“Be more resilient.” “You need to show more resilience.”  “You’re not resilient enough.”

How many times have you heard those comments, either directed towards your child or yourself as you grew up? Those comments assume that resilience is something that can found by managing negative emotions or adverse situations and it is learned by osmosis from the surrounding environment.

This couldn’t be further from the truth.

At Hume Anglican Grammar resilience is one of our six core values. For our community, resilience is a positive approach, founded upon realistic expectations, strength of purpose and flexible actions that help us deal with the challenges of life.

For our Hume Anglican Grammar community, resilience is built through relationships, support, and explicit education across all year levels P-12.  We create conditions that enable all students to be supported and guided through our pastoral care system and the use of Restorative Practices to resolve conflict and build health relationships. Our student wellbeing curriculum is designed to build student capacity for solving problems and explicitly teach social and emotional skills in the key areas of self-management and self-awareness across the whole school.

“The ability to sort and solve your own problems, rather than step back and expect others to resolve them, is usually developed in childhood. With repetition and practice problem-solving becomes a valuable life-pattern, to be used in the workplace, in the community and in family relationships.” – Michael Grose

Parenting educator Michael Grose has tips for parents to help their children become courageous and resilient problem solvers. He has six practical ideas parents can use when their child presents them with a problem. Michael Grose: How to encourage kids to be resilient problem-solvers (theparentswebsite.com.au)

Our students have demonstrated an enormous amount of resilience the past two years, and this has been attributed to the support of parents at home. As a school, we cannot build resilience alone; it needs to be built in partnership with families to ensure all students are supported through challenging times throughout their life.

If you missed the live webinar with Andrew Fuller earlier in the year, the Parents Website has a tip sheet on Building Resilience in Turbulent Times’ which parents can download. It has strategies parents at each stage of development (lower primary, middle primary, upper primary and teens) on what to look out for, what to say and what to do. TPW_Building-resilence_Tip-sheet_forweb.pdf (theparentswebsite.com.au)

Claire Thompson - Director of Student Wellbeing