However, some children may continue to be reluctant to go to school after quite a few terms or suddenly become reluctant to go to school pleading illness like stomach aches, nausea or headaches. This could indicate a problem that needs sorting out. This could involve one of the following:

Physical illness

If you feel it necessary, take your child to the doctor and have them checked out physically – sometimes there really are physical reasons behind some of these symptoms which seem psychosomatic in nature. Children can get low-level viral infections or other illnesses that can cause them to be run down for months.

Bullying

A frequent reason for school refusal is a simmering or more virulent bullying problem within the classroom or in the playground.

Difficulties with friendships

Sometimes, children will be reluctant to go to school because they are finding it difficult to make friends or join in with groups in the playground. They may just have had some kind of argument with a friend or friends the day before and are worried as to whether they will be able to sort it out. If you think your child is having problems socially, then it is worth talking to the class teacher for his or her observations as to how they are getting along.

Personality clash with the teacher

Sometimes, a child will suffer from having a personality clash with a particular teacher. Teachers are flawed human beings, the same as anyone else, and will sometimes, in what is a totally unprofessional manner, take against a particular child. Your child might complain at getting picked on or punished unnecessarily, or being shouted at by the teacher.

You need to try to sort this out by not becoming aggressive or defensive yourself but by quietly trying to address the teacher with the problem. You could say that your child feels that they are not able to do anything right within the classroom and it is making them unhappy.

How can you help the teacher to turn things around? If you do not feel that you are making any headway, then remain calm but set up a meeting with the principal, putting your case with some clear examples of what you feel are unprofessional comments towards your child.

Sometimes, a teacher’s personality will not suit your child very well – maybe the teacher is loud and brash and your child is sensitive and quiet. However tough this is, children have to adapt to the difficult personalities of the world and will sometimes have to ‘bite the bullet’ and keep their heads down, hoping they will get a nicer teacher next time round.

Concentration difficulties

Some children do find it very difficult to concentrate, preferring activity to concentration. They are often easily distracted, and tend to think before they act. If your child is like this, then he or she may find it extremely hard to settle at school and find themselves in constant trouble for their behavior. This might be because they are wandering around the classroom rather than sitting still, chatting rather than working, or fiddling with things rather than listening. They then become reluctant to go to school because the demands for concentration and listening are perceived by the child as being too great for them to manage.

Learning difficulties

If children are struggling with the complexity of the work being given them, and feel they cannot achieve what is being expected of them, they can lose confidence and not want to go to school. It is important to work with the school in making sure that the work is adjusted (differentiated) so that your child can manage it, and to work in partnership with the Special Education Co-ordinator to ensure they get sufficient support.

Jealousy of younger sibling

When there is a new baby in the house, or younger children at home, some older siblings may not want to come to school because they think they are missing out on all the attention and fun. They need to be persuaded that they are not forgotten when they are at school and perhaps they will be doing special and fun things at school that their young sibling cannot join in with!

Anxiety about what will happen at home

If you are struggling with major issues at home such as bereavement, separation or divorce, domestic violence, money worries, substance misuse or mental or physical illness, then your child may become reluctant to go to school as they do not want to leave you because they are worried what might happen to you while they are at school.

Seek help for yourself when possible and always try to communicate the truth to your child in as much as they can understand things according to the age and level of maturity they are at. Reassure them that Mum or Dad will cope and the best thing they can do is go to school and be with their friends where they will be busy and learning things.

School phobia

Very rarely, a child may become phobic about going to school. It may begin with one of the above difficulties, but then become so all-encompassing that the child will become extremely distressed at even the thought of going to school. You must then seek help from a child psychologist who can help you rebuild your child’s confidence and work with the school to help get them back to school, even if only on a staggered basis.

All schools are required to have a teacher who acts as a Special Education Co-ordinator. This person is in charge of monitoring all youngsters who have any kind of special need that may affect their ability to access the usual curriculum. This could be a learning difficulty in the area of literacy (dyslexia) or numerary (dyscalculia), hearing or visual impairment, emotional and behavioral difficulties, physical disability, or a wide range of medical or neurological conditions.

