The Therapy Edit - One Thing with Susie Robbins on why starting school isn't all about academics

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

As we zoom towards the start of a new school year Anna interviews Susie Robbins who offers some incredibly helpful advice for mums of children starting school this September.Susie is a behaviour expert that you'll find on Instagram at @resolvetoplayYou can also learn more about Susie and all that she offers at her website.Susie has many years of experience working with children deemed to be 'at risk' of social or academic exclusion. She has supported them, and their families to repair relationships at home, and at school with the aim that they would come to, remain in and ultimately enjoy school life. Susie is passionate about empowering children and young families to do the very best that they can, and so thrive.This year Susie released her Happy Days Diary; an emotional wellbeing journal for kids to help identify emotions, triggers and build a tool kit to aid regulation. You can find out more and get copies for your children here.

Hello and welcome to The Therapy Edit with me, psychotherapist's mum of three and author Anna Martha. Every Friday, I invite one guest to tell me the one thing they would most like to share with mums everywhere. So join with me as we hear this dose of wisdom. I hope you enjoy it. Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week's guest episode of The Therapy Edit. and I have with me today, Susie Robbins of Resolve to Play. She is a behaviour expert, passionate about reconnecting family.

She is the creator of the Happy Days Diary. It's the perfect first step for your child to recognise how they're feeling and how best to manage these emotions. It's a wirebound, hardback book and encourages daily practice of gratitude and reflection. It would be amazing to do that as a practice for ourselves as well alongside our kids. Susie has a whole host of perfectly playful gifts from play packs of fun activities, Play planners, play boxes. There is something for everyone. And she's got a whole host of resources, beautiful and meaningful resources that aim to strengthen your relationships with your child and support their emotional well-being. So just to give you a bit of backstory, I've come on to this podcast recorder. I had to delay a little bit because I had the post drop off tears and needed to reapply my makeup. But I just saw Susie in my door and thought, what an amazing way to start my day. Because she totally and utter gets it. So Susie, it's so good to have you here today. Just wondering how you are. How's your morning been? Oh, do you know what? It's been really, really good actually. I have three young

boys, similar ages to your children, and my youngest finds it quite difficult to go into school sometimes, to go into nursery. But today was a good day. So I have soaked that up and I feel quite grounded and rearing to go. I'm having a good start to my day. Thank you. Oh, that's to know. I always just feel it's springing my step when everyone goes and happy. Because it's hit and miss, isn't it? It really does. It really does make a difference to how we feel. And I find those moments of kind of decompression just sitting in the car afterwards. It's been like, okay, and breathe. It's really good to kind of ground yourself, however it's been, reflect on it all. So, Susie, with all your knowledge around kind of behavior and kids

starting school and just kind of family, the family unit, what is the one thing that you would love to share with all of those listening today? I would love to let people know that if your little one is starting school, we don't need to prepare them in terms of academics. We can remove that pressure from ourselves straight away and completely. It's more important to nurture your child's emotional well-being. to develop their sense of self before they go in and have to stand on their own two feet at school, then it is for them to be able to read or add up or know their times tables or write

because that's why they go to school. They go to school to learn those things. But if we can give them a really good grounding to start off with in terms of their emotional well-being, then I think that's a great starting point to then be able to go and learn. Because if we're worried and stressed. Yeah, if we're worried and stressed, like if our child is really upset, they're not going to be able to learn as effectively. So if we can do all the soothing and the nurturing and supporting our end before they go, then they stand a better chance of picking up the academics if that's what they want to do, if that's important. Oh, I love that. I bet that's a bit of a shoulder-dropping moment for so many parents listening. And you know,

So my youngest is starting in September, and it feels like her first time, partly because she's a different kid to the other two. So she's going to approach it very differently. And I think I never realized that that would be the case. But also because my oldest one, he was in reception in the pandemic. So that year was just so disrupted. And then my second one started in the pandemic. So I didn't even go inside his classroom at all, ever.

