In this episode
Professor Matt Sanders, founder of Triple P - Positive Parenting Program.
In this episode Professor Matt Sanders, founder of the Positive Parenting Program, discusses the importance of resilience in kids, especially in today’s world where things are changing rapidly. He also shares how resilience develops and how parents, educators and communities can work together to help children bounce back from challenges. Professor Sanders shares the work Triple P does to support parents in developing their relationships with their children and what resources and workshops are available.
About Professor Matt Sanders
Professor Matt Sanders is the founder of Triple P – Positive Parenting Program, an international program that provides evidence-based parenting and family support.
He is a Professor in Clinical Psychology and has published research and books on parenting, family psychology and the prevention of social, emotional and behavioural problems in children.
He is the foundation professor of Parenting Studies and Family Psychology, and strategic advisor to the Director of the Parenting and Family Support Centre at The University of Queensland.
Professor Sanders has developed successful models for cultural adaptation of evidence-based psychological interventions for Indigenous and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD).
Triple P has been used in 32 countries, has been translated into 23 languages other than English and has more than 100,000 practitioners trained in its delivery.
Transcript
MAK
A warm welcome. I'm Marie-Anne Keefe, but please call me MAK.
They say that parenting doesn't come with a manual, and today, probably more than ever before, mums, dads and carers of children are probably wishing they did.
Not that it's difficult to find advice. There must be more than a million books on the subject of parenting and a growing number of podcasts.
Your friends and other parents are probably more than happy to offer their 2 cents worth and then there's your parents. After all, you turned out all right, so they must have known what they were doing.
Fortunately, to help us sift through all that advice, there is the Positive Parenting Program, otherwise known as Triple P. It's a program that is evidence-based with more than 35 years of research, and it's effective because it offers simple and practical strategies for parents who need help building relationships with children.
In this episode of Ed Talks WA, Brad Elborough from the Communications team spoke with Professor Matt Sanders, a leading voice in child and family psychology, and also the founder of Triple P.
Brad Elborough
Welcome, Professor.
Professor Matt Sanders
Thank you very much. Good to be here.
Brad Elborough
Professor, there seems to be a new challenge facing parents every day, many we don't even see coming.
Triple P program must be very popular and must keep those working on it very busy and on their toes.
Professor Matt Sanders
Absolutely. And if you think about parenting since COVID, what unsettling times there have been for families. People's lives have been disrupted in lots of unpredictable ways and there's been a disruption in parenting and what we've seen since COVID is an increase in parental mental health issues. There's been increasing concerns about parents being more negative and less positive with their children, there've been increased rates of family violence and child maltreatment. And of course, social, emotional, behavioural problems in children have increased over this time.
You throw into that concerns about screen time and cyber safety and what seem to be, you, perhaps more straightforward problems to manage in the past have now been complicated by this series of things that and it's not just been COVID, it's been the communities have been through things like drought and floods and tsunamis and bushfires and earthquakes. And then you think of the human-made disasters of terrorism and violent crime and war and school shootings and forced displacement of families within a community.
There's no instruction manual for dealing with these issues. They're hard enough for adults to cope with.
Brad Elborough
Absolutely.
Professor Matt Sanders
When it comes to kids and parents are rightly concerned about, ‘well what is an appropriate way of handling these kind of issues?’ It's a toughie.
Brad Elborough
Is the stigma of getting help through psychology or any sort of help, is that going? Because it's always been, ‘I should be able to handle this myself’.
Professor Matt Sanders
What's been found is that when there's a serious commitment to making evidence-based parenting support like Triple P available in the community and when you promote it, you have active social marketing of the idea that it's healthy, normal, and desirable to seek information about raising kids, stigma goes right down.
Parents are finding that it's absolutely legitimate to reach out to receive support and assistance in an environment where it's quite unclear about how you might handle a situation. But the main thing that I'm concerned about is just the over-reliance on the internet for parents looking for Google solutions to everyday parenting concerns that they may have, which because there's millions of sites out there on positive parenting, it's really hard to tell the difference between the good stuff, the not so good stuff, things that are based on evidence and things that are really just homespun theory.
And what we know, parents are looking for things that work, that are practical, that are easy to access, and that are well-informed by a research process.