Sometimes, a child will need one-to-one help or to be part of a small group instead of a whole class for some of the time. It can also be important that work is what is called differentiated (same subject, or learning topic, but adjusted to a level the child can cope with). This means children can still participate in what is going on and retain their self-esteem moving at their own pace.

Some children, whose special educational needs are of particular concern, will need to be seen by an educational psychologist who will assess the ways an individual child thinks and learns in great detail. Children can be referred directly to an educational psychologist by parents, or in partnership with the school. The educational psychologist will spend some time getting a full learning background and pinpointing the precise difficulties the child is experiencing.

Part of this process will involve talking to parents about their worries and concerns and taking an early history of the child’s development that might prove helpful. Usually, educational psychologists will keep in touch with schools and monitor a child’s progress. They will give specific advice on how a child might be helped to overcome their difficulties.

Some youngsters will have difficulties that require support beyond the normal financial resources of the school. If, after initial advice has been taken and support given, a child fails to progress in the way the school and parents have hoped then a ‘Individual Education Plan’, or IEP, might be necessary. This is a legal document that gives the child a statutory (legal) right to a range of provision extra to normal school resources. In this case, the educational psychologist, or other agencies outside the school, will recommend a ‘multi-disciplinary’ assessment of the child’s physical, social and mental abilities. The outcome of this assessment will be clear recommendations of the type of support the child needs and should have access to.

If you suspect your child has some kind of special need or learning difficulty, it is good to check this out with your child’s class teacher. The sooner any difficulties are picked up, the sooner something can be done about them and the right help given.

Schools tend to be places of routine and structure where there are particular expectations. Children will have to learn to sit still, listen, concentrate, pay attention and absorb information in line with school expectations. They will also be noticing themselves alongside their peer group and making comparisons in the way they perform and achieve.

For some children, going to school will be their first experience of being away from their parents. Others will already have been prepared by attending a playschool, nursery or daycare center. While most children find going to school an enjoyable and stimulating experience, others find it an extremely daunting one. Changes and new things are always stressful even if they are positive. Children need plenty of support from home and their parents to make a good start in their new school.

Some children become anxious and nervous on separation at the school gate or classroom door, and can become tearful and upset. Some find it extremely difficult to conform to what is expected of them in the classroom and want to do their own thing without following the teacher’s instruction. Some children find the demands for a new level of concentration, sitting still and listening overwhelming. Usually these problems gradually fade away as going to school becomes more habitual and normal and as the child adjusts to the new demands.

Young children find it difficult to articulate their fears, anxieties or difficulties in their new environment and you may find that your child regresses into more babyish behavior at home or becomes more difficult or aggressive. This will usually settle down as the child becomes more settled at school.

As a parent, you can prepare your children for the experiences that school will bring them and make them more ready and adept to deal with their new measure of independence.

- Children’s attendance at a pre-school setting is an excellent preparation for school life as it involves a short separation from parents or carers in the morning or afternoon and allows them to become used to the routines and structures of an institutional environment.

- If children don’t attend a pre-school, then give them opportunities to separate from you and spend time with other adults such as grandparents, or do a ‘swap’ for a day and let your child play at a friend’s house. This gives children the opportunity to feel confident about being without you for a few hours.

- Giving children lots of opportunities to play with other youngsters in the park or at home gives them a chance to develop social skills that will aid their ability to make friends and relationships and play positively with one another.

- Encouraging and helping your child to dress themselves independently is very important. Make sure that your child has a coat that is easy to put on and take off, without a stiff zipper or buttons, as this will most likely be put on and taken off throughout the school day. If possible, teach your child to tie shoelaces and be able do up shirt and trouser buttons without assistance. If tying shoes proves a problem, then buy shoes that are done up with Velcro.

- Make sure your child is confident in going to the toilet, wiping their bottom and washing their hands. The school staff do not expect to have to help children in these areas unless they have a special need.

- Teach your child how to use cutlery so they are able to eat their school dinners in a polite and acceptable way.