So it just feels, it just feels new. So I think regardless of how many kids you've walked through this process with or, yeah, how far down the line you are, there's also lots of other transitions within schools, aren't there? So there's around here we have infant school, junior school and then secondary school. And there's just a lot of newness. So what would that look like then? So for parents, oh, amazing, I'm going to take that pressure off myself. I'm going to put away the kind of preschool maths books and all of that kind of pressure. How can I prepare them best? emotionally to navigate to time school? So I think the first thing that I would recommend for parents to do is to encourage your child's

independence, sense of self and their emotional literacy. So for their independence, I know it's the hardest, most frustrating thing to watch your child struggling to put on clothes or struggling to open bottles.

And it's even more frustrating perhaps when they say, no, I want to do it, I want to do it, and they won't let you help them. And they're fighting and they're getting crosser and crosser and crosser. But if we can allow them that chance to work it out themselves and to overcome the obstacles and to problem solve, then that's really empowering for little children. That's really empowering. And by not swooping in to rescue them and do it for them too soon, then they get to build that kind of a frustration resilience as well, which will come in so handy in reception, because when they're in school throughout their school lives, they won't be able to do

everything straight away. And for some people, that's really hard, but they will face that obstacle as they get older. So if we can help them and support them in a really loving, nurturing way as much and as often as we can, whilst being realistic that, you know, sometimes we're depleted to and so we have less resilience perhaps ourselves if we can do that then we're doing them a real service actually

by allowing them that opportunity it shows that we trust them yeah I love this and also it's okay do you know what that's making me laugh because actually the more kids I've had the more I've ended up having to do this anyway because you just you can't be hands on

all the time you can't just spend five minutes getting a one kid dress when the other two are causing chaos in the next room and fighting over stuff. So this morning my daughter, she did her own buttons up on her dress

and I handed her over to nursery and I noticed they were all done at wrong. You know, she had want to be missed somewhere down the line and then the other day

she went on with the shoes on the wrong feet and I just saying, you know what? It doesn't matter. She might, you know, she might get a change later on

and she might realise and do it herself. She might kick off her shoes to go and play and then put them back on the right foot. like she did it and I'm proud of her but I think with my first one I probably would have been like oh gosh no I must help you do your buttons because yesterday you did the more wonky and oh no your shoes are on the wrong feet let's thought that right out and it's quite liberating

actually because you're just like does it actually matter she's done great yeah absolutely I love that I like something I try to bring into my parenting a lot is um does it matter is it important or does it feel important because that's how it was when I was a child or that's just the way it's always been. But how important is it actually to do the buttons up the right way when you're four? Not what's all important. It's very impressive that you can do any of them at all. And we should celebrate that success rather than correcting all of the time.

Yeah. I love that. Yeah. So it kind of just gives space to learn and get it wrong. And when it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. If things are a bit wonky or back to front or inside out or what matters is. that they did it and they tried. So kind of hanging,

that just that encouragement to hang back a little bit and ask yourself whether it matters because that's quite freeing in a way, isn't it? Yeah, that makes my shoulders drop a bit because sometimes you do, you answer yourself and you're like, it doesn't matter. But if I hadn't asked myself that question, I might have leapt in, I might have fixed.

Yeah. So when you talk about emotional literacy, I'd love to hear a little bit more about this because obviously we hear all sorts about literacy. There's like a parent's workshop where I go and learn about how they're teaching phonics this year because apparently there are so many different ways of doing it and sometimes they change it.

But what's emotional literacy? Tell us a little bit more about that and how we can support our children in their emotional literacy. Emotional literacy is everything. It's so important. It underpins so much of our mental health. So emotional literacy is understanding, your own emotions and the emotions of others. And so this comes easily to some people, but

not at all to others. And it can be taught. A large part of my role before I had children was teaching emotional literacy to teenagers. So if we're looking at children who are starting school, we need to manage our expectations about what they should be able to do in terms of understanding emotions and other people if I was then teaching teenagers to do the same things. So, what we want to start the conversation with our little ones is thinking about if you're reading a book or if you're watching a cartoon on the telly or if you're playing a game together, how does the character feel and how do you know they feel that way? Just start off that conversation and maybe have you ever felt that way? And what it does is it brings awareness to the whole different scope of emotions

and that in itself is a different conversation but it brings awareness to it and then we can look at how that emotion feels in our body so our physiological response so when you're nervous how does that feel in your body? Do you get sweaty hands? Do you get like squiggly feelings in your stomach?

