Cybersafety

These links provide important reading as a way of maximising your child’s safety online.

• https://www.esafety.gov.au/parents/big-issues/online-pornography
• https://www.esafety.gov.au/parents/skills-advice/hard-to-have-conversations
• https://www.esafety.gov.au/parents/skills-advice/taming-technology

Social-Emotional Learning

Seek a fair go for all;  Strive for peace

In conversation with students, we talk about Safe Friends, Good Friends and Potential Friends.  So what’s the difference? 

It is important first to start with the fact that children are learning to work with all personality types.  It’s difficult enough for adults to ensure a fair go for all and striving for peace when one disagrees with another on a moral or ethical basis.  So children need many opportunities for discussion as they learn to implement the conflict resolution skills.

After resolving an issue, we need to help children to identify who are their:

Safe friends -those they can trust; who care about their friend as much as themselves.

Good friends  - those that need boundaries.  Often these friends are fun to be around but together, silliness and poor decision making can be had.

Potential friends – those friends who can be introverted or extroverted but tend to push the boundaries; take advantage of when the supervision has moved on or isn’t around.  Where children make a deliberate choice to be sneaky.

Whilst implementing the strategy of Be Kind is so simple when children are with their safe friends, it’s not so easy with good friends and potential friends.  But if children can learn to do this, their influence on those friends could be significant. 

A scenario:  A child decides to demoralise another child through put-downs.  Your child as a bystander knows there is no reason for this and chooses to say to their friend, ‘Sam/Alice, you’re a great chess player but I think I can beat you today.  Let’s go to the library and have a game.’

Whilst the target has been on the receiving end of something not nice or necessary, he/she can see that there is someone looking out for them by intervening in a strategic way.  This builds resilience but also nips the problem in the bud – at least for now.  We just need to be encouraging our children to use kindness (and distraction) to change the mood.

Children feel powerful when they can use strategies that work.  We just need to set them up with the skills.