Maybe it was easier when your children were toddlers. Then you didn’t have changing school friendships, struggles with learning and navigating your children mixing with other families and their different ways of doing things. There weren’t any bullies in your backyard, like there are in the school yard. You could keep your child safe under your watchful eye, but now they are at school and you have to trust them to teachers and school staff, who you barely know, let alone the classmates who can make and break how your child feels.
Your child may do well at first, and then you hit a snag at the school when a teacher didn’t understand the note you sent or when your child didn’t get their assignment done in time when they were not quite sick enough to not be at school but they were too exhausted to finish at home, or the friend turns on your child or excludes them from games. Then suddenly school yards can become a spiral of hurt and anxiety for children.
In the media the unseen dangers of infections and frightening scenarios shout out at our children and has contributed to increasing anxiety in families everywhere. If you as a parent have experienced fear and anxiety, then these realities are frightening when your child enters school.
If you have a child with anxiety at school, it can be draining on your family. Particularly if your child starts to refuse to go to school or claims to be sick in order to stay at home. Then it can become a nightmare of school meetings, medical bills, seeking specialist assessments and psychologists who are skilled with children and their families and potentially long waiting times to be seen.
These scenarios may be your current or feared future reality.
Child Psychiatry Brisbane has developed an innovative course for helping families in these life situations.
We believe in building strong resilient families who stay connected and learn to problem solve through the challenges of early primary schooling onward. This is about teaching your children to face their fears with bravery and authentically managing the stages of processing their own challenges without always resorting to you as the parent to fix the problem or find the solution. Our hope is that you will then have children who get adept at finding ways to succeed without being told what to do. That is what happens when children build confidence in their own abilities to find a way through these social challenges.
If any of this resonates with your family situation, can we encourage you to enrol in this short online course in building skills in dealing with anxiety.
What the course includes:
Our course is designed to increase your confidence as a parent in managing anxiety symptoms, learning skills to handle psychological setbacks that you can impart to your children, so that they find new perspectives to handle their challenging circumstances to bounce back into daily activities with a zest for learning and growing that becomes infectious to others. The key to success in your child at school is to build healthy child- adult relationships and promote positive interactions with peers, while learning to manage when those peer relationships don’t eventuate as expected.
The course is purely online and done at your own pace – There is no exam at the end and no pass or fail it is purely designed to try and be helpful.
We will create a lesson each fortnight accompanied by a lesson plan, activities for personal reflection and skills to practice with your child. Each short video has some highlighted learning that is reinforced in the workbook that includes the activities and skillsets. Our course presenters have significant experience in the field with families and are active clinical practitioners. We are also aware that recent research in this area has shown the success of similar online training programs with families growing in resilience and problem solving.
