The Tassomai team recently caught up with Emma Yentis, an experienced PSHE teacher, about the best ways to open up conversations with students and improve emotional resilience…

The best way for parents to engage with their children is to really assess the questions that you ask them about their day. This may seem like a small thing but asking ‘How was school?’ and being greeted with a grunt or a passing ‘fine’ does nothing to help you understand their world or to help them open up about how their day really went.

Changing the question to something like: ‘What did you learn today?’ or ‘What mistakes did you learn from?’ gives them the opportunity to recognise where they have had learning experiences and creates a space for them to view mistakes as an opportunity, rather than something that inspires panic.

Vulnerability is contagious

Hearing personal stories and experiences from parents is also really helpful for students. It’s all too easy to say ‘You mustn’t give up’, rather than ‘I used to struggle with X topic when I was at school, which topics do you feel you need to work on?’ This helps to open up the conversation and gets them to talk more about how they’re feeling.

Talking about what you were unable to do when you were their age can help them to understand that learning is a process and there’s no harm in not mastering things straight away.

Building resilience through goals

One of my favourite things to do with students is to ask them to write down what they’re really good at and what they would like to work on at the beginning of the school year. This process of encouraging them to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses is great for understanding how they improve. Young people tend to like reflecting on what they have done, so they are normally very engaged with this process.

For parents, I suggest starting a physical record with your child in a journal or notebook and reflecting on shorter time periods, whether that’s per week, month or term. I think this is a really nice activity to demonstrate how they can build resilience through learning about the areas they need to improve on and identifying mistakes without negativity.

Learning to talk about emotion

There aren’t any subjects or classes in school that really ask students to think about their own emotions and how they are feeling, other than during PSHE sessions. This means that tools to regulate and discuss emotions can often be forgotten about in other lessons.

There may even be situations where talking about emotions isn’t deemed the appropriate place to talk about them, which is why it’s all the more important to make sure they are discussed and valued at home and encouraged to be shared openly with teachers too.

The language of learning

If your child wants to do something, within reason and practicality, let them! It’s great for children to try a wide range of activities and hobbies to learn what they find hard and what they can achieve if they persist. This could be as simple as painting or running in their free time, but teaches them valuable lessons that they can apply to their studies. It’s all about learning to improve over time.

If you couple new learning experiences with more questions like ‘How did trying hard make you feel?’ and ‘What will you do differently next time?’ you will start to see them make real progress and gain a better understanding of themselves along the way.