Brad Elborough
Well, absolutely fortunate that we've got the Triple P program, and I'm not saying that just because you're sitting across from me, and I could pick your brains on what that means for parents and for kids all day.
We're going to dive specifically into the topic of resilience today.
What it really means, how it develops and how parents, educators and communities can work together to help children bounce back from the challenges that you've already spoken about.
So whether you're a teacher, a parent or just someone who cares about kids' well-being, this conversation is for you.
So let's start with the basics, Professor.
What is resilience? Does it look the same for each child? My belief is that it wouldn't, it would be different for each child. And is having to be resilient more of an issue for kids today than previous years?
Professor Matt Sanders
Well, first of all, when you think about what emotional resilience is, it's the ability to cope with the ups and downs of life and to bounce back from the challenges that we experience. So that when you think about children being resilient, it's usually how they react in an environment of some kind of stress or adversity or things not working out well.
And of course, there are many different ways of coping with the different kinds of life stressors that children may experience. Some of them will be of their own making. For example, they've behaved badly towards peers and found that the peer group has rejected them, and now they don't have friends and they're on the receiving end of being excluded and bullied. That's a different scenario than losing a family pet or losing a family member.
So I think most parents out there would like to think that their children have the personal resources that they need to tackle the difficult times, that they're not just a victim of being overwhelmed by stress or relationship problems or, you know, potentially disappointment and failure, that they've got the capacity to recognize that a situation may have been distressing and upsetting for them, to recognize that, to accept it, to realize that there is now an opportunity for me to deal with it, to cope with it, to develop a strategy for turning things around.
And the more parents are able to support children themselves, develop their own solutions to problems that they're confronting, the more kids are going to own those solutions and implement them and then parents can come in with providing extra support or scaffolding if it's required.
But I think the thing about dealing or promoting resilience in children is the idea of having some foundational building blocks because it's very much based on parents creating a kind of relationship with their kids where they're able to help their kids recognize and accept feelings that sometimes are difficult to accept. It involves children learning to express their feelings and viewpoints about what has happened in a way that enables them to gather support of others around them so that they're not just sort of whinging and moaning in a way that's courting rejection on the part of parents not wanting to hear what the kid is having to say.
Kids can develop specific coping skills for dealing with things like anxiety that range from learning to relax to controlling your breathing to meditation and mindfulness kind of techniques and things like that. But fundamentally, kids need to learn how to cope with uncomfortable feelings that the natural tendency is to want to suppress or avoid or not have those feelings addressed.
And then, you know, the kids essentially needing to develop a range of strategies and tactics for dealing with the kind of the stress that's associated with these different events that are potentially troubling for them. And finally, I'd say that, you know, our capacity to be supportive of a parent in our children becoming more resilient involves us also taking care of ourselves. I mean, we've got to be good role models to our kids about how you deal with disappointment, letdown, uncertainty and to see that is just part of life's journey.
You know, everyone goes through it from time to time.
Brad Elborough
We've all been kids too, right?
Professor Matt Sanders
Yeah but we're continuing to experience those emotions, highs and lows, triumphs and setbacks. And the sooner kids realize that there's no magic state of affairs where none of these problems are occurring, it's normal to deal with some adversity in your life, and it's normal to have to develop ways of coping and overcoming them.
Brad Elborough
So Professor, we're months away from the government ban on social media for kids under the age of 16 in Australia. While some kids it wouldn't have been an issue for, it sounds to me from what you're saying, this is going to help a lot of kids with that journey. Is that right?
Professor Matt Sanders
Oh, yes absolutely. I mean, I completely support the government's decision to do this, it's quite clear that social media is having a really adverse effects on many, many young people and we know from a national survey of 8,300 families in Australia last year, that about 83% of those parents are reporting considerable conflict with their kids over social media and concerns about screen time.
So, you know, to have a situation where children are going to need to be informed about the change and what I suspect is this is going to be a much more straightforward process than most parents are anticipating because they approve of it. And it provides the family with extra sort of backup and support around the decision that they are making for their kids not to be on social media.
And, you know, there will be a transitional period where kids are getting used to the idea and there will certainly be some kids who are trying to work around it, and with the assistance of older siblings and even parents at times. But the fundamental message is that you need to be able to develop a relationship with your screens, with your phones, with the world of the internet that enables you to have a balanced life, that enables other activities to be taking place indoor, outdoor, artistic, creative, sporting-wise, not to sit for hours and hours and hours flicking through your screen. And it drives so many parents to distraction because they know themselves they're doing exactly the same thing. And so kids are growing up in an environment where the very behaviour the adult wants the child to control is being modelled, prompted, and reinforced by the parent.
