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Speaker 4Not to Screw Up Your Kids podcast. So, pour yourself a cuppa, find a comfy seat and enjoy the conversation. Today's episode, five skills for life success. I want to talk you through five crucial skills that we really want to ensure our children are acquiring. And that we are creating opportunities for them. Because they are the five skills that are fundamentally, they're the foundations of success in our children's lives in any shape or form. Now, we all want our children to be successful. And one of the traps that we can find ourselves thinking is that if our children do well academically, they will be successful in life. Even if this were the case, and I believe very strongly that this is fundamental. Fundamentally, where we go wrong as parents is that we really focus our energies on our children fulfilling specific milestones that are often related very specifically to tangible outcomes in an academic sense. But let's just say, even if that was the case, you know, there are some specific professions which require very specific academic credentials. However, life still happens beyond the day job. Or getting on to that specific career pathway. You know, just think about what our children actually, as adults, will have to navigate in the workplace, but also in terms of life. Whether that's negotiating with colleagues, negotiating with a landlord, negotiating with a mortgage company, negotiating with their electricity provider or their car insurance. Managing conflict, being able to communicate, you know, how they manage setbacks. You know, if they don't get. If they don't get the job that they've applied for, if they don't get the promotion that they were hoping to get, finding and maintaining a home, setting up a bank account, making good choices in terms of their financial management. There is a whole string of skills that are so crucial to success that I really want to focus on those skills. Focusing in on those five skills, in my view, will give us the byproduct of our children being super successful in whatever way. Whether that's a career or work choices that they make, whether that is employed, self-employed, however they go about choosing it. But I do think that if we really focus in on these five skills, they're just so set up for life. And the reason why I'm so passionate about this, as you can probably tell, is that these skills are things that we as parents can create opportunities for our children to experience. We can provide that learning environment day to day. It's not something that we have to pay huge amounts of money. We don't have to have extra tutors for. It's all in, within our realm of. I was going to say control there, but it isn't. It's within our realm of opportunity. And I think as a result of that, our children end up becoming more rounded, more wholesome and more capable adults as a result of it. So I'm going to share with you these five. That have come about very much from Harvard University Center of the Developing Child. And they're really investing a huge amount into really understanding what are those crucial components? What are those crucial elements? Are there critical periods in children's development? How can we as parents impact really positively our children's outcomes later on? And so these five are taken from some of the work that they have done there. And I shall share them with you. So these. So these five are planning, being able to make and carry out and make and create specific goals and then break those goals down into tangible plans and then break that down even more into tasks. You're going to love that one. Focus. And this is the ability to really extend time and attention and concentrate and prioritize what's important and then give it the time that it needs. As opposed to what we can set aside and delay gratification for later. We're going to look at self-regulation. Talk about this a lot. But this is about understanding our own emotional states and how we respond, not only within those emotional states, but how we also respond in stressful situations and how we can control and manage and understand what we need to do for ourselves in those situations. The fourth is around socializing. Social curiosity. So this is not just about just noticing other people and situations that are happening around us, but understanding what is our part within this wider social context that we find ourselves in and the value that we then bring within that. And then the last one is flexibility. Our adaptability to adapt and to modify to changing situations and then adapt and modify our plans and our goals and maybe modify ourselves. Maybe modify our focus, manage our self-regulation as a result of the changing landscape or changing situations. So those are the five that we're going to talk about. So let's start with the first. Let's talk planning. So think of this skill as the ability to take a task or take a goal and break it down to its constituent parts in such a way that you could then take action. So think of this skill as the ability to take action from it. So sometimes that might be super micro-detailed. Sometimes it may well be very high level. It's whatever is required. And in some ways that goes back to number five, which is the flexibility, is about we want to be able to be flexible around the task or the goal that we find ourselves in. So for example, let's take some super simple things, first of all. The task of getting ready for an activity, whatever that activity might be, maybe whether you're going to the park, whether you're going trampolining, whether you're going to a birthday party. But when we think of that task of getting ready for that activity, that requires planning because it requires choosing something appropriate to wear, which is suitable for that particular activity. It's then about physically then getting dressed. It's about packing things with you or bringing with you things that you may need as part of that activity or that you may need post that activity or you may need just in case. It's brushing teeth, it's getting shoes on, it's having breakfast, all of those things. And obviously that's an assumption that we're getting