- Mark all your child’s equipment with his or her name so if things are mislaid at school they can be found quickly.

Children need to learn to respect other children’s needs and feelings and to be able to share and co-operate with others. They must learn to take turns when playing with games and with equipment. It is important for the child to understand that someone else may have a different point of view from themselves and that this is not only acceptable but has to be tolerated.

Children need to develop a real understanding and empathy with other people’s feelings. This involves being aware of their own feelings and being able to describe them so they can articulate their own needs and consequently also be able to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. Children also have to learn to manage the frustration that comes when people do not do what they want!

In the infant school there will probably be a ‘home corner’ where children can exercise their imaginations and role-play cooperatively with one another. The school will provide simple board games and a range of toys the children can play with such as a train set, car track, farm, dolls house or construction toys. Children move from playing alongside one another to playing together, they learn to take turns, and this is a natural part of their development.

Children in school are constantly being given opportunities to work at tasks together and to share ideas. Staff will work with small groups of children on a shared activity to encourage and promote this sharing of ideas and task completion. As children get older, they will be encouraged to work co-operatively in table groups discussing ideas. They will often have the opportunity to work in pairs to carry out research or complete a task. This might involve working on a computer or planning a piece of work together.

Many schools have developed a technique called ‘Circle Time’ when a whole group of children sit in a circle sharing thoughts and feelings regarding a particular topic. For example: I feel happy when . . .’ or ‘I feel sad when . . .’ Children learn that we all share a range of reactions and feelings to the same kinds of situations. They also have an opportunity to be listened to, and this raises their self-esteem and a belief that they do have important things to say.

On the sports field, older children will begin to learn to play team games. They start to realise that victory lies in the cooperation of the whole team rather than the skill of the individual player. If a goal is to be scored, then the ball must be passed rather than held by one person.

The school playground is a place where children can really suffer if they have poor social skills. A reluctance or inability to play with other youngsters can mean isolation and loneliness. Some children will become very frustrated and physically aggressive because they have not learned to control their impulses when others upset them or don’t do what they want them to do.

Children who are successful at friendships are co-operative, supportive, and able not only to articulate their own needs, but to understand others’ needs. They are usually full of ideas or able to take up other people’s ideas. They have a strong concept of interaction and engagement.

Schools should support children who are struggling with social interactions and see it as a lack of skill rather than children being introverted or badly behaved. Children can learn to interact more effectively, even if it doesn’t come very naturally to them in the first place. Sometimes, children need to practise strategies to enable them to join in games, or have some gentle feedback on their bossiness or physical aggression which makes their peer group not want to play.

Good schools will set up good.playground practice to encourage children to play successfully with one another. This might include having a wide range of objects such as balls, hoops, skipping ropes and bats which children can play games with. Some schools offer training to midday supervisors to be ‘play leaders’ helping children to develop constructive games and keep to the rules. Some develop ‘quiet areas’ where children can read, play games or chat, to accommodate children who are not so keen on rushing around constantly.

Some schools will have a ‘can’t say, won’t play’ rule, or have a bench in the playground where children who want to play with someone can sit and a little supportive group of older children will pick them up and start a game. This can encourage children to notice if someone is isolated or left out, and to empathise with how that might feel. The school can encourage an ethos of good social interaction.

If our children are not disciplined and can’t behave, we will set them up to fail – at a basic level, people will not like their behavior and therefore will avoid playing with them or inviting them round. They will also be unable to gain from and engage in the process of education.

It is a parental responsibility and duty to keep control of our children and to train them in socially acceptable behavior. However, this is often easier said than done. Society has changed considerably over the last twenty-five years and the whole structure and hierarchy of authority and discipline has altered.

Where there used to be automatic respect for elders, teachers and those in positions of authority in society, such as the police force or the church, this is no longer so. Now, we expect people to earn our respect and be somehow worthy of it. It is easy for ‘authority’ to ‘slip from grace’ as certain parts of the media tend to hound and undermine those in authority roles, given the slightest opportunity or failing.

