At St Paul’s we are teaching our students to be resilient. Resilience refers to a child’s ability to cope with ups and downs and being able to bounce back from the challenges that they experience. Building resilience helps children not only to deal with current difficulties that are a part of everyday life, but also to develop the basic skills and habits that will help them deal with challenges later in life, during adolescence and adulthood.

As a parent, carer, or significant adult, you can help to develop essential skills, habits and attitudes for building resilience at home by helping your child to:

• build good relationships with others including adults and peers
• build their independence
• learn to identify, express and manage their emotions
• build their confidence by taking on personal challenges

We encourage parents and caregivers to work alongside us with building resilience in the child/ren and to let them know that it is normal to experience friendship issues and sadness. Equally important though are qualities such as optimism and problem solving skills, and the understanding that most disappointments are temporary and can be endured or solved.

Often as parents, we want to solve the problem/s for our child/ren, which can often result in us heightening a situation. It is not helpful for a parent to:

• Approach another student regarding an issue with your child
• Respond to other students via social media
• Request for students to be kept apart during playtime

Finally we ask parents to be open with their class teacher and to make an appointment to discuss any matters that are concerning you. A success happens when we move away from blame focus to solution focus. This would be a good mantra to share with your child/children.