ready and we're going to do an activity in the morning. When we typically think of planning, we tend to think of it as something that is not practical for our children to do. But actually, I think, and I'm going to give you some specific things that we can do to help encourage our children and bring planning into the everyday for our children because I think you'll be surprised at how many times we're going to do that. How many things that we do as parents, inevitably, we plan for all sorts of things. We plan for a birthday party our child might go to in terms of buying the presents. We plan how we're going to get there, whether we're going to give lifts to other children. We might have to plan who takes them there, who takes them back. There's a huge amount of planning. And of course, that is part of our role as parents. What I'm suggesting is that there may well be some things that we can begin to communicate out loud to our children. At least they're learning vicariously, as in they're learning through us about what we're doing to plan. At the very least, we're explaining that. And at the very other end is that we're deferring to our children to do the planning. So what I'm going to do with each of these five core skills is I'm going to describe it and then I'm going to give you some practical ways that as parents, what can we do? So for planning, things that we can do to help this skill, develop this skill and flex. the brain's muscle in this particular area, because we're thinking, you know, our brain is a muscle. The more we exercise it, the stronger it becomes. So how can we build muscle in that particular area, making those hard wiring, those connections in some situations so that that flex and that growth and those neurons firing become super quick that can translate into other situations that may well feel higher stakes. So we want to start. by simply, at the very base level is that we want to start by simply talking through the plans for the day. So if you've got a super, super young child, you can be doing this. It's something that you can do. As we get to some of the more complex ones, you can't do that with an eight-month-old, a 12-month-old, a toddler in the same extent as you might be able to do with a slightly older child. But at the basic level, we want to start by simply talking through the plans for the day. So break down the tasks which are involved. So we need to choose what we want to wear to feel comfortable enough for the big playground we're going to head out to, something which allows us to comfortably come down the slides, go up the climbing frame, and not get too hot, for example. So we may well be doing this with a really, really young child who may not even be verbal at this stage. They're not speaking in any shape or form. But there's a huge amount of information, our children pick up on, from the intonation. It's almost like the melody of the words that we use, from the rise and fall, from the emphasis and the de-emphasis. And then while we're using that language as we're choosing things, we then doubly reinforce it. As our children get older, they can then understand what we mean by having something that's comfortable to wear to come down slides. For example, you might find your self in a situation where you are choosing for your three or four-year-old to put trousers on them, or tights, or leggings, whatever it might be that you might be choosing for them, because you know they're going to go to a playground, and you know they're going to be going down some slides. And if it's in the winter, you're obviously going to be mindful of that, but you're also mindful of it in the summer. You know, we've all been there as a child or a young child where we've not been able to go down the slide, because we've worn things where flesh is exposed. And so that lovely doesn't happen. So we're doing that planning for our children automatically. And so what we want to do if we want to create that skill within them to be able to plan, then we can't just say, you need to plan and think about, if we haven't sort of given them the basic foundations of what planning is. So at the basic level, I want you to almost think out loud and do that with your children so they can understand. So that's at the basic level. So if you're not doing anything in terms of flexing those planning muscles, start with that. Simply talk out loud what you're doing in terms of anything that you're planning. Then number two, it's about involving your child in the planning as much as their age and stage allows. So if we're talking super, super young children, it may well simply be that we are talking it through out loud. If we're starting to get slightly older children who can really grasp what we're saying, what we're then doing is then encouraging them to help us with the problem solving situation. So going back to the situation about the slide and going to a playground, we might give our child choices or we might encourage them to choose and then ask questions about how comfortable is that going to feel when you're going down a slide? Child says super comfortable. Great. Okay. And does that give you enough movement if you're climbing up the climbing wall? Yeah. Fine. Brilliant. And what we're not necessarily wanting to do here is interfere. But what we are trying to do is ask relevant questions so that our child can begin that process of planning, of contemplating, of thinking through what it is that they're going to be doing so that they can then make that choices and then do that reflective piece afterwards. I chose that. Would you choose that again? How well did it work in the playground? What would you do next time? So start by simply talking through, involve our child in terms of their age and stage. And then we want to start building up their plan and planning skills with tasks that are pretty sequential that we can kind of begin to create and orchestrate such as cooking or meal prep. So when we're talking about the fact that they're sequential, if you're cooking something from a recipe, there are implications if you don't follow the sequence of the order in which the ingredients are put together, particularly when it comes to baking. But it's this idea