this may be the time to override your friend’s opinion and listen to your own sense of what is right. This may take courage.

However it is important to support young people’s resilience by recognising and celebrating their ability to solve many of their problems independently. Equally it is essential to empower them to know when it is smart to seek help. They can come to recognise these times and normalise the practice of help seeking through talking, planning and practising.

When children have a plan that they have discussed and practised, they are far more likely to get help, sooner rather than later.

During our session, we reinforced the importance of creating clear and accurate messages when asking for help.

If people do not understand our needs clearly, they may not be able to help us.

Each student was given a Help Seeking Hand to complete and they wrote the names of the people they felt they could turn to for help both at home and school in each finger.

Have a chat to your child/children to see whom they chose and ask them why they chose them.