And so it's a wake-up call for us all to reinvent family life that doesn't involve the over-reliance on screens.
Brad Elborough
And the world's going to be watching to see what happens there.
Professor Matt Sanders
And there'll be plenty of supporters of this too, not just critics.
Brad Elborough
It'd be interesting to see who jumps on afterwards. It's going to take a little bit of time for us to see the benefits, but you've spoken about them. It's going to be very interesting.
Now, you talked about this as well. We've often hear that he or she or they, that your kids, they're not a resilient kid or they need to build resilience. Is that something we start building early? Is it something that is taught or is it something that we naturally build?
Professor Matt Sanders
Look, I think the important thing to remember about children's, the building of resilience, that it is more likely when the fundamental principles of positive parenting are in place in a home.
So there are five key principles here that help kids with resilience. The first, that they're growing up in a loving, interesting, safe and engaging environment where there are plenty of age-appropriate things to do to keep kids busy, keep them focused, keep them engaged in interesting activities.
Secondly, that it's a positive learning environment. It's a world of encouragement. It's a world of when children are doing things that are appropriate where they get plenty of attention and positivity and you've got adults who are highly attuned to when children approach them, want to share something with them, want to tell them something, the adult pauses, pays attention to the youngster so the youngster gets used to being able to initiate in an interaction to get attention and get support from the parent and then move off and continue on with their own independent goal-directed activity.
The third thing is having clear boundaries and limits. So that kids are growing up in a world where they understand the meaning of the word no and shock horror that sometimes that it means that what it is that you were doing right now needs to stop and it needs to stop on the basis of adults' authority and best judgment about what they're prepared for their children to be doing, because some of the things that they're wanting them to stop are things like that are dangerous or hurtful and so on.
The fourth principle is having reasonable expectations of kids. So we can't expect kids to be able to be brilliant at being resilient in the face of disappointment. If the adult's expectations are that, you know, ‘just get over it, build a bridge and get over it’ sort of thing is the bottom line message, ‘stop whinging about it’, because that doesn't actually empower kids to be able to address what their concern is and develop a solution for it.
And the final thing is taking care of yourself as a parent. If you're miserable, lonely, isolated, in conflict, you're much less able to be supportive of your kids and you're much less likely to tune into where your kids are with respect to how they're dealing with some adversity in their life. Because if you don't have a good relationship with your kids, they're not going to be talking to you about it.
You'll observe what's going on through their actions, but they need to be able to talk to you as a parent about their feelings and concerns, because unless that's brought out, you're not able to then move on to, well, ‘how are we going to deal with that?’
Brad Elborough
And we're all human, right? And we are busy. So that advice about being present and being aware of yourself as well as what the child's needs are is super important.
Professor Matt Sanders
It is. But on the other hand, being present often involves moments. It doesn't necessarily mean you've got to be available for half an hour of continuous being with your child. Some of the best moments last between 30 seconds and a couple of minutes.
They're moments that are special to your child because they've initiated the interaction, they've signalled a need to communicate and to connect with you and oftentimes that connection is a glance, a look, a little hug, a suggestion of what the child might do.
Brad Elborough
Acknowledgement.
Professor Matt Sanders
Like, for example, a child who's struggling with something like can't get the lid off a glass container and is getting really frustrated with it and approaches the parent and says, ‘Mum, can you help me with this?’
The parent who's into rescuing their kids would say, ‘oh, just give it to me’, undoes it and gives it back to the child. And the child's response is to say, ‘thank you, mum or dad’.
Whereas a parent who's promoting the child's resilience and promoting their problem solving would say, ‘just show me how you're trying to open it’ and ‘just do it again’. And the parent might say, ‘how about you twist it the other way to see if the lid might come off?’ And the lid comes off, who solved the problem? The child has. The parent has provided a clue, a tip, a suggestion but the interaction ends with the parent being able to say, ‘well done, you've done it yourself’, as opposed to the child saying, ‘thank you, mum, for helping me with that’.
So there's a difference, isn't there?