about sequential process. And what we're looking at doing here with the planning, it's not about just, you know, we're going to do this, we're going to do this, doing a recipe, but it's about, it goes beyond just simply following a recipe to what, you know, we might ask them, what do they want to cook? Getting them in it, rooting them through the cupboards so that they can check whether you've got the ingredients or not. Writing a shopping list that consists of what is needed rather than the ingredient list. Going to the supermarket to buy from that list, et cetera. So that, that teaches them about that planning, process. And then obviously they then got a plan in terms of the timings of when they might cook it, how much time it will take to prep it. What time do they want it to be ready by? All of these things are super helpful. And I did a variation of this very planning task in the school holidays one year with my children, where I gave them each one day in the school holidays where they were responsible for feeding the family. So I gave them a budget and they had to feed us for lunch and for dinner. I didn't do breakfast. I just, that was their budget. They had to create two meals for the whole family. They had to do the research of what they might want to cook. They had to work out what ingredients they needed based on what we already had. And then what was missing. We then went shopping to get the ingredients. Each had their own shopping basket. Each had their own funds. And then they had to plan the timings of when to start cooking for the mealtime that they wanted. So it's about just, just notching, notching up in terms of starting super simple and then building up depending on our children's age and stage. And we want to get, the idea with planning is that we want to give them increasingly complex opportunities to plan. So as they get older, for example, we might ask them to plan a family day. We might ask them to pull together some suggestions for a if there are some specific criteria, either it has to be a hotel or it has to be something like a villa or a home, whatever that might be, we can just ramp up the planning because what we can see is that this skill in terms of we're using it planning within the context of our home and our family, but this skill then becomes super transferable to life planning when they need to do homework, maybe when they have different deadlines, particularly as our children then end up going to their secondary schools, is that they won't, you know, in primary school, things are a lot more structured and the time frames with which our children need to do homework is much shorter. So they do their spellings every night, they do their maths, they get it on one day and they hand it the next day. What happens when they get to secondary school, when our children go to university, when they're then in life and working and employed, is that deadlines span multiple, more than one week. And then there will get lots of conflicting deadlines that they then have to manage. So if they've got the skills around planning, if they've acquired that and they flex that muscle and they've built those neural connections in a family context for straightforward things that we can put in place, there's nothing to do with academics at all, but they can then transfer that. It's also really helpful in terms of managing their time so that they prioritise what needs to be done. They can achieve goals by understanding how these things go. So that's planning and that can be a really helpful skill that we can start working on regardless of our children's age.
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Speaker 4The second one was about this idea about social curiosity. So getting along with others is a crucial skill that not only in the workplace, but generally for our wellbeing. Humans are social animals. And whilst we won't always be raising a child who loves and relishes the opportunity of being around people and being a social butterfly or loving that social time, understanding others and how they fit in within our family, how they fit in within their community, within their clubs, within their school, for example, in those environments, creates a sense of belonging. Creates a sense of worthiness, creates a sense of contribution and understanding and a knowing and a belief that the world, their world, their community, their neighborhood, their clubs, their family, their school are a better place for them being in it. And this is the idea about social curiosity is that we're just building that framework for our children to understand how other people and how they might fit in within that context. Things that we can do in terms of how we can help our children these skills and to flex the brain's muscles in this area is about being super intentional about understanding how other people may feel and how other people may think now i've used this example it's a game it's an activity it's something that i used to do with my children quite regularly and it's just playing the observation game so whether that's you're sat on a park bench after you've had a play in the in the playground or you've been out for a walk whether it's you know you're in a restaurant you're in a coffee shop with your children or you're at the you know a play center is being really intentional about noticing with our children so doing things such as so the one thing that i used to do with my children was that we used to i would sort of point but do it in a subtle way so i might describe see that person over there wearing a gray jacket and has got a blue umbrella i wonder how they may be feeling and then you're what you're doing is you're opening up a conversation around curiosity we don't need to know for sure how they're feeling we're simply encouraging our children to take a moment to look and notice people around them and to have an have a guess and what we're trying to sort of do is help them read cues by the way that that person might be walking their facial expression maybe their body language so it may well be oh i think that person's looking a little bit upset actually oh that's interesting why do you think they're upset well their shoulders are quite hunched