In the same way, it seems that parental authority, the underlying fabric of society, has in some ways been eroded in the minds of parents, the public and children. The disciplining of children is now increasingly perceived as the role of parents and parents alone rather than something the whole community shares a responsibility in.

In the past, people in the community would feel free to step in and chastise a child if they were behaving in an unacceptable way. Now, we might be arrested for telling off someone else’s offspring! So, although the responsibility and burden of parenting now falls squarely on parental shoulders, parental confidence seems to have hit an all-time low.

Many parents find it difficult to recognise their own authority. They may not fully appreciate that children require expectations and boundaries and the imposition of a certain amount of control in order to develop their own internal self-control and self-discipline in the future. In order for children to feel safe, loved and secure, they need boundaries – an imaginary, but firmly drawn, line that, when crossed, will mean there are consequences to their behavior. However, how do we create these boundaries and controls to raise stable, well-adjusted adults?

While past generations may have used extremely controlling and aggressive methods of disciplining their children, since the sixties parents have sought other ways to raise children. Where spankings, smacking, shouting and punishment were the order of the day for unruly youngsters, we now seek a different pathway. This generation, and the one before it, have sought to give children rights and to make them accept responsibilities through negotiation, compromise and empowerment.

However, the new pathway of communication, negotiation and compromise has proved a difficult path for some parents to cope with. While many parents try their best to avoid smacking and shouting, they don’t really know what to do instead. They are offered little training, sometimes judgement, disapproval and lack of support.

Meanwhile, schools are experiencing more and more children with emotional and behavioral difficulties, children exhibiting anti-social and violent behavior. These children seem to have few if any boundaries to their behavior. They also appear to be inherently unhappy.

Is something going wrong? How can we as parents steer a path through discipline which is not aggressive, controlling or punitive, but is an extension of our legitimate love, care and regard for the well-being of our children? How can we bring about our long-term plan of raising children to be responsible, law-abiding, socially acceptable adults?

What we need is a near mirror reflection of what modern day schools do as organisations and what good teachers do as individuals. Just as there has been a big turn around in disciplinary methods within schools, so there needs to be a development in the way we discipline within the home. We all need a ‘home-behavior policy’. It is a policy or plan to achieve our goal: disciplined children who will grow into self-disciplined adults.

The first thing to remember is that our ‘home-behavior policy’ must be a plan to raise children effectively. Something we create in the best future interests of our children, and not to control them or to confine them. Discipline is part of love, care and compassion for our children, not an obstacle to crush their spirit. Good discipline takes place when we operate within an environment of love, encouragement, praise, acceptance, tolerance and forgiveness (there is a lot of forgiveness necessary in the average family!).

- Wake your child in plenty of time to get up, get dressed and have breakfast without rushing and worrying about the time. If your child is a bit of a daydreamer, they may need more support in not becoming distracted and drifting off to play or watch TV before they are ready. It is a good idea to say that no TV or playing can happen until they are dressed for school and have had breakfast.

- Make sure your child has a good breakfast. Research indicates that children who have had a good breakfast are more alert, able to concentrate for longer periods of time, and better able to cope with their school work. Sitting down together with your child to have breakfast can help them to eat. Cereal, toast or some kind of protein such as egg or bacon will set your child up to make the most of their morning at school.

- Make sure that your child has a long drink before they go to school and include a bottle of water or fruit juice in their bag. Research shows that dehydration is a major cause of lack of attention and concentration, and the brain functions less well as the body dehydrates. It is important that children drink regularly.

- Leave for school in plenty of time so there is no rush and therefore no anxiety or apprehension. When children are late for school, they miss out on the beginning of the day and often on the explanations for the first task of the day. It will take them longer to settle down and understand what to do. It also means they may have to walk into a room of children who are already settled and organized, which is difficult and sometimes causes a great deal of stress.

- Have a board in the kitchen or by the front door to remind yourself of anything special that your child has to bring into school.