Brad Elborough
Absolutely a difference.
Professor Matt Sanders
And so a child who experiences that process of being constantly empowered as a problem solver in dealing with little frustrations, little disappointments, little times they're arguing and fighting with their sibling.
And the parent will say something like, ‘OK, what's going on? Tell me how are you dealing with it? Okay, what have you tried so far? What else could you do in this situation?’ And the child suggests a possible solution. The parent might say, ‘okay, let's try that. Go and approach your brother and say, can I have a turn when you finish that and see how that works for you?’
The child does it and the parent notices what's happened and saying, ‘well done, you sorted it out yourself’.
The ownership is, see, with the child's taking control and the parent is constantly thinking about ‘how can I enable this to occur so that my child is becoming more and more resourceful, resilient, and grows up with this sense of personal agency’. I have the knowledge, skills, and confidence to deal with the task I'm confronted with right now.
And we need that capacity right throughout our life, don't we?
Brad Elborough
100% we do.
Professor Matt Sanders
Yeah. So parents are very important in helping kids become really resilient in the face of challenge.
Brad Elborough
To give them that idea that ‘I can help myself’.
Professor Matt Sanders
Yeah, and it's not only normal but it's expected and you as a parent have confidence in the child's capacity to rise to the occasion.
That's a good message to get across.
Brad Elborough
It's a really good message.
Can you offer, and you've touched on a couple of them already, some simple everyday things that a parent or carer listening to this episode can do right now today to help that resilience in a child, not just the one coming to help take a lid off a jam jar.
Professor Matt Sanders
But of course it could be how to start the lawnmower. It could be many other things to do with cooking and taking care of the family environment and kids learning sort of life skills that are part of living in a community.
But I mean, I think the sort of things that I would zero in on are just observing your children and how they cope with peer interaction. Like for example, a child who's got a play date, got another child coming around to play, and in the past they've been a hogger of all of the activity. They wanted to define everything that was being done, what toys to bring out, what activities they were going to do when their friend came around. And this time, when their friend arrives, they're asking the other child what it is they'd like to do this afternoon and present them with a few different options that they could do.
Now, the parent who observes that is taking notice of a child tuning in to the needs of someone else. And its sort of like if you think about a visitor coming around who wants to play a particular outdoor game and says so. The child who agrees to that and enables that to occur and is supporting the other peer, their friend basically, being able to determine what activities they're going to do. That's a worthwhile thing to have tuned in to notice and to draw it to the child's attention.
Another example would be where, you know, an older sibling is going, you know, pointing or saying something that's kind of like mocking the other child and the other child just sort of stops, gets up, and walks away.
And just simply takes the wind out of the sail of the other child who's being nasty. And the parent notices that and says to their child, ‘I really like the way that you just walked away from that and you didn't reward him for being nasty to you. Well done’.
Brad Elborough
Encourages that behaviour.
Professor Matt Sanders
Yeah, but the child is getting validation that the way they resolved that peer relationship or the sibling relationship issue was noticed and was deemed by the parent to be skilful, to be appropriate, to be something that they should be proud of.
Whereas the parent could easily not respond in that way at all and the child feels as though that they've just caved in and were trying to avoid a conflict. But in fact, they did the right thing.
Brad Elborough
Absolutely. It's powerful. We've all heard the saying, it takes a village to bring up a child.
So with parents who are engaged with the Triple P program because the child needs help, is that something that's encouraged to get the school community involved, get the family involved, get friends and extended families involved?
Professor Matt Sanders
Yeah, definitely. But I would say that of all the carers who are involved in the raising of the child it's best to have each and every one of them on their own parenting journey because they've got to decide for themselves what their role can be, and one of those roles might be to support someone else in their parenting role.
But we would often recommend for parents who are wanting to do Triple P that if there is a partner, that they are welcome and should be absolutely aware of what's being introduced in the groups and so on and now with Triple P online being available, it's possible for one parent to be doing the in-person group and another parent to be doing it online.
And so we've got some interesting evidence to show that where grandparents are involved in raising of children, spending significant amount of time with their children, that they will benefit hugely from participating in Triple P in 2 ways. One, it reduces the stress of being a grandparent, particularly if you've got a young child who's a handful. and secondly, it reduces friction and acrimony between the parent and their own biological child who's the child's natural parent.