and they don't seem to be walking very fast and they're just not looking happy i wonder what they might be upset about and you can make up wild stories you know they went to go to the shop to get their favorite bar of chocolate and they'd run out and so now they're really sad and they don't know when they're going to be able to get it so the whole purpose of this is just creating a sense of security and creating an intention about noticing things and having an educated estimate at what might be going on and using that to begin conversations and then what you what tends to happen with this particular exercise is a really easy and brilliant exercise to do is that you'll notice that your children will start pointing out random people obviously we have to be mindful because we're trying to describe the person and our children end up pointing out that lady over there but you know it's all part of the process so it's a really good exercise to do and i think it's a really good part of that enjoyment and that sort of social piece of you know i don't operate in isolation me as an individual does not operate in isolation how might i observe so we might even extend the conversation to in the playground when you were playing in the park as we were walking through you were scootering or you were cycling did you notice this child why do you think that they said or did that why what how may they be feeling and i think that's a really good exercise to do and really sort of talking around that and then we can add things in there you know they're feeling sad what do you think they might be able to do to cheer themselves up i mean we'll talk about this when we get into the self-regulation piece but it is just that being curious what we also another thing that we can do is be really active within our community in our neighborhood and this has to start with us because we it's about modeling it but how engaged are we in our community in terms of the activities that we're doing and how engaged are we in our community in terms of the activities um that our community provides and the opportunities we we have to show up for others in our community whether that's the elderly whether that's the young whether we're active whether we live in the countryside whether we live in the city it's about how can we encourage as a family to demonstrate our community culture and this idea that we can contribute that we can make a difference so often when particularly when we are concerned about our children being entitled is that we often feel that we need to do a really big disparity comment you know you're so lucky there are lots of children who don't have homes who have no food who don't have mummies and daddies or whatever extreme we may take that to instead it can just simply we can you know flip it on his head and instead be like how can we as a as a family make a difference and contribute and give back to our community in our neighborhood through the skills and the qualities that we have and do it that way so we're just encouraging and that's such a big part of helping our children see particularly where our children are lacking in confidence is that they often forget or there's not even that they forget they don't realize how richer their community and that means that your family the extended family and the people that they interact with are for them being in their lives and the best way to kind of affirm that on a regular basis is to join in in community services and that you may well be doing that already because your children may well be part of scout groups they may well be part of community clubs but i would encourage you to think about that if you haven't if you're not yet doing that is how can you be active in that and it could be that your community does a park run you can get involved in that as a family you go down there that gives them that sense of belonging and being part of something it could be that you take part in your community might do periodic cleanups of parks or litter picking it's just kind of providing those opportunities for our children and i know we're very busy in our lives i would just argue that social curiosity and that seeing firsthand how they make a difference to where they live can be so life-changing for those who are lacking that sense of i'm important to others so i think that can be really good and then having you know you know sticking to and creating some specific routines and non-negotiables that you have as part of your family so that may well be eating certain meals together on certain days of the week you may not be able to do every single day of the week but there may well be some non-negotiable days and again that encourages our children to be socially curious they're curious about their siblings they're curious about their parents and what that also builds is that cohesion and that sense of being part of something bigger than they are you know despite the good and the bad so that's our social curiosity so we've covered planning we've covered social curiosity so let's now move on to the next question this notion of self-regulation which is such a an important part it's an important life skill because if we think about it as an adult we spend a lot of our working day having to self-regulate you know we may well feel frustrated with a particular colleague we may go into a meeting where we feel exhausted or we're feeling like our voice isn't heard we may feel nervous we may feel irritated but we have learned through experience that there are certain ways of managing our emotions and how we respond to those in certain situations which is why we typically as adults tend to unpick or contain those emotions until we get home so we may feel frustrated you know hence that whole saying not that i am advocating for this in any shape or form but the the figure of speech that you know you go home and you kick your ass and you're like oh my god i'm so frustrated the cat is it isn't about we want to go and kick the cat but in essence it's a i've had frustration in my work day i go home and then i take it out on my family my nearest and dearest and all my pets so it's this notion that we learn as adults to self-regulate because we know what is deemed