Learning for real life

As our Board Chair, Mr Lou George, mentioned in our last newsletter, it is a privilege to live in a country that enjoys the freedom of voting in a democratic election. This democratic process forms part of the Australian Curriculum, and the Year 6s have used the opportunity to study this process, and hold their own election – read all the details here.

Tips for parents 

Parenting today seems tougher than ever, and we all need help from time to time. In this issue, Nurse Tegan (one of our school nurses and parent to five children) shares some practical tips for parenting to help build character and resilience in children, and prepare them for real life.

Mr Peter Thomson, Principal

An older mentor of mine told me these words almost 15 years ago, and, as a young mother at the time, I was seeking all the help and insight I could get for raising my children.

What she said that morning has stayed with me, and I believe it is more relevant now than ever before. You see, in my role as a school nurse I have the privilege of caring for the families and children within the Cedar community, which often means dealing with sickness and pain. Because we love our children and desire what’s good for them, we, as parents, often adopt a purely “protection mentality”. We want to change their environment to make everything “safe” for our children.

We all want to protect

Now as I said, this desire to protect our children comes from what I believe is a good place, and our children do need us to protect them. This is especially important in a world where they can be exposed to things, often through technology, that can have a devastating impact on their lives. However, the problem with a “protection mentality” is the reality that we are never going to be able to protect our children from all of the suffering and difficulties that they will experience in life. We can, and should, strive to provide a safe and healthy environment for them in our homes, and in our school, but we simply can’t control all of the circumstances and people that they are going to encounter. For example, at some stage in our children’s lives, people will be unkind to them, and there will be times when they feel left out and alone. Everyone at some point has had this experience. But the question at that moment is, will they have the emotional resilience to pick themselves up and keep going?

How can we prepare?

Because of this, I believe that a better approach for us to take is a “preparation mentality”. We need to see that our role as parents is not to shield our children from everything negative that they are going to experience in life. Instead, we can see ourselves as mentors who help our children interpret the difficulties they encounter, in order to help them develop the resilience to keep on going.

The road ahead

Our children will eventually become adults and will face various hardships in life; from broken relationships to sickness and suffering. They will experience all of these things and more at some point, no matter how hard we try to protect them. As parents we need to continually ask ourselves, what is my parenting goal – a protection mentality, or a preparation mentality? The reality is, we will not always be able to prepare the road for them, but we can prepare them for the road.

Nurse Tegan Bengtson, Cedar College Health Centre