Parenting

Managing Children’s Back-To-School Anxiety

Anxiety, Back To School, Emotional Intelligence, Parenting /

Any transition or change can be a bit challenging but can be made a rewarding experience by putting in effective and collective efforts. Its Back-To-School Time ‘Back to school’, this phrase alarms a change or transition in everyone’s mind, that might develop anxiety for children, parents, and teachers. This is normal and manageable by applying emotional intelligence.  Some children may feel anxious about changing their routine, fear of separation from family members or apprehension about a new environment,  fear of being bullied, the pressure of school work submission, the stress of upcoming exams, sadness due to reduction of playtime, or stress of coming out of their comfort zone, etc. 10 Ways Parents Can Help Their Children Overcome Back-To-School Anxiety Regardless of the reason, parents can help ease the acceptance of transition by educating children to handle it in the following ways:  1.  The first and foremost thing is preparing their mindset for a change by opening for discussion to understand and visualize its positive side. 2.  Recognizing symptoms of stress,  anxiety, and fear. If a child shows unusual behavior or makes a complaint about aches in body parts or encounters mood swings etc, these might be symptoms of their emotional unbalancing. 3.  Creating and applying some strategies to work around it. Every emotion can be recognized, understood, and managed, by emotional intelligence. By understanding the intention behind that emotion good strategies can be applied to see the positive side and show better behavior. If required, parents can seek assistance from experts in coaching and counseling.  4.  Simulate the school routine one week before. Getting children acquainted with the upcoming schedule. A visit to the school may be a fun way to familiarize yourself with the place. 5.  Calling and interacting with a few teachers before joining the school motivates a child to be ready for the new term.  6.  Enrolling your child in a training program to learn skills to uplift emotional intelligence levels is a way to bring self/social awareness, and improve communication skills. This helps a child to learn and apply emotional management and communicate with old or new friends. 7.  Coach your child by applying some life coaching tools. As a parent, if you are aware of these skills you can help them manage their anxiety. 8.  Show encouragement and celebrate their wins. This may include writing a note or showing confidence in their courage or you can use your creativity to do it in your own way. Whatever the way, every small act of encouragement becomes empowering for your child.  9.  Before school re-opens, plan a meetup for your child with his/her school friends. Motivation is contagious and there are many things we learn from interacting with our peers.  10.  Seek emotional and mental health support if needed – Although every child/person has resilience power, it is always important to pay attention and to take care of their emotional, mental, and physical well-being. If your child is prone to anxiety and finds difficulty with coping mechanisms then take it on a serious note. Do not hesitate to seek professional help. Experts in this field provide sessions in a very safe and secure environment.

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Leadership Skills in the VUCA World for Effective Parenting

Emotional Intelligence, Parenting /

VUCA is an acronym that stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. It was first used in 1987 and based on the leadership theories of Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus. In early 1990, US Army War college chose it as a response (seeing and reacting in new ways) to the collapse of the USSR. In today’s time, where technology is changing so fast that the whole environment is affected terrifically, it is no longer a case of finding the way or following a standard methodology. Leadership skills highly need to be reinvented and refined to match the frequency of the VUCA world. An increase in volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity means that you need to seek a new orientation to lead your life. In a one-liner, “Thinking and adapting a fresh approach to lead a better life”. Who needs leadership skills? Leadership is an act of leading people or a group. Leading self is known as self-leadership. Often people understand leadership skills need to be acquired by only skilled people or professionals. It’s a myth. Since we all lead our life as well as we lead others too by different roles in their life. So it is not unusual to say ‘We all are leaders.” “A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way and shows the way – John Maxwell” Considering the challenges of the VUCA world, to lead children’s super successful life, every parent needs to be reinvented leadership skills for incorporating them into the parenting style. Your parenting style can affect everything from the thinking, feeling, and behaving of your child. It’s important to ensure your parenting style is supporting healthy growth and development because the way you lead your child and how you discipline him/her will influence him/her for becoming a successful and happy person in life. Traditionally there are four identified parenting styles. Authoritarian Authoritative Permissive Uninvolved “Do exactly what I say”, that’s authoritarian where a child follows a path decided by parents. “You can do whatever you want to do, I am your friend.”, that’s Permissive. “Let’s discuss and decide the rules.” that’s Authoritative, it is the sweet spot between authoritarian and permissive parenting “You do what you want; I really don’t care” that’s Uninvolved parenting. All these approaches are the old styles and in practical life, a parent can’t fit into a single bucket all the time, it needs to keep changing from time to time, the age of the child and the situation. As a child grows, parenting needs to be switched from one bucket to another at a higher frequency. Here leading as a parent needs reinvention. Although there are different ways to reinvent it, one most suitable leadership skill is persuasive influence. Following this leadership style, it becomes easy for a parent to juggle different buckets of parenting styles. Let me explain it with an example. There is one very popular Bollywood movie named ‘3 Idiots’ which is based on Chetan Bhagat’s Novel. In that movie, the main character ‘Rancho’, exhibits persuasive influence and leadership skills. The base is innovation and empathy. Using these two core skills he not only leads his life successfully but helps others to lead their life successfully. If something is explained by giving the demo or digestible proofs then people understand clearly what do you want them to follow. Empathy helps a person to understand and respect others’ thought processes and feelings. Today children have exposure but lack clarity Today’s children have a lot of exposure but clarity is somewhere missing. They follow only those things that they find logically proven. If something doesn’t seem logical to them, they simply refuse to do that. Being a parent applying persuasive influence leadership style makes them understand how to make their children understand the importance of balancing freedom with values to design super success in life. In short, after learning it a parent can ‘hence proved’ to bring a smile of clarity to their child’s face. Learning this leadership style helps parents to gel with traditional parenting styles too by reinventing those with innovative ideas. Today’s VUCA world challenges parenting by giving unpredictable and inexperienced situations but there is a super tool of ‘coaching’ that helps parents to face it in innovative ways to lead to successful outcomes. Persuasive leadership skills can be learned with help of the coaching, which is based on NLP, Hypnosis Emotional Intelligence Techniques, etc.

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