- If your child has a packed lunch, then make sure you make a healthy meal which has a mixture of mainly carbohydrate and protein and some fat to give maximum energy to revitalize your child in the middle of what is a long day. Don’t give them a huge amount (the same amount as you might eat), as this can be overwhelming and mean they can’t face eating any of it. Try to include some fruit as well as a chocolate or cereal bar treat. Make sure they have plenty to drink, water as well as fruit juice.

- Make sure that your child is dressed in a way which will keep them warm, cool or dry as the weather demands.

- If possible, try to have a five-minute sit down with your child before leaving the house, perhaps watching TV or reading a book, or having them reading to you to calm them down, and have a cuddle before the beginning of the school day.

- Walk to school if possible. A walk at the beginning of the day can help children to dispel their early morning energy and arrive at school having had some fresh air and exercise and ready to sit down to work. It is quite good for parents, too! It also avoids cluttering up school streets with too many cars proving a danger to children.

If people acknowledge we are doing well and praise and encourage us, then we are more likely to want to do the same again. Praise and encouragement build self-esteem and a sense of value in the individual – these are as necessary to children and young people as water to growing plants.

Good schools will offer a range of different rewards and incentives; the first and most important being plenty of verbal praise. Teachers who manage behavior very successfully within the classroom use positive statements far more frequently than negative ones. Teachers who praise pupils who are behaving appropriately are more likely to reinforce this appropriate behavior in the whole class. Teachers who notice and comment on inappropriate behavior are more likely to reinforce the attention-giving potential of poor behavior.

Good schools will make sure that all youngsters have access to a reward system and not just the high flyers or disruptive children who are being encouraged to behave better. Children who work hard and are always polite, helpful and kind should be held up as an example and rewarded accordingly.

Children’s top reward is their parents knowing about their good behavior so it is worth asking how you will know your child has behaved well and the school is pleased with them. Other reward systems that reinforce verbal praise might include:

Class incentive schemes

This involves pupils earning points towards a whole class treat – pupils can earn points individually, or as a group or class. Peer pressure is towards obtaining the class treat and therefore eliminates the ‘teacher creep’ mentality. Treats could involve extra break time, watching a short video, playing a quiz, etc. Some primary schools have a special ‘choosing time’ known as Golden Time in order to reward good behavior.

Star charts

These are a familiar sight in the primary school and enable children to put a star on a chart when they have behaved well or worked hard. These can accumulate to gain a prize or certificate.

Stickers

Stickers have great visual appeal and a child wearing one usually gets extra praise from other members of staff for their achievement.

When they start school, many children like to flit from activity to activity, only staying in one place for a minute or two. They are naturally excited by the environment and want a little bit of everything. When reception classes were more an extension of nursery ‘learning through play’ environments, these children had an opportunity to slowly build up their ability to concentrate for longer on a given activity. Now, right from the beginning of schooling, children are expected to sit still for twenty to thirty minutes at a time. Many children, particularly kinaesthetic boys, find this almost impossible.

We must remember that top attention levels for extremely attentive adults is twenty minutes. Most of us will drift off into our own thoughts and concerns or be distracted by what is going on around us or by what other people are doing. Therefore children whose level of concentration is naturally much lower will need constant encouragement to stop them drifting away and enable them to focus back on the task in hand.

Good teaching staff will give feedback every few minutes such as: ‘well done for listening’, ‘I can see you are working really hard’, etc., which draws the child back on task. Staff can prolong children’s interest in an activity by encouraging them to expand on what they are doing ‘just a little bit more’ or to ‘just try a bit longer’.

Good schools will recognise that their kinaesthetic learners can concentrate and attend when building models, cooking, playing the drums, painting or playing sport. They will raise children’s self-esteem and ability in these activities, keeping their motivation higher when things are more difficult for them, for example concentrating on a mathematical activity.

One of the essentials of children being able to concentrate and complete tasks is being able to understand that a task has a beginning, a middle and an end, and being able to assess how long each of these processes will take. Often, children have difficulty in setting down to a task and need help and support to do this. Sometimes, children get ‘stuck’ in the middle of a task and need moving on. At others, children cannot put on that extra spurt to complete a task successfully (these are the children who find themselves staying in at lunchtime to finish their work). The job of the good teacher is to understand the needs of different children so they can be offered the appropriate support at the right time. Some teachers will give children times when they expect, for example, one or two sentences to have been completed. Others will stop the children and ask where they have got to and remind them how long they have got in which to complete the task. Again, praise and encouragement provide the motivation to refocus the non-attentive learner.