to be socially appropriate and socially inappropriate in a workplace setting our children are not born with the ability to self-regulate they just simply aren't our you see if you're a parent of a really young child they're so in the present they're so in the moment they're so invested in what they are doing at that time they find it difficult this notion of delaying gratification you know i'll do the the tricky stuff because i know the good stuff's coming later so when they're sort of you know as they're developing we're we're helping them understand their emotions their emotional states how that may feel and how that may feel physiologically how does that show up in their body what are those sensations that can alert them to those feelings what are their current go-to's when they feel those particular feelings and how can we help them make better choices and they won't make those better choices 100% of the time because we don't make them 100% of the time but it's about helping them understand and begin that reflective practice of okay in a classroom or in a playground if i get angry it's not okay to push another child to snatch something off another child because that's not how we communicate those particular feelings and instead we find that being able to step aside for a moment to be able to use our voice and communicate that we're frustrated that we were playing with something first and they've taken it we find alternatives so when we're looking at it it's about helping them understand their own emotions and how their reaction what they're current reactions are in specific situations? And how can they then be more intentional in making better, more socially acceptable choices? Now, this is not about dampening our children's spirits. It's not about social conformity. It's just simply about helping them understand how they may be better equipped to navigate those social situations through something that they have full control over, which is their response to a particular situation. It goes back to what I've talked about before about that. What's in their hula hoop of control? And it's all about the what I can do. And what's outside their hula hoop of control is all of the things to do with them and others that are not the I. So it's really concentrating about the I. So what can we do to help this skill and flex that brain's muscle in that particular area? Well, talk about emotions and talk about emotions often. Label emotions regularly. Ponder, I wonder if you might be feeling with a child who may not take so well to, I can see that you are feeling X. We can be flexible in how we try and help our children become more emotionally literate so that they're better able to identify their feelings and their only going to be able to do that if we use an emotionally rich vocabulary rather than an emotionally limited vocabulary of maybe five or six emotions. There are hundreds. If we start considering that generally we don't feel one emotion at a time, we may well feel anger, but there's a certain element of embarrassment within that anger and maybe a little bit of shame. So it's more nuanced than just simply a small handful of emotions that we use to label it. So to talk about emotions, label emotions regularly, we want to help our children understand that they get to choose how to respond to the emotion. The emotion may well feel intense. And of course, a lot of the time our children feel overwhelmed by the emotion. You know, when I'm working with children who really struggled to manage those big emotions, they'll often use language that feels like this sort of, this whole wave comes over them and this, this, their reaction, their behavior seems almost as if it's another version of themselves stepping in rather than it being them. So we want to help them understand how that behavior may well affect others. What's the impact if I then snatch something or if I push someone over or I say something unkind, it's helping them understand that not because we're guilting them or shaming them, but we're trying to help them see that how they respond in certain situations, not only impacts them, but has an impact on others. So how might we then make a different choice so that we can better respond in those particular situations. And whenever our children do feel these intense emotions and they don't make the best choices, which will happen a lot, is we want to regularly reflect, debrief, consider what we might do differently next time. And then what our children are going to do next is we want to make sure that they see this goes back into our planning. You know, we're planning, we're reflecting, we're making a plan for next time we're setting goals. And it helps our children understand that we are by nature, a constant work in progress, and that we're doing that constant checking in. And that that's a super helpful and of course, not all children like that recap and that reflection. But I think if we make it really clear that the reason we're doing this is because we're doing it for the purpose of helping them, not just to chastise them, not to tell them off, not to be punitive, but simply a way of helping them make different choices and helping us help them better. So that is number three, self-regulation. Number four is focus. Now, this is probably feels like quite a prudent one. And this is about our ability to attend and be really intentional about what we're doing. We want to be intentional in something for a sustained period of time. And focus is such a crucial part to be able to switch on and off. We want to be able to get super laser focused on something. And when we want to be able to have that adaptability and that flexibility, which we'll talk about, to then shift to something else. And one of the things that we are noticing, I'm noticing as someone who works with young children, I know that this is being reflected in schools, because of the conversations that I'm having with staff at schools. And I know that this is something that you are seeing as parents, because I'm being asked about it regularly, is that we're noticing that our children are finding it increasingly more difficult to be focused for any extended period of time. And I have to be