Positive way forward
TEACHING CHILDREN TO THINK POSITIVELY ABOUT THEMSELVES HAS MUCH WIDERREACHING BENEFIT, WRITES
WE live in an age of prosperity not seen in any other period in history.
Only 10 per cent of the world lives in poverty, 90 per cent of people are literate, gruesome diseases such as smallpox have been eradicated and the majority of the world now lives in a democracy.
Yet why, in this age of material abundance, in wealthy countries such as Australia, do we have unprecedented levels of depression, anxiety and anger among young people?
Addiction to devices is robbing us of time to forge meaningful friendships, we are less connected to things bigger than ourselves – like churches, communities and our extended families – and the quality of our relationships with each other are suffering.
Professor Martin Seligman, founder of the Positive Education movement, wants to change all that.
“There is increasing evidence of poverty of relationships – loneliness, less romance, less face-to-face friendship,” he says. “The most worrisome thing to me is that it cuts into face-to-face relationships. Our species is built to do face-to-face stuff.”
Prof Seligman has been visiting Ravenswood School for Girls in Sydney’s north over the past three weeks, serving as the school’s psychologist in residence. Ravenswood is one of thousands of schools in Australia that has embraced Seligman’s “positive education” approach.
That means it has embedded positive education into the curriculum and is explicitly teaching students, in an ageappropriate way, the skills to develop high levels of positive emotion and engagement.
MEASURABLE OUTCOMES
Positive psychology measures wellbeing in five areas: positive emotions, personal resilience, mindfulness and encouraging a healthy lifestyle.
Rather than just tell people to be positive, it uses evidencebased techniques to bolster the positive relationships essential to wellbeing.
“You don’t want to evade bad things like trauma, sadness and anger. In evolution, we get sad when we fail. It is a signal, a very important signal. We get anxious when we’re in danger and we get angry when there is stress passed around.” But how we process and react to those emotions is what we can change in a constructive way.
Prof Seligman says if a child feels rejected at school, they have feelings of sadness and say things like, “I’m a loser” and “nobody loves me”.
Positive psychology trains a person to deal with those emotions in a constructive way. First, they learn to take a step back to become aware they’re speaking in a “catastrophic” way. Next, they realise the situation isn’t going to be permanent.
“Studies have shown the kids who were resilient were the ones who, when they fail, thought of their failures as temporary, local and they could do something,” he says.
Prof Seligman says that in an age when most parents work, schools are uniquely placed to teach young people to bolster their mental health.
The positive education movement is rapidly gaining popularity among schools because they must address mental wellbeing, but it also reaps academic results – with some estimating it could lift a child’s academic results by a full year.
But teaching someone how to have good relationships, positive emotions and meaning and purpose is easier said than done.
At Ravenswood, one way the school has increased students’ relationships with each other is by banning the use of mobile phones.
DON’T FEAR FAILURE
In the classroom, Ravenswood principal Anne Johnstone says, students are taught to think about failure as part of the learning process.
“Failure is just part of the learning journey. Failure and difficulty are just feedback – feedback you might need to try a little harder. Put up your hand and you will get there,” she says.
They are also taught to focus on their strengths rather than things they’re not good at.
Marita Hayes-Brown, the CEO of the Positive Education Schools Association, says the program can lift academic achievement significantly.
“A recent study involving around 270,000 students showed, at the end of a 15month intervention which taught the skills of wellbeing, students reporting significantly higher wellbeing and significantly better performance on standardised national exams – the equivalent to a gain of almost a full academic year,” she says.
Showing children how to be optimistic could even help them live longer. A study based on the analysis of millions of Twitter tweets and Facebook posts found that not smoking added seven years to a person’s life expectancy and regular exercise added three, but being happy was estimated to add another eight years to life expectancy.
Prof Seligman says one of the best things you can do for your child to spark positive feelings would be to help them to help others. “We’re wired to feel better when we help other people,” he says.
Another strategy he says is beneficial is to sit down every evening and write down three things that went well during the day, and why.
It is not just private schools who are reaping the benefits of the positive education movement; Ravenswood hosted principals and teachers from public, Catholic and private schools in the Upper Hunter recently to meet Prof Seligman. So far positive education has been rolled out to 20 schools, thanks to the work of the Where There’s A Will foundation, and the foundation has just launched it in a further 32.