Another key ingredient in the ability to concentrate is being able to block out what is going on around you and to focus on what it is you have to do. This can be very difficult in a classroom where there are maybe thirty to thirty-five people also engaged in a number of tasks. Some may be chattering, the teacher may be explaining things to a small group, some may be wandering about, and someone else is sharpening their pencil, etc. Children need practice and positive feedback to shut out distractions and to keep focused.

Asking and answering questions

Children need to develop confidence to ask and answer questions within the classroom environment. The best environment allows children the opportunity to enquire and be curious and to seek answers to their questions. Children should feel able to take the risk and ask questions, even if they don’t always get the answer right, and this means creating an environment of trust where it is OK to get it wrong.

Good teachers will make sure that all the children in the class have an opportunity to ask and answer questions on a regular basis as teaching is an interactive experience.

Talking about experiences

Part of talking is ‘telling the story’ of what has happened to you, and how you reacted or felt about it. Schools usually have a ‘news time’ when children are given the opportunity to talk about what is the news in their life and to share their feelings or reactions.

Learning to listen quietly while sitting in a group

Learning to listen and absorb information is a skill in itself. Children are by their nature active and find it difficult to sit still. However, if a classroom of thirty children is to remain calm and able to learn, then listening skills are a prerequisite. Children need to learn to sit still without fidgeting or shuffling. They need to look at the person speaking, or at the visual teaching material. They need to follow what is being said and absorb it, in such a way as to re-process it and answer questions the teacher may pose.

When children first enter school, teachers spend a great deal of time and energy focusing on listening skills and training children to sit cross-legged on a carpet, avoid touching one another, and maintain eye contact. In our culture, we have set ideas about what listening ‘looks like’. As adults, after good early childhood training, even though minds may wander off into the middle distance, our bodies will remain in a listening pose that can deceive the speaker of our true attention levels.

This focus on listening skills will lead into the literacy and numeracy hours, story time and all other times during the school day when the teacher wants to gain the attention of the children.

Children also have to learn to listen to the contributions of other children having their turn to talk and to show them respect by keeping quiet and attentive.

Development of vocabulary

Schools are language-rich environments where children are constantly learning new vocabulary, and expanding on their old one. They will learn the underlying concepts of grammatical structure and the names for words like nouns, verbs and adjectives. They will learn comparative language such as big, bigger, biggest, and will have an opportunity to use the mathematical language of measurement and number. Science has its own special vocabulary with practical experimentation.

Children also get an opportunity to explore books, listen to tapes, sing songs, learn rhymes and look at poetry. All of these enable their vocabulary and ability to express themselves to expand and mature.

Standing up and speaking

Children also have opportunities within school to stand up and talk about their learning, news or interests, and to therefore try out their talking skills on an audience. This can give children confidence that they have something worth saying and something worth explaining to others. As they get older, they may get an opportunity to speak out in a school assembly or in front of an assembled audience of parents and school community.

Learning when not to talk

Because of the number of children in a class, children have to learn when it is appropriate to talk and when it is not. They have to learn to take a turn, or wait for an opportunity to say something that they are burning to say! Often, the teacher will ask someone else to speak and a child will have to contain what it is he or she wants to talk about. This is an important lesson to learn; while we have a right and a need to talk, sometimes we must keep quiet or hold what we have to say until later or until another occasion.

Talking and learning

Nowadays, children are allowed for the most part to keep a low level of discussion with the pupils sitting directly around them. Classrooms are arranged in small sets of tables which are conducive to discussion and collaboration. The teacher will always encourage the discussion to be focused on the task in hand. This is because children can learn more through talking and discussing things among themselves than through remaining silent and getting on with the task on their own.

