Teach your kids to SHRUG!

By Michael Grose

The secret to having resilient, confident and optimistic children is to teach your kids to shrug!

Modern children can find themselves under a lot of pressure. Rates of depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses in young people are increasing. Expectations are sky high. All of which, of course, only puts pressure on parents too.

What's gone wrong?

A big part of the problem is that too many kids have never learnt the ability to shrug things off. They've never learnt how to handle life's inevitable 'downs' as well as the 'ups'.

Teach Your Kids to Shrug! is a highly readable, extremely practical guide to parenting in a way that will improve your children's ability to deal with life's challenges, rather than be weighed down or held back by them.

In six sections, author and parenting expert Michael Grose shows you how to build resilience, confidence and cooperation in your kids, and how to better handle family matters, gender matters and sibling matters.

An essential guide to raising the children of the 21st century.

Michael Grose is the author of nine books for parents including Why First Borns Rule the World and Last Borns Want to Change It and Thriving! He is well recognised in the media for his expertise, regularly appearing on television programs such as The Today Show, Sunrise and The Morning Show as well as on ABC Radio Victoria. His popular parenting columns appear in newspapers and magazines across Australia, and his parenting resources are found in schools in every state.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Grose
• Release date: Oct 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9780987581365

Michael Grose

After starting his career as a primary school teacher, Michael Grose has spent over 20 years has informing and educating parents in Australia, Singapore and the United Kingdom. Michael is the author of nine books for parents including Why First Borns Rule the World and Last Borns Want to Change It and Thriving! He is well recognised in the media for his expertise, regularly appearing on television programs such as The Today Show, Sunrise and The Morning Show as well as on ABC Radio Victoria. His popular parenting columns appear in newspapers and magazines across Australia. Michael supports over 1,500 schools in Australia and internationally, providing parenting resources and helping the staff of those schools to build strong partnerships with their parent communities. As a speaker and educator, Michael has presented nearly 2,000 parenting seminars. He is a member of the National Speakers Association of Australia Hall of Fame and one of only 100 Certified Speaking Professionals in Australia. In 2013 he was awarded the Educator Award for Excellence by the association. Michael holds a Master of Educational Studies based on research into what makes healthy families tick.

Book preview

Teach Your Kids to

SHRUG!

and 40 more ways to raise your kids to thrive

Michael Grose

First Published in 2013

by Monterey Press

PO Box 319

Carlton North  VIC  3054

Australia

www.montereypress.com

Smashwords edition

Copyright © Michael Grose, 2013

Author contact: [e-mail]

Website: www.parentingideas.com.au

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders. Michael Grose asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Designed and typeset by Tricia Mahoney, Scarab Blue Design

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Author: Grose, Michael, 1955- author.

Title: Teach your kids to shrug! : and 40 more ways to raise your kids to thrive / by Michael Grose.

ISBN: 9780987581365 (ebook)

Subjects:         Resilience (Personality trait) in children.

Confidence in children.

Child psychology.

Dewey Number:     155.41824

Sam and Birgitta,

Enjoy your parenting journey together.

Introduction

‘Character, like good soup, is made at home.’ Unknown

It was so irritating, yet so effective.

When I was a boy I had a good mate called Terry. Terry had a habit of shrugging his shoulders whenever anyone teased him or tried to persuade him to their way of thinking.

‘Hey Terry, you’re a &%*\%$!’

Shrug.

‘Hey Terry, everyone says you’re *^%$&!’

Shrug.

‘Hey Terry, I’m going to tell on you.’

Shrug.

His nonchalance used to drive everyone nuts … so much so that Terry was rarely targeted for teasing, despite the fact that he wasn’t sporty, wasn’t cool and matured late (all of which back then, as today, put most kids like Terry in the ‘to be picked on’ category).

I thought of Terry recently when I was coaching a young person about how to respond to some schoolyard taunts. It occurred to me that Terry’s shrugging said a lot more about him than I’d realised at the time. I’d thought he was pretty unflappable, but what I obviously didn’t understand was that he was also incredibly resilient. Terry was comfortable in his own skin; he knew who he was and how he was and cared very little what anyone else thought. Shrugging was his way of getting on with life, whatever it served up.

