On the 17th of May, as part of Mental Health Awareness Week, myself and four Year 12 students led a Parent Wellbeing Workshop. During this session I wanted to focus on Parent Wellbeing as a stand-alone topic as we cannot fully focus on keeping our children ok until we ourselves are ok.
To this end, we began with a short breathing exercise as a way of letting go of the stresses that we arrived with and enabling us to be present with the topic and with each other.
Following this, we heard four short but powerful presentations from Quang Hung and Thuy Linh, our Mental Health prefects, followed by Mia and Gaetane, our Student Wellbeing Representatives, on how the different generations support their own Wellbeing and how we can learn from each other. It’s great to see that crochet and knitting have endured despite the advances of social media – a great way to reflect and unwind.
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The Zones of Regulation have been used to great effect in our school as a way of understanding and naming our emotions, as well as giving our students strategies to regulate their mood. We talked about how this can be a good way of opening up conversations with our families that are beneficial to all.
We can use it as a strategy to manage our children’s behaviour and support their development of empathy, as in the following example:
It took me a long time to make that meal for you. When you don’t eat, it puts me in the blue zone.
You sound angry. Are you in the red zone? What can you do to get back into the green zone?
As well as this, we as adults can use the Zones of Regulation to monitor and manage our own moods. It’s not always easy to understand what emotion we are feeling, but if we expect our children to do it, we need to make the effort as well. As you read this, what Zone are you in right now?
As I mentioned at the beginning, if our own Wellbeing isn’t good, we can’t expect our child’s Wellbeing to be good either. The following video illustrates the importance of putting on our own ‘oxygen mask’ first. Despite being aimed at Primary age children, the message is equally relevant for all parents.
Following on from our student’s suggestions, we looked at further strategies to manage and regulate ourselves, and shared our ideas about what works for us. It’s important that we can experiment and try new things, as what helps us may be very different to what helps our peers.
We also looked at what can prevent us from developing and maintaining our own Wellbeing. Time is the obvious factor but external and internal pressures to maintain a certain image as parents can be just as important. We discussed how planning ahead and having open and honest conversations with others can be important in gaining the space to look after yourself.
Finally, we shared some websites that can support us in navigating the path of parenthood and the constant new challenges that it throws at us. The first website from the Anna Freud Centre supports self-care for parents of children at all ages. Place 2Be gives great advice for children of Primary School Age, whilst Young Minds focuses on the mental health of older children.
We ended on an advertisement for the BIS Community Wellbeing Committee which aims to support the Wellbeing of all members of the school community. I’m pleased to say that two attendees of this workshop have now signed up as our Parent Representatives – thank you and welcome to Xochitl and Tina!
If you have any suggestions as to how we as a school can make improvements to Parent Wellbeing, please contact them on the e mail addresses below:
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BIS Hanoi students, Katie, Julie and Nguyen Anh from Year 11, attending annual Summit to develop creative solutions to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
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