honest, a huge amount, a big contributor to that is the explosion in device use and the fact that we have got 30% of eight-year-olds have their own mobile phone. We've got eight-year-olds on TikTok and on social platforms. And whilst a lot of the software companies are suggesting that there's lots of educational content online, I would really encourage you to think very carefully about how we use devices for children who are under the age of 16. So I'm not going to get into a long conversation about device use. That's a whole other podcast episode. But let me explain why I think it's really important that we need to be intentional. So I'm not saying that you should not use them. But I'm saying that we should be intentional in how we use them. Devices by their nature are, and particularly the software, the apps that are on there, are meant to be attention grabbing. And in order to do that, the brain is tuned into novelty. And therefore, these pieces of software, the games, even the educational content is designed and created in such a way that it requires constant, short, sharp bursts of attention. And it constantly pulls you in. And the danger with this, if we are not intentional, is that that happens at the expense of our children's ability and the brain's adaptability to concentrate and focus for extended periods of time. In novel and creative ways that go beyond digital devices. So what we want to do is move away from the instant gratification that they get through devices and make sure that when we're looking at the time that our children spend across devices, whether that's on an iPad, a phone, a tablet, a laptop, and a television compared to the in-person interaction where they can spend time focusing in on other things. So it's about the things that we can do. It's about enforcing very clear, screen-free time, even when we get huge protestations and they complain. And I shall tell you why. Because when we speak to, when I speak to young people, they know that they're often caught in this trap and this cycle of not being able to put down these devices. They do not feel that they have the capability to self-regulate. Now, this isn't the case for all of you. Some of you will have children who have really managed that self-regulation process. But the devices are stacked against us. They're stacked against our young people. And so what young people really want us to do is to make the difficult choices for them, even when they complain, even when they say we're the worst parents, even when they say they hate us. I think having those very clear boundaries and being super intentional. So that's the first thing is that enforcing specific periods of time that are device-free. And I would really encourage you to be intentional when you look at the amount of time that your children are on any form of screen so that there is more time off screen than there is on screen. And start on a gradual process. If you're listening to this and you've got children on devices literally for 12 hours of the day, then it's about working out where are we going to go cold turkey? Where are we going to have really clear boundaries that devices are no longer used. In bedrooms is where I would recommend you start if they're in their bedrooms. And then at mealtimes. And then you're slowly, incrementally enforcing more and more. So that's the first thing we can do. But the second thing we've got to do is it's not necessarily about providing them an alternative, but providing opportunities for there to be an alternative. So if we've got young children that we're trying to avoid getting sucked into that, it's about having things around the house and that we take with us when we're out and about that allow and provide opportunities for them to make, to build, to create, to do things so that they're not necessarily drawn in. It doesn't have to be structured. It's not about feeling that you've always got to take a specific game or have a craft activity that gives them instructions from one to ten to build something. It's much more about having just general things that they can use their creativity and their imagination to build something with. And if we're talking about older children, it's about being able to provide space and opportunity for them to get involved in things that may keep them entertained for a specific period of time. And if need be, if we're going from one extreme and we're trying to get them to the other, is that we may well need to be involved and helping them initially so that they can, you know, we're almost trying to get them to retrain their brain. If we've got a young child or a teen that has got so used to spending so much of their time on devices, then it's almost as if the part of their brain that taps into their creativity imagination when they are bored needs to be reignited. It's a muscle that has atrophied, it's barely been used. And so we can help scaffold that by either doing a project together that we do over a period of days and weeks, or we can do a project together that we do over a period of days and weeks, or we can do a project together that we do over a period of days and weeks, or we can do a project together that helps build that to get them started, or we provide them something that has a specific structure that allows them to at least get started. And then it's about, you know, making, reading fun again, having materials that they can engage with, whether that's reference books, whether that's picture books, whether that's books that have got more meaty content in terms of chapter books, depending on our child's age and stage of development. And so it's about but when we're talking about books and reading and being curious and focusing on a pit for an extended period of time with books, particularly is how often are we demonstrating to our children that reading is something that can be done for pleasure, that can be used as a piece of enjoyment, because our children are much more likely to do what they see than what we say. And if we are not engaging in that ourselves, we're not creating a culture within our home, where our children see that reading is something that is done for pleasure. And I have no issue in reading of magazines. I genuinely