A PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR PARENTS
& EDUCATORS DURING COVID-19
RESILIENCE NOW FOR PARENTS
JULY 2020
WE ARE RESILIENCE NOW FOR PARENTS
an international collective of wellbeing-in-education specialists that includes teachers, psychologists, coaches, researchers and parents with over 275 years of combined experience. We have come together to offer guidance to parents on how to support the social and emotional needs of their families during this challenging time.
SInce March we have been offering weekly tips via our website ResilienceNowforParents.org and posting them along with weekly live, open dialogues on our Facebook page.
We know both from research and from our own lived experience as parents and educators that in order for children and teens to be able to focus and learn well they need to feel safe and supported by the adults around them -- physically, socially, psychologically and emotionally.
This eBook has been prepared by our collective to help parents prepare for their children returning to classes as schools begin to reopen in various ways amidst the continuing COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
Our intention is to offer practical and actionable tips that parents, grandparents, and others raising children and teens can use to boost their family’s well being. