SNNHK was delighted to host our first in-person event in a long time on 13 June 2023, in collaboration with the Child Development Centre in Wanchai, on the topic of “Building Resilience in Children” with a focus on those with additional needs. Thank you to everyone who came in person or watched the event online, with the help of SNNHK tech whizz Erin Macalligan!
Our first speaker was the Chief Executive of CDC, Dr Yvonne Becher. She explained the meaning of resilience, which is how a person deals with acute or long-term challenges and setbacks, and comes out stronger. How we react to events makes all the difference, and building resilience helps children buffer potential damage caused by adversities, and flourish despite potential hardships in life.
In younger children and those with additional needs, who are highly sensitive to changes in their environment and routine, building resilience takes more time and patience. Dr Becher explained that factors fostering resilience include:
1. Encouraging self-efficacy (a sense of confidence in one’s own ability to master a skill): parents and caregivers can provide opportunities to feel this “mastery” by giving choices – even two can be enough – and to be generous with specific praise.
2. Promoting hope by focusing on positives: ask “what made me feel good today?”, reframe negative self-talk and criticism, and model optimism and problem-solving.
3. Fostering social connectedness and offering constant emotional support for children with reassurance, feelings of safety, establishing daily and weekly routines, and modelling or applying regulation techniques such as deep breathing, movement breaks, deep pressure, etc.
4. Caregiver wellbeing is important too – don’t forget to take care of yourself!
Resilience pitfalls can occur when parents are over-protective, or perhaps we even try to avoid certain situations to try to minimise tantrums. We all want to protect our children from bad experiences, but sometimes they have to experience these to equip them with the coping skills for life.
1. Overprotection will limit a child’s ability to solve problems and may even lead to increased anxiety. Even small setbacks can help children how to learn to cope with adversity.
2. Another pitfall is over-compensation – if we constantly do this for our children, we are not helping them to develop their own potential and independence.
3. Being a perfectionist will also undermine resilience. Comparing ourselves to others creates insecurities and undermines hope. Instead, try to recognise their achievements and effort, give specific praise, focus on their strengths, and recognise it’s about doing the best you can for you and your child, not doing it perfectly or being the best.
4. Not learning how to deal with negative emotions can hamper resilience. Children need to learn that sometimes you just can’t fix something bad that has happened, and that everyone occasionally feels sad, deals with failures, and so on.
Parents should have reasonable expectations, use appropriate challenges for their child, encourage sticking to commitments, and encourage them to reach their goals. Foster independence and learn that it’s OK to fail sometimes. Normalising negative experiences so a child can see that it doesn’t just happen to them is helpful. Talk about incidents in others’ lives and how they have coped. When problem-solving, try not to tell your child what to do and instead ask them to come up with their own ideas and solutions. Lastly, remember to take into account their age, personality, situation and ability – as we know, every child is different!
Our next speaker was Melinda Sturges, speech and language therapist at the Child Development Team at Central Health. Melinda gave an overview of helping children deal with social interactions, handling conflict and challenging social situations, and how to make friends.
Melinda explained the differences between social skills, social thinking, and social cognition.
· Social skills are everyday skills used to communicate and interact with others, and include both verbal and non-verbal communication, e.g. gestures, facial expressions, body language.
· Social thinking refers to a methodology developed by Michelle Garcia Winner and is a process by which we make sense of our own and other people’s thoughts, feelings and intentions in context. The ability to think socially is an aspect of social learning that begins at birth and evolves across our lifetime.
· Social cognition is a broad umbrella term describing how people make sense of themselves, other people, social situations and social relationships, and this includes 3 key domains: social perception, social understanding and social decision making.
Some practical activities used in therapy include The Size of the Problem, Circles of Control, and social scripts and story books. The Size of the Problem helps children to categorise issues according to traffic light colours – big problems are red, medium problems are amber, and small problems are green. They can build resilience by learning to adapt according to the size of their problem. “Circles of Control” is particularly useful as it helps the child understand what is within their control and those areas which are outside of their control and therefore not worth worrying about!
Melinda recommended some story books including “The Good Egg” by Jory John and Pete Oswald, “What should Danny do?” by Ganit & Adir Levy, and “What if Everybody Did That?” by Colleen M Madden.
Our final session of the evening was a fascinating practical example of “Lego-based therapy” by Athena Wong and Sarah Lo from CDC, which included a fun session with parent volunteers giving instructions to each other on how to build a Lego house.
The beloved children’s toy Lego being used as an intervention therapy was discovered by a psychologist in 2004, when he discovered two socially withdrawn children using it to communicate. Since then, Lego-based therapy has been used to encourage turn-taking, listening, sharing, teamwork and problem-solving. CDC runs courses on Lego-based therapy and you can find out more by contacting the Centre directly.
In our Q&A session to wrap up the event, we received some questions from attendees which included What’s a “normal” level of resilience and when should a parent become concerned? Dr Yvonne Becher explained that there is no “one size fits all” answer to this and there is no such thing as a normal level of resilience, every child is different as is every adult. By using the techniques outlined in her presentation, parents can address issues with the child to help determine their level of resilience.
How to help our kids deal with social rejection was another question asked by a participant. Melinda answered that this can sometimes be more heartbreaking for the parents than for the children! Talking to them about their feelings and validating the situation can help. Sometimes it’s not about social rejection but a small misunderstanding, and addressing this through social skills and conversation can help the child adjust.
If attendees and SNNHK members and friends have any additional questions, please feel free to reach out or ask a question on our Facebook page.
Thank you to everyone who attended our event and we look forward to seeing you again – check out our website and social media pages for more information.
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