Kate Lund on Helping Your Child Build Resilience and Thrive in School, Sports, and Life

Kate Lund talks to Alexander “The Engineer” Lim, host of AuthorStory by alvinwriter.com about her book, Bounce: Help Your Child Build Resilience and Thrive in School, Sports and Life.


PLAY THE VIDEO AND LEARN MORE FROM DR. KATE LUND.

“Focus on the relationship with the child.” ~Kate Lund

Kate is a mother, clinical psychologist and university instructor who is interested in resiliency and wrote Bounce from the perspective as a mother and university instructor, and based on her own childhood experiences with hydrocephalus. Kate noted that resiliency is particularly important where children today are concerned, as they face a lot of challenges. The book came out of her years of experience as a clinical psychologist and with her own curiosity about resiliency and is designed to be an easy read for parents, teachers and coaches. One of the times that she recalls was when she was working in Shriners Burn Hospital in Boston, where she encountered children who had serious burn injuries, children who needed a great deal of resilience in their lives after receiving their injuries.

Kate notes that resiliency is important mainly because children will face challenges, and the ability to get up after being knocked down by a challenge enables them to move on and eventually realize their potential, rather than getting stuck. She also remarks that resiliency varies from child to child, with some being naturally more resilient than others, and notes that it is important to help less resilient children shift their perspective to one which enables greater resiliency.

Kate remarks that children can become more resilient as they learn and grow, where the environment and the people around them can help out. She points out that helping a child manage their emotions and, thus, their frustrations, which will keep those children from shutting down. Kate remarks that kids learn in different ways and at a different pace, and that separating their classroom performance from how they feel about themselves enables greater resiliency in children.

The pillars of resilience that Kate notes in the book are

· the ability to tolerate frustration and manage emotions;
· navigate friendships and social pressures;
· sustain focus and attention;
· develop courage;
· build motivation;
· find confidence; and
· create optimism.

Kate believes that building the skills espoused by these pillar will create more resilient children. She notes that the model she uses is based on her experience and analysis, as well as on the research done on resilience, and that these pillars are the core elements of resilience. She gave an example of a situation where navigating friendship and social pressure was the concern, remarking that, by helping a child do so, they can be taught skills which would enhance their confidence and emotional intelligence, what their own strengths and values are and accept and understand individual differences in others.

Kate notes that, at the end of each chapter, are bullet points – action steps – that parents and teachers can do to help foster resilience in children. Teachers and parents, for example, can help by creating a positive, focused state of mind and identifying the way by which a child learns, as different children learn in different ways. Parents also need to be connected with their child’s strengths, passions and aptitudes, and then focus on these in daily life.

Purchase from Amazon: Bounce: Help Your Child Build Resilience and Thrive in School, Sports and Life by Kate Lund

Patricia Jennings Teaches How Mindfulness Frees Teachers from Stress

Dr. Patricia Jennings talks to Alexander “The Engineer” Lim of AuthorStory by alvinwriter.com about her book, Mindfulness for Teachers: Simple Skills for Peace and Productivity in the Classroom.



"We often get depressed about the past - what happened in the past. When we focus our attention on the present, it helps reduce both anxiety and depression." ~Patricia A. Jennings 

Patricia had always wanted to work with children and enjoyed working with them, which was the reason she went into teaching. She spent her first twenty-two years as a classroom teacher, after which she taught teachers, and it was over the course of that time that she realized how emotions can interfere with teaching, for, as she pointed out, both teachers and students are essentially held captive in a single room for a particular amount of time, and if the students complain and grumble and are generally not receptive to the teacher, this has an effect on the teacher, who reacts with such emotions that result in anxiety, thus making the experience rather stressful on the teacher.

Patricia had been practicing mindfulness and meditation even before she started teaching, and she realized that her practice of meditation helped her manage the emotional demands of being a teacher in a classroom full of children. She observed that, often, the behaviors that the teachers needed to manage created a negative emotional reaction in them, such as anger and frustration, and that the beginner teachers had a difficult time reflecting on such experiences. Patricia realized that teachers could benefit from practicing mindfulness, but she didn’t do so until she had done more research on the topic, which led her to get her doctorate studying stress and coping, after which she developed programs to help teachers manage their emotions through mindfulness, and gave the example of a beginning teacher who, after undergoing training in mindfulness, was able to make a subject that her students greatly resisted, interesting.

Mindfulness for Teachers was an opportunity for Patricia to bring together several threads that she had been working on over the years and present these in a way that the average teacher could get, so that they could be more responsive and become better teachers. She mentioned that one of the reasons she was interested in writing a book was her experience dealing with intern teachers, some of which she trained. She mentioned that Daniel Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, recommended her to his publisher when the latter asked if he knew anybody who could write a book on mindfulness in education, and Patricia was up for the challenge, particularly since she had been thinking about writing a book but didn’t know how to get connected with the publishing industry.

The concept of mindfulness is based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work, which is based on stress reduction, and the definition of mindfulness is “paying attention to the present non-judgementally.” In other words, being aware of what is happening in the present moment, both within oneself and outside and oneself in a way that these are perceived very clearly. Mindfulness might be inherent in some personality traits, but it can also be practiced and can help people realize their conditioned responses to particular situations, such as being late.

While Patricia’s book is aimed primarily at teachers, she notes that the lessons within have helped readers who weren’t teachers in other aspects of their lives, such as parenting, and that the lessons within can help out anybody.

Patricia notes that research is presently ongoing on mindfulness, mostly conducted on adults, and practicing mindfulness has shown that it can reduce depression, anxiety and pain, as well as change parts of the brain that are related to regulating emotions and improving the response of the body’s immune system. She hopes that as teachers learn mindfulness skills, they would be more likely to stay in the teaching profession, particularly since teachers spend a lot of time on other activities outside of the classroom still related to teaching students - in other words, their work doesn’t end when classes do.

Patricia hopes that, at the end of the day, mindfulness can help teachers do their work in the classroom by understanding the entirety of the students they teach, particularly those who have suffered trauma and are acting out negatively due to that. She sees mindfulness as directly helping students as well. She says she wants to return to teaching students at some point in the future and use all the tools and techniques that she has learned over the years. She’s found her calling in teaching and she definitely has no desire to return to being a secretary for a real estate agent, which was where she started her working career. We should all be thankful for her choice.

Website: tishjennings.com

Purchase on Amazon: Mindfulness for Teachers: Simple Skills for Peace and Productivity in the Classroom