How to calm the mumma bear when something happens at school

This weeks school success tip is to do with improving communication.

Communication is one of the secrets to school success. Communicating with your child, their teachers and other school professionals is all important.

One of the tricky situations is when your child comes home and tells you about something that happened at school. Now you weren't there... and therefore you really don't know what happened. So what do you do? 

Depending on the situation you may want to go full on Mumma Bear, but before you do take the following three steps:.

1. Check in with yourself.  
If you have really strong feelings about what is being reported to you I wonder why.  Maybe a similar thing happened to you at school, maybe it's happened to your child before, or maybe you are just very surprised.  It's important to sit and digest those feelings before responding by sending off an angry email, gossiping about it in the car park or using your crystal ball and imagining the worst possible scenario.

2. Put all this in the context of how your child normally responds to situations.  Do they tend to see the worst or best in a situation?  Are they a sensitive child or rarely show emotion?  Do they have confidence or experience anxiety?  Whatever they are reporting is through the lens of their emotions and personality. 

3. Take some time to gather all the facts you can, or as best your child can remember.
Doing all of this is all important preparation for approaching the school and/or teacher.

Your child will spend about 13 years in the education system (not including pre school). Experience and research have taught us much about creating school success,  Having worked with 1000s of children, adolescents and parents for over 17 years, Positive Young Minds offers private consultations where you can talk about your concerns and we can help you work through a plan to address the tricky bits of your child's educational journey.



​Kim Ross
Child Psychologist, Fierce Self-Care Advocate and Founder of Positive Young Minds​