The Parenting Series: Problem Solve

In today’s forum we launch our new Parenting Series starting with Problem Solve: The role of resilience, critical thinking and empathy for solution focused learning.  

The session began with reflecting on how our struggles in learning and childhood have a role in teaching us skills in problem solving and resilience.  Next we watched Jessica Lahey’s introduction to her book The Gift of Failure which explores how we need to let go in order for our children to succeed.

Problem solving in the curriculum
We explored problem solving in the curriculum through four interactive activities including coding with robots, solving a mathematical problem, exploring a scientific phenomenon and learning to navigate a PE obstacle course.  Each of these activities were designed to help us experience what challenge and problem solving looks like and we can support it.  A few key ideas that were shared from this experience included:

• Empathise with your child’s struggle like writing with a non-dominant hand, learning things for the first time can be a challenge.
• Do it together - some participants noted that learning with others helps overcome frustration and failure, and social learning supported further ideas and solutions
• Facilitating thinking - having a teacher or expert who can both encourage and give hints was helpful.
• Modify the task - if the level of difficulty is too high, it can tip the balance of confidence, so have alternative pathways or options, for example in the PE activity instead of balancing a ping-pong ball the ball was changed to a tennis ball.

Problem Solving in Social Contexts
The second area of problem solving we explored was in social settings.  A large part of the learning that comes with going to school is to learn to get along with others.  Social skills are a key part of the journey and understanding our emotional state and experiences can help.  Tool such as the Zones of Regulation can help with regulating our emotions, conflict response tools such as Kelso Choices can be helpful in choosing how to respond and as we read in this article earlier this semester we can support our children’s social challenges by empathising and listening to help guide their next steps.

Problem Solving at Home
Jessic Lahey asks if we are rescuing our children or teaching independence?  We discussed which of these actions below we are doing for our children that they could do for themselves?

We were also reminded that we model how to deal with problems, with our partners, with our children or people who help and support us.  Our children are watching us all the time and the way we cope and respond, tells them how they should respond.  So it is important that we also learn to manage our emotions and navigate problems with the same resilience and determination that we are asking our children to develop.

Key Ideas:

• Problems are part of life, things will go wrong
• Managing how we respond to a problem is important: our emotions and impulses.
• Knowing we can control and what we can’t control can help.
• Allowing children to learn through problem solving is an important skill that we shouldn’t shield them from, or “rescue them.”

What might you START doing that you are not doing already?
What might you STOP doing that feel needs to change?
What might you CONTINUE doing that is working?
 

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