There can be a lot of negativity around our children. We are living in a world where there is a lot of bad news and they are exposed to it a lot of the time. Newspapers, news programmes, even listening to the majority of people’s conservations, focusing on the negative and what’s wrong in the world, missing so much of what is actually good! If we as the adults get sucked into this we can influence them too, believing it’s hard to make a living, hard to find a job, hard to be happy. We need to set a good example and let them see we believe it is possible to experience good things and positive experiences. So often children are put off doing things because adults tell them, that won’t work, or you can’t do that. Working with a young teenage girl who wanted to study psychology at college, I found out she thought she couldn’t do that because she wasn’t clever enough. Her parents had told her she wasn’t, she wasn’t any good at academic subjects and she’d be better going into hairdressing, is what they said. Perhaps studying psychology would be a struggle for her, still encouragement is needed and a belief that our young people can do what they want to, when they put their mind to it, apply themselves and have self- belief that has served so many of our successful people. Belief, support and encouragement go hand in hand.
