Fun Friends and PSE
How Can You Support at Home?
For very young children personal, emotional and social development is one of the most important components of learning, playing a vital role in supporting effective interaction and developing positive attitudes to self and others. Relationships form the foundation of human experience and it is essential that young children learn the social skills needed to interact successfully with others and to develop healthy and effective connections.
Early childhood experts describe personal development as understanding who we are, what we can do and how we take care of ourselves. Social development means learning to understand ourselves in relation to others, how to initiate and maintain relationships, understanding the 'rules' and how we behave towards others. Emotional development involves understanding our own feelings and those of other people, developing empathy and perspective. This can be broken down into three main aspects of learning and development:
- building and maintaining relationships
- managing feelings and behaviour
- self-confidence and self-awareness
At UWCSEA we believe that for learning to be most effective learners must feel secure and supported. While there are opportunities for personal and social development in all elements of the UWCSEA learning programme, the fact that we have a dedicated Personal and Social Education (PSE) programme shows how much we value its importance. Read more about our PSE programme here.
Research shows that PSE not only improves achievement by an average of 11 percentile points, but it also increases prosocial behaviors (such as kindness, sharing, and empathy), improves student attitudes toward school, and reduces depression and stress among students. (From The Impact of Enhancing Students’ Social and Emotional Learning)
Last week we had our second Parent Workshop on the Fun Friends programme presented by Dr. Natalie Games, a UWCSEA mum and Clinical Psychologist who works at Alliance Counselling. In addition to her clinical practice, Natalie is trained and licensed as a facilitator of the World Health Organisation approved FRIENDS’ programmes and has implemented these programmes with individuals, within schools and university settings in Singapore.
You can watch the Fun Friends Parent Workshop video here.
During the presentation Natalie made reference to a number of resources that you might find useful and she has shared them all below.
Descriptive Praise
Focus on strengths in your child's efforts - Martin Seligman's character strengths VIA
Not in Praise of Praise - Acknowledge rather than praise?
Empathy
Mindfulness
There are many resources out there but here is an article from The Huffington Post to kick start mindfulness practice in the home.
Others:
Robin Grille "Parenting for a Peaceful world"
From Dr. Louise Porter:
"Listen First:
Listen to children about their fears. Understand that they are fearful even if you don’t understand why. Find out if there could be some reason for the fear and remove children from a situation if there is good reason to be afraid. But even if the fear seems ridiculous, do not tell them to stop being silly, as that forces them to try to hide their feelings. They will become frightened that no one will help them and worried that their true feelings will show. These two feelings make the original problem worse. Take the panic out of being afraid.
Normalise what they are feeling.
You might explain that everyone gets frightened at times, or teach them the difference between being frightened of something, disliking it, and being surprised by it. Sometimes we seem frightened of a cockroach when really we have been surprised that it is somewhere unexpected. Being surprised or disliking something is more manageable than being frightened of it.
Have faith
Express your faith that they can overcome their fears. Tell them about other times when they have overcome their fears and express to them your confidence that they can do so again. Courage does not mean being unafraid: it means feeling fear but conquering it. So congratulate your children for their bravery.
Soothe children during meltdowns Sit with the child during a meltdown, repeating over and over that you will be there until they feel better. Do not address the object of the fear as that is not the issue: the issue is learning to manage their feelings. As you comfort them, they will be learning to self-soothe.
Make them responsible for a solution In the long term (not during a meltdown), ask them how they plan to overcome their fears. As these are a product of their own imagination, only they can change their thinking. You might explain that the fears are sneaking up on them, and suggest that now is a good time to think about whether they would like to find a way to out-sneak them. Once they have decided to become boss of their fears, you could offer to be their ‘fears adviser’. You know about fear-dispelling magic and they know about their own brain so together you could invent a spell that will banish their fears."
A spontaneous mindful moment captured during playtime!
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