It is PE Week this week and the games have certainly begun. We have guests from various sporting groups coming in to help encourage and instruct the students, the Year 5 and 6 students are running special games for the younger ones, table tennis tables are filling our Northwing undercover area at lunch time, and the staff have step goals and challenges to meet. It is a great celebration of physical activity. A big thanks to Mr Campbell and his helpers for organising things.  Also, a reminder that this Friday is a pupil – free day here at Prescott Northern as the teachers are writing Reports.

The other day, Mr Davis and I spent some time sitting and talking with a couple of young men who had not been putting their best foot forward at school. We discussed things like doing our very best for others and ourselves, causes and consequence and good longer term habits we can develop now. Over my close to 30 years of teaching, I have had many conversations like this with young men and women, and I am very grateful for the opportunity to do so. I have had the same conversations with my own children. It brought to mind the following article I would like to share with you. It is specifilly directed to those of us helping boys as they learn and grow. I really love the part about them coming to the point of saying sorry and putting things right, and how being genuinely apologetic is not weakness, but strength. I hope you find the article helpful.

“ Our boys tend to get into trouble more than our girls. There are lots of cultural and biological reasons for this . . .

Generally, boys have more muscle than girls and, with that, a physicality that gets them in strife. There’s also brain research that shows that, while females tend to quickly shift emotions from the brain’s limbic system to the word centres of the brain, males tend to shift them into their bodies.

This is more obvious as our boys become teens as they can be as big and strong as men, but their brains are under construction and their bodies are flooded with testosterone.

Author and counsellor Michael Gurian writes that boys tend to seek external measures of success to feel good about themselves. It is critical they maintain credibility and status in the eyes of the ‘tribe’… that’s their peers, not you.

Inevitably, all this means your son will probably make many mistakes; or hurt himself; hurt someone else; or make a very poor, thoughtless, seemingly stupid or cruel choice.

React with compassion not shame

How you react as a parent can significantly impact how your son recovers from mucking up. Your first reactions may be anger, disappointment or the urge to discipline harshly. However, there are other ways of reacting that can strengthen your bond with your son and ensure he learns from the experience through growth rather than shame.

Listen to him, guide him to see the impact of his poor choice, help him make it right, forgive him and ask him what he might do next time he’s in the same situation.

Break down the old male-code

This code told us that men don’t apologise as it’s a sign of weakness. One of the most powerful things we can teach our boys is that when we make mistakes, we own up to them and we apologise if need be. Teach your boys that saying sorry when they really mean it is a sign of courage and strength, not the opposite. It is also about taking responsibility for your actions, which is important for boys to learn. They need to see the men in their lives – particularly dads – apologise.

Don’t force an apology

Forcing a boy to apologise can be problematic. A genuine apology is very different to a forced apology. A genuine apology has a real sense of remorse attached to it. Coach your son to see the situation through the other person’s eyes. If someone has been impacted, he needs to apologise and make amends even if he didn’t intend for the consequences of his poor choice to happen. It doesn’t mean he’s wrong. It just means his choice affected someone.

Embrace failure

To help your son better learn about failure, have conversations about things you hear in the media where boys and men have experienced failure and recovered. Steve Smith, the former captain of the Australian cricket team who was involved in a ball-tampering scandal, is a great example. He owned his mistake, publicly apologised and he went on to have a very successful return to cricket.

Your son is going to make poor decisions repeatedly until he has enough myelin in his brain to be more mindful of the choices he makes. That is just a fact of life. As parents, your job is to, day-by-day, help your son learn a culture of accountability without a need for severe punishment, shaming or ridicule.” (Dent, 2020)

Have a great week with your kids,

Mark B

“Be gentle with one another, sensitive. Forgive one another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you.” Eph 4 : 32