It Takes a Village

It may take a village to raise a child but it takes the skills of an SAS commando to get them to all their activities on time, at the right venue, with the correct equipment, without tears (either your child’s or your own), while avoiding a parking ticket.

BELINDA MOORE DEPUTY PRINCIPAL

Often the planning for your daughter’s cocurricular commitments can start weeks in advance, particularly if you have more than two children and multiple activities. Throw in a birthday party, a play date, or a sleepover, and you are teetering on the edge. Why do we do it? How do we do it? How do some parents make it look so effortless and as if they enjoy these highly organised routines?

One answer is that we are supporting our children in the pursuit of enjoyment and happiness derived from doing something they love with people they like. Happiness is a by-product of emotional health and the greatest influence on our happiness turns out to be our own mental, emotional, and physical habits, which create the body chemistry that determines happiness. Without delving into the science too much, it is all about serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, and oxytocin.

As parents we are keenly aware of our responsibility to encourage our children to participate, try new things, learn from mistakes, develop positive relationships, and learn to make good decisions on their own. How we choose to support these opportunities for our children can differ from family to family and most of us are influenced by our own childhood experiences in some way. Take the classic example of the parent who was a successful athlete; the expectation would be that their child is in possession of some of these genetic traits and therefore should be exposed to sport to test this theory. Should it be the same sport, a different sport, many different sports? What age do you start? How long do you persist? What happens if they find a sport they like but they are not good at it? What happens if they find a sport where they have talent and they don’t like it? This highlights one of the greatest challenges of parenting: decision making.

There is no rule book and the game plan may have been abandoned as your child did not seem to understand the importance of sticking to the game plan and the decisions have multiplied exponentially anyway and you just wish someone else would make the decisions for you. Often, we get it right and many decisions are more straight forward because of our own set of values, or focus on keeping our child safe, or limitations in our own capacity. We also know (usually), which battle is worth fighting, when to say sorry and when to own up to the fact that we really do not know what the best decision is in a particular set of circumstances.

What do we do when we don’t have the answer? Fortunately, Queenwood considers raising confident, compassionate young women as a partnership between parents, professionals, and the School. Our staff are experts whom you can turn to for guidance and advice, whether it be an academic, wellbeing or cocurricular concern. If there’s anything I’ve learnt from my background in sport, it’s that working as a team provides a strong foundation for success.

One of the greatest challenges we have as parents is working out exactly what it is that makes our children happy and how we can contribute, facilitate, support, encourage, monitor, manoeuver, and at times mandate, the experiences that will sustain their happiness. Sometimes we have to wing it, sometimes we are on the money, sometimes we need some help and that’s OK. If the whole community works together – girls, parents, teachers, mentors –then we can raise kind, considerate, compassionate, tolerant and responsible young people that will make a positive contribution to the world. •