What does that look like for you? And for lots of people, they'll be slightly different and there's no right or wrong answer because that's their body and that's their response. and that's empowering for children to own as well, to have ownership over their feelings, their physiological responses. And then as they get older

and their understanding of this becomes a bit more sophisticated, you can look at triggers. So when do you feel that way? And if we can identify when you feel that way, we can preempt it and we can learn how to regulate our emotions. And if we can regulate our emotions, then that's really good for our relationships, our mental health, our success, our concentration, our focus. And it just spirals into absolutely everything.

But if we can start the conversations with these really little children who have big feelings, then that is really valuable to whole families, not just to the child, not just to the child and the parent, but to the child, the parent, the siblings, the grandparents, the teacher and child relationship. You know, it spills out into everything. Yeah. Yeah, it allows them to communicate a little bit more. I think I very much see the Coke bottle effect sometimes of all the emotion that kind of gets held in at school because maybe they don't know how to express it or maybe they don't feel safe expressing it or want to. And then it can often then come out at home. And it's so helpful to be able to identify with them what they're feeling or what those needs are so that you can meet them. I'll say, fine, I've had to learn this for myself as well. so that I'm regulating myself and acknowledging my feelings and sometimes literally having to label feelings to myself to see which one it is that feels like it fits.

Yeah. Because if I'm not regulated and then they come home full of all this stuff, then I'm going to find it so much harder to help them navigate it. Yeah, absolutely. And it's really hard as a parent or as an adult in this relationship to contain their emotions sometimes. And that's why it's really important to do things for ourselves,

to create space, to have decompression time, to know our triggers and to know what regulates us before we then have to take on, well, we've both got three children each, so three different sets of emotions. The husband comes home from work

and he's got his set of emotions from the day. And it's a lot to hold. And it's, I feel it's a real contributor it's a parental burnout. But if we can look at ourselves, as well as our children and our emotional needs and our emotional literacy, then it will help settle things. You can't magically erase people's emotional outbursts. That's not helpful anyway.

But it is a useful thing to be able to give yourself. It's a really valuable gift to give yourself and to give others by allowing yourself that investment of time and effort. Yeah. So if our child does come home from those early days of like settling in sessions and sometimes they're half days, aren't they? Sometimes they're just mornings or just afternoons or half weeks

and there are so many different ways of doing it. But if they do come home and they are just full of emotion and it just feels like a bit of a whirlwind or a bit of a, you know, just a dam that just kind of breaks, what are the tips that you would say? to parents first navigating that dynamic. So firstly, to expect it, this more than likely will happen. It's called restraint collapse and it's when you've been,

you've mentioned it, called it the Coke bottle effect where you get shaken up. But it's where your child is holding in their impulses and their natural emotional responses and reactions to things because they are essentially being hypervigilant. They're at a new school, which will look different and sound, the acoustics will be different to home and it will smell different and there will be different pictures everywhere, different sounds, different children, nuances in behaviour like when you should

sit still on the carpet or when you're allowed to go and wander off and play your own thing, it's hard to navigate. And so our children are kind of holding everything in, watching, learning, and it's exhausting. So when they come home to bus, the chances are they can come out of the school doors crying because they're so relieved to see you because they can let it all come out now. Or they can come home and be very, not stroppy, but you know, they could be quite snappy with you. They could be quite grumpy. All of these things just come up because we and the family and the home are their safe space so they know that we will not abandon them when when they show us these emotions but they

