WHEELS OF AWARENESS – MAKING SCHOOL GOODBYES EASIER

Written by Eve White 

The first weeks, or even months of school can be a difficult time of transition for many children, and their parents too. For some kids, it will be the first time they’ve been separated from a parent for five or six consecutive hours. Even for those who are used to day care, the transition to the new environment can be challenging with new people to meet and social interactions to negotiate, new routines, a different environment and different expectations. But often, the most difficult bit of all is saying goodbye to mum or dad in the morning. 

My oldest daughter struggled with school drop off in the first months of kinder – which here in Tasmania is the first year of (part time) school. She clung to me and cried in the morning; it was hard. But by some fortuitous fluke, I stumbled across exactly the right strategy to help her at exactly the right time. It worked like a magic trick.  

I remembered a book that I’d read a couple of years earlier: “The Whole Brain Child” by Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson that applies neuroscience to parenting in a practical way. One of the concepts the authors describe is the “wheel of awareness”, a way of helping your child (or yourself) to regain perspective and see the bigger picture when she finds herself focussing on a particular fear or worry.  

With the wheel of awareness, you envisage your mind as a bicycle wheel with a hub in the centre and spokes extending to the outer rim. The hub in the centre represents an inner place in the mind from which you are aware of everything that’s happening around and within you. It essentially represents the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that integrates the whole brain and makes the soundest decisions. The outer rim of the wheel represents everything that you can be aware of: thoughts, feelings, dreams, desires, fears, memories, physical sensations, and perceptions of the world. 

There are times in your life when you get “stuck” on a rim point, focussing on a particular fear, worry or anxiety-provoking thought, forgetting about all the other rim points (i.e. experiences, feelings, sensations etc) that make up your life. As a consequence, at these times, you experience unhappiness, anxiety or excessive worry and fear. One way of countering this is to pick up a pencil and create a wheel of awareness to bring your attention back to all the other aspects of your life, yourself and your experiences, which can help you regain perspective and balance. 

When I questioned my daughter about school, it became clear to me that the most difficult part of her school day was saying goodbye to me in the morning. The rest of the day, on the whole, was fun. My teacher friends assure me that this is the case for most children who have trouble letting go of their parents in the morning; they are generally fine for the rest of the day. This is reassuring to know, but it doesn’t necessarily make the goodbye any less heart-wrenching in the moment. 

One weekday morning – a morning that my daughter was saying she didn’t want to go to school – I suggested that we draw a circle, and divide it into segments. I adapted the wheel of awareness to suit a four year-old and ours was more a pizza of awareness, with each slice of pizza containing a picture that represents part of her school day. 

In each segment, I asked her to draw something that happened during a typical school day. We talked about it as she drew, and we ended up with six segments containing pictures of: painting / craft; her lovely teacher; good food for lunch; my daughter playing with her friends; picture books; and her saying goodbye to me in the morning. I asked her about each of these pictures: how did each one make her feel? She ascribed good feelings to each segment, except the one with a picture of us saying goodbye. We shaded each segment in either a “happy” or “sad” colour around the outer rim, sad being represented by blue, and happy by other colours. 

When I say it worked like a magic trick, it really did seem to elicit an instantaneous change in her outlook. When I pointed out to her that five of the six segments represented good, fun things and only one was sad, it was as if some switch in her brain clicked; she had discovered a whole new way of looking at things.  

Some kids take a comfort toy, an item to remind them of mummy or a picture of their family to school with them; my daughter asked if she could take the wheel of awareness in her pocket. And she didn’t actually need to look at it much – from that moment forward, the goodbyes were easier. 

Of course, as soon as you permit yourself a moment of smugness, thinking you’ve got parenting all worked out, the rules completely change with the next kid. My oldest daughter is fortunate to be a positive person by nature, as well as being quite rational; she wants to look on the bright side all the time and sometimes she just needs a little help. There is no guarantee that this magic trick will work for my younger daughter who starts school this year, or for your child. But it takes only a little effort to try and it’s a great tool to have up your sleeve not only for the start of the school year but for many other situations in life.