Since my book Thriving! was published in 2010, I’ve given hundreds of seminars outlining the Thriving! way of parenting. The idea of preparing kids to handle life’s ‘downs’, as well as equipping them to make the most of the ‘ups’, has resonance with most modern parents. Thriving! sets the scene for parents by laying out a roadmap to help kids lead a sturdy life.

Teach Your Kids to Shrug! is the first of a number of follow-up books delving a little deeper into the Thriving! approach to parenting. It is inspired by Terry and his art of shrugging. Teach Your Kids to Shrug! is divided into six sections: ‘Resilient kids’, ‘Confident kids’ and ‘Cooperative kids’ reflect the Thriving! way of parenting, while ‘Family matters’, ‘Gender matters’ and ‘Sibling matters’ form the framework for the information I provide for parents in our Parentingideas Club.

My aim in writing this book has been to make it eminently readable, extremely practical and filled with very doable parenting ideas.

Here’s to becoming better parents, and to raising kids who are able to shrug and deal with life’s inevitable challenges rather than be weighed down or held back by them.

Michael Grose

Section 1: Resilient kids

‘Good timber does not grow with ease. The stronger the wind the stronger the trees.’ Douglas Malloch,  from his poem Good Timber

Resilience is a 21st-century parenting concept that every parent and teacher needs to understand.

Some kids are resilient by nature – their temperament helps them to be mentally and psychologically tough. You know those kids. They get straight back up after a setback or disappointment. Rejection in the playground doesn’t faze them. They are flexible enough to cope with changes such as moving from one school to another. They keep working hard in school even if they don’t succeed at first. They have resilient spirits.

Unfortunately, not every child has such natural resilience.

The good news is that most of the research into the area indicates that resilience can be nurtured and developed, particularly when parents themselves are resilient and actively foster the characteristic in their children.

Resilient kids share four basic skill sets: independence, problem solving ability, optimism and social connection. There are many ways parents can develop these skills in their children, but allowing kids to fully contribute to their family is perhaps the easiest and most accessible way. By developing your children’s self-help skills, you will promote independence and resourcefulness in them.

Regular positive parent–child interactions help kids pick up the basic social skills needed to interact with their peers, as well as more subtle resilience skills such as humour, goal setting and persistence. So parents need to look for as many opportunities as possible to spend time with and talk to their kids.

Kids also learn optimism within the home. Martin Seligman, author of The Optimistic Child, found that kids pick up much of their approach to setbacks from the parent they spend most time around, usually their mother, by the age of eight. If that parent tends to be optimistic it’s likely the child will be too. In other words, a ‘can-do’ attitude pays off.

Children’s life experiences contribute to their resilience

The seemingly small disappointments that kids experience – such as not being invited to a party, missing being picked in a sports team, or not achieving success in a school project the first time – help them learn to cope with hardship and frustration. Coping with minor development issues such as change, sibling conflict and even failure build up a psychological hardiness that will help them when they face some of life’s big challenges in adolescence and beyond.

That means that you, as a parent, need to resist sorting out your children’s social problems for them, rather skilling them up to solve their own friendship challenges. Sometimes parents can create problems by interfering in children’s disputes. From the resilience perspective you are better off coaching kids through some of their more challenging moments and reviewing what they may have learned for next time.

You also need to put children and young people in situations where they must draw on their resourcefulness. Camps and adventure activities are great ways for kids to stretch themselves and test their problem-solving and coping skills. My second daughter believes an eight-day adventure camp she went on as a 14-year-old was the defining event of her early adolescence. It involved real physical endeavour, which stretched her to the limits, bringing her to tears on many occasions. But it was the first time she realised that she could cope with being separated from her friends and family, as well as the comforts of home.

One year later she went on a six-month student exchange to the other side of the world. While away she frequently drew on the coping skills she had learned on her eight-day camp to overcome homesickness and deal with the challenges of living in an unfamiliar environment for such a long time.

Promoting resilience in kids is a not a single event but a continuous process. It requires parents, teachers and other adults to look for opportunities for kids to stretch themselves socially, academically and even emotionally.

It also requires parents to see some of their children’s difficulties and hardships as valuable learning opportunities rather than catastrophic events that will scar