And so if you think about a parenting intervention that can have a 3-generational hit, the grandparent benefits, the parent benefits, and the children benefit.
Brad Elborough
Consistency in message as well.
Professor Matt Sanders
Yeah, and it's sort of a recognition that if each of them are working on building a positive relationship with their grandchildren and that the grandchildren are getting this consistent message across the different carers in their lives, it makes it so much easier for children to know how to behave and what's appropriate to do.
And all you have to do is throw into the mix the school environment and it becomes a real no-brainer for the idea that parents and teachers get on the same page together with respect to how to handle the child when they're being challenging or difficult. And so the idea of having schools and parents working in partnership, I think where Triple P can work really well is if you have parents doing a parenting seminar and then you've got the teachers who are aware of the content of the seminar that the parents are being introduced to and can look for ways of supporting that parent's efforts to address the behavioural, emotional or learning issue.
One of the things that's been found from longitudinal studies of parenting is that when parents have greater self-efficacy or confidence in handling children's behaviour, when the kids are 6-year-olds, they're more likely to have a positive relationship with teachers when those kids are 8. And the teachers are more likely to have a better relationship with the pupil at age 8, and that continues on to age 10.
And so the whole idea is you build your confidence as a parent and it improves your relationships with other significant carers and educators in the lives of your children and that it's a win-win scenario.
You know, part of Triple P is really about building a team who are all involved in relating to children and each other, and the more they're on the same page, the better.
Brad Elborough
So I think a lot of the examples and scenarios you're talking about at the moment, ringing home to people listening to this podcast. And I think there'd be a lot of parents who are just maybe learning about Triple P they would be feeling, I think, greater than knowing that there's some help out there.
If a parent wants to get involved with the program, what do they need to have ready and prepared, and what do they need to do to get involved and get some help?
Professor Matt Sanders
All they have to do is reach out to the Department of Education website in Western Australia, search for Triple P, and they'll be able to access a program. It's run across the state.
In addition to that, there's the national rollout of a suite of Triple P online programs that parents can access freely by going to triplep-parenting.net, and they can choose a program that ranges from ‘Triple P for Baby’ to the ‘Triple P Online’ for the 2 to 12-year-olds, to ‘Fear Less Triple P’ for parents who've got kids with anxiety problems.
There's another program called ‘Family Transitions Triple P’ for parents of kids who've been through separation and divorce, there's ‘Stepping Stone, Triple P’ for parents of neurodiverse children and children with disabilities and then there's a new program about to be launched called ‘Resilience Triple P’ for parents whose children appear victimized or bullied at school.
So that's a comprehensive suite of programs, particularly for the primary school age group of children, that parents are able to reach out to and engage with and all of these programs have been carefully studied and evaluated and shown to have benefit to children.
Brad Elborough
And we hear stories of having to go to a GP and get referrals and then having to wait in long times to get a help. Is this help immediate? Is it ready?
Professor Matt Sanders
It's immediate, yeah.
So the idea is, I mean, if there's a triple P program being run in your community, at least you'll be able to find out when it is and to be able to book into it. But the online programs will be immediately accessible so parents are not having to be on extended periods of waiting in order to get services.
Brad Elborough
Well, Professor, if this were a live radio show, the switchboard would be lit up now with parents asking questions and I know you don't have time to sit here and answer too many more.
So that's all we have time for today for this episode of Ed Talks WA. It's a huge thank you to Professor Matt Sanders for chatting about the very important topic of resilience today and for sharing some of his insights and practical wisdom on building resilience in children and families.
Professor Matt Sanders
Thank you.
Brad Elborough
If you'd like to learn more about the Triple P program or access parenting support, check out the links in episode notes from today's podcast. And if you found this conversation helpful, please share it with your network. You never know who might find it valuable.
MAK
You've been listening to Ed Talks WA.
This podcast has been recorded on Whadjuk Noongar land. We pay respect to the traditional owners and to their elders, past, present and future.
Notes
Read more about Triple P's program for parents on the Department's website.
Access support resources on the Triple P website.
Programs mentioned in this episode
Access Triple P Online for Baby.
Access Triple P Online for Under 12.
Access Fear-Less Triple P Online.
Access Stepping Stones Triple P Online.
Access Family Transitions Triple P Online.