Social behavior is often learned around the dining table when children see adults and young people talking and interacting over a meal. We can teach our children to have a ready smile and good eye contact with people they meet. We can give them confidence to speak up and out when adults engage them in conversation.

Children also need other children to develop their social skills. Inviting a friend back to the house can be a huge learning curve for your child. They have to learn to accommodate a guest in their own environment and to share their toys and space. Now that children do not play out so much in the street environment due to fears for their safety because of traffic and stranger danger, it has increasingly become the role of parents to provide opportunities when they can mix with groups of children outside school.

This can be at extra activities such as gymnastics or dance, or through belonging to a sports club. We can also take them to parks and sports fields to run around and meet other youngsters.

Often, there will be rows and fallouts when children are playing together. This is a normal part of growing up as young people learn to interact, negotiate and co-operate. Children learn that if they try to be too bossy and controlling, people won’t want to play with them. Equally, they learn that getting angry or frustrated because the game is not going their way will mean the game usually ends in disaster.

Children learn that there are consequences to their behavior in social situations. They learn that in order to get on with other people we have to make ourselves agreeable, and sometimes modify our behavior.

As parents, we can encourage our children’s social confidence through our love and attitude towards them. If a child feels good about themselves, who they are and what they can achieve, then they are able to take the risks necessary to reach out to others and to communicate in a way which solidifies and builds relationships. Children who have poor self-worth can have difficulties managing their social behavior, and can distrust others, therefore finding it difficult to make friendships or sustain relationships.

We can help our children to feel good about themselves through first of all appreciating them for who they are rather than having unreal expectations about how we would like them to be. Often, we carry our own baggage into the parenting process and seek either to fulfil our own ambitions or longings through our children or to have expectations that our children will never be able to achieve in a certain area because we were not able to as children either.

Try not to force a square-shaped child into a round-shaped hole. Even within families, we can easily label children ‘the sporty one’, ‘the clever one’ etc. However, each of us is more a mosaic of different gifts and talents that make us up to be the unique person we are. Let your children grow in their own unique way and support that process as a supporter on the sidelines of the playing field rather than as a coach directing the game.

We need to recognise and respect our children’s feelings and to give them an opportunity to express them, even if they are sometimes not what we want to hear. The most important aspects of social interaction include a level of emotional literacy. That is an ability to communicate our feelings and emotions to other people in a way in which they can understand. If we don’t listen to our children, we will not give them the opportunity to develop this emotional literacy.

We also need to express our own feelings to our children taking responsibility for them by using the words ‘I feel’ rather than ‘you make me feel’. This models good emotional interaction for our children, and thus we all take responsibility for our own feelings and reactions to life rather than blaming others for making us angry.

Children sometimes do not have the necessary vocabulary to identify the name behind their feeling. They may not know the word ‘jealousy’ or be able to name the confusion of rage and temper as anger. We can help by making suggestions to our children such as ‘it sounds like you are feeling very angry with Dan’. When children’s feelings are acknowledged and accepted, and when they are not told that they are wrong to feel them, then they can learn to exercise the necessary self-control to contain them.

If our children are to be successful in a social context, they have to learn the parameters of that social context. It is OK to feel angry, but not to hit people because you are angry. It is OK to want to play the game your way, but if no one else wants to play it that way, you may have to compromise. It is OK to feel disappointed, but not OK to throw things around because you are disappointed.

Our children will need help when social situations get out of hand or when they are rejected, angry or sad. The world is not a perfect place and other human beings can let us down and cause us pain. We can be there to support our children through these times by allowing them to express their feelings, and through giving them strategies to deal with people who have upset them or hurt them.

Children’s friendships can be very up and down. There can be bullying, unkindness, bossiness, manipulation and rejection. However, children can also show extreme generosity, forgiveness, kindness and friendship – all in the same hour or day!

This is all part of the process of growing up and learning to adapt to the social world. As parents, we can help our children’s sense of self-worth to remain intact by continuing to love our children unconditionally and by being there, talking about it, and giving them practical strategies that our own experience has shown to work.