don't know the teacher yet they don't know their classmates yet they don't know the dinner staff yet they don't know that they won't have a negative response to their emotions yeah so that's why it happens that's how it comes out but so my advice to parents would be expect it feed make sure your child's basic needs are met so feed them give them a drink allow them some rest time after school. It's very tempting to be, oh, exciting. So let's go to the park and have an ice cream after your first day at school, which is great and exciting because you want to celebrate this, you know, this milestone. But it's also further draining, further exhausting. And another thing for your child to navigate. So I would allow plenty of downtime and decompression. And once your child

has had that, then of course if they strike you as lots of energy still, they want to do things, they want to go out and have an ice cream, then you can do that. But be prepared to scale back and just sit tight and be like a fortress for your child. Just be steady and sturdy and there and reliable in your nurturing of them. And if they do, if it does all spill out of them, which it probably will. Don't take it personally. It's a backhanded compliment, really. It's because they feel loved and secure and safe with you.

But it is quite easy to feel victimized by it, to feel a bit put upon because you're the one that always has to have this barrage of emotions. You can hold your boundaries lovingly. You can say, you know, you can't speak to me in that way. Let's think about another way that we can work together to get these feelings out. But to be there and to be supportive

and respond consistently and lovingly and in a nurturing way is so helpful to your child to allow them to process everything that they've experienced that day for the weeks, the months. Expect it. Do what you can. Maybe fit some rest or just something in the day that gives you a bit more contingency

so that when they come home and they just spill it out everywhere, as they may well do, that you can just provide them with that calm, secure base, which I love that. It's a backhanded compliment. They feel safe with you, which is why they're learning it all out. And I find that so helpful to remember.

But before I ask you, just a couple of quick fire questions, Susie, I'd love to hear a little bit more about the Happy Days diary because I just think this sounds amazing. What age is it for? I've got a force, nearly seven, and an eight-year-old. Oh, it would be suitable for all of them. I use it with my four-year-old. He was for in February, so he's still quite newly four.

I use it with them as like a talking prompt to discuss how people are feeling and what it feels like in our bodies and we can start having those conversations and he loves it. With my, I have a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old, they could quite happily take it away and it could become their own emotional well-being journal that they do on their own and they reflect on their own. They don't necessarily need adult support with it because it's quite clear and quite open-ended.

You know, there is no right or wrong. It's an exploration of their feelings. And the Happy Day's Diary is a guide for children to start looking at their own feelings and to look at the feelings of others and to identify them and then it will go and give you some tools and tips that you can then use for regulating. So it's about working out what regulates you because it doesn't work.

The same thing doesn't work for everybody. So true. And once we've identified that, we've had the time to look at it, and things become a little bit easier because you've got your toolkit kind of ready made, ready. That sounds so good. I think I need to make a bulk order of those. So that would work amazingly then for those who are thinking, right, emotional literacy. That needs to be my focus.

How can I begin? so maybe the Happy Days Diary is a great place to start. So thank you so much, Susie. I'm going to give you one quick file question because that's all we've got time for. What makes you feel good? What's one thing that makes you feel good as a mum? Not necessarily to do the kids at all, but what refuels them gives you something? Running.

I love running. Is that where you've got loads of medals behind your head? Is that to do with running? I was wondering, are they running? These are my husbands, sadly. Mine are in a different room. But I love running. I have a little team of friends and we go out running together

and the sense of belonging and support and encouragement and freedom that comes from it is really invigorating and it fills my cup like nothing else. Amazing. Fills your cup so that when they come back and the chaos begins, you've got something to allow you to just be a bit more resolved. So thank you so much. you are on Instagram at Resolve to Play and I think it's got all your links there to all of your resources and your website and everything but thank you so much Susie for joining us and for

sharing your nugget and your encouragement and your shoulder dropping insight and yeah support so thank you so much and it's been a joy thank you so much for listening please do take a moment to subscribe rate and review as it really helps get these words out to benefit more juggling parents like us and head to anamatha.com to find my resources on everything from health anxiety to people pleasing starting at only 20 pounds and finally don't forget to pre-order my new book raising a happier mother how to find balance feel good and see your children flourish as a result I can't wait for you to have that take care and we'll chat soon