Parenting Facilitator Elaine Halligan from The Parent Practice offers ideas to help children to be happy, cooperative and confident.
Help children settle in well at school by
- Preparing children in advance
- Encouraging confidence and cooperation
- Empathising with and validating their feelings
Prepare your child for school by:
- Familiarising your child with the school. Visit or look at pictures of the new school often. Explain unfamiliar things.
- Getting any uniform well in advance.
- Practicing in role play conversations with other children.
Build confidence and cooperation by noticing and describing what the child has done right.
- Focus on the positives “You hung up your coat without me reminding you.” “You remembered to bring home your games kit (or most of your games kit!)”
- Praise effort and attitude. “You’re not giving up on tying your shoelaces. They’re really tricky when you’re first learning.”
- Praise improvement. “You’re getting quicker at putting on your socks now.”
- What quality does that show? eg maturity, self-control. “You didn’t interrupt me when I was on the phone although I could see you wanted to speak to me. That takes self-control.”
Help children cope with feelings
- If children can say how they feel parents need to listen and not deny the child’s feelings.
- Eg, Child: I don’t like school. Parent: Don’t say: “You’ll love it, you’ll see.” Do say: “There are probably a lot of things that are quite confusing right now since school is so new to you.”
- Some children don’t speak about their feelings but parents can guess something is amiss and need to address the underlying feelings. Stop what you are doing and convey with your body language that you are paying attention. Look behind your child’s action or words and imagine how he is feeling; reflect it back to him in words. Don’t try to make it better. Children don’t need protection from their feelings– they need to be able to deal with them. Once children’s feelings have been expressed they may be ready to focus on solutions.