don't. If you've got a child who's super resistant to reading, maybe they found reading really difficult. Maybe they've not yet found the pleasure and joy in reading. Don't give up. Don't just be like, this child just doesn't like reading. Be creative. Find different types of material that they may or may not engage with. It may well be crosswords. It may well be comics. It may well be picture books. It may well be short form referencing. Just don't lose sight of that. And it may well be, and certainly I can remember periods of time when I was actively encouraging my children to read bigger, chunkier chapter books, was that at bedtime, we'd gone beyond the young books. They were like eight, nine, 10. Instead, we just picked much chunkier books. And then I would read a chapter. And what I found with that was, because let's think about, if you think about it when we're reading something that's fictional, or maybe it's just me, I often find it takes a little while to get into a book. And then once you're into the book, you want to devour it and you want to read it. And so for our children who may well not be able to read at a pace that will allow them to get into the book, it's a little bit more difficult. And so I think it's a little bit more difficult to get into that book to the point that they're really wanting to devour it. If we read chapters to them, there will be a tipping point where they then want to take over and they're then going beyond what you're reading to them. And then they are getting that pleasure. So I think reading can be super powerful and it flexes that focus and attention muscle. So that's number four is about focus and how we can build that with our children. And reading is a great one. And then the last one is about focus and attention. And I think that's a great one. The last one is this notion of adaptability and flexibility, which is super crucial when we think about it, because let's face it, life never, ever really goes to plan. We have all sorts of great ideas. You think about how you wake up every morning and you may well have a plan for how the day's going to pan out, the things that you're going to get done on your to-do list. More often than not, we have to be adaptable. We have to be flexible because stuff happens. And we may need to reset our expectations. We may need to reset our expectations. We may need to manage our goals. We may need to pivot completely. We may need to abandon what our plans were and start all over again. So what we want to have a certain element of teaching that flexibility, but also having flexibility within our children's day-to-day schedules so that things are not necessarily rigid, so that we can be adaptable and flexible to what they may need. So we're teaching the skills of adaptability and flexibility. But we're also doing it in the way that we go about managing their day-to-day and going about their day-to-day things. So it's about not being sort of super rigid in that. And of course, if you're listening to this podcast with a young child, I can remember so very vividly this notion of children being overtired and being like, what are you talking about, overtired? If they're tired, they just go to sleep. And we see this even with older children. We don't get tired, but we can just simply see that our child is responding. Our 13-year-old, our 16-year-old is responding in a way that we know they wouldn't respond to had they just got more sleep, but we're constantly battling with them. And it's the same with younger children too. But we can get so rigid and so stressed out, particularly with younger children that, oh my goodness me, they need their nap. And if they don't have their nap, then they're going to be an absolute nightmare to deal with in the afternoon. Or if they fall asleep in the car at four o'clock, I'm never going to be able to put them down. So it's about being willing to flex and not be super rigid around specific nap times or meal times or how things should be so that we can create and have some flex in the system that what we can do is we can be a bit more spontaneous. Because if we do that with the spontaneity, it also filters down to our children to understand that ability to flex If we are too caught up in a routine, which our child becomes super reliant on, that doesn't help them be adaptable or flexible because they then become rigid in the way that they're going about things. And if you've got a child that you're already seeing is a super routine person, they really struggle and have real challenges when you mix things up or you haven't given them advanced warning, then by us being more spontaneous, we help them become more comfortable with that adaptability and that flexibility. And so if we focus in on those five skills, those skills of planning, social curiosity, self-regulation, focus and flexibility, we give our children all of the tools that they'll need to be an adult that can operate in a world that is often unpredictable, that requires us at specific periods of time to be laser focused and be able to give something our full attention. To be able to manage those emotions that we experience throughout a day within social contexts allows us to connect with other humans in a way that that social curiosity also fosters that sense of being part of something larger than who we are, and then being able to set ourselves goals and break it down to those constituent parts. Now, hopefully that will give you some super tangible, actionable strategies that you can start implementing and begin to see and begin to notice and be curious yourself as you start working on any of these five skills, how those begin to translate into other areas of your child's life that you may not have thought of initially that they would be helpful for, but you begin to see that coming out because these are all transferable skills. And the things that we can do to help them, we can do to help them, we can do to help them really matter. So as always, if you have enjoyed this episode, I would be eternally grateful if you could rate, follow and review this podcast so that others can find us and we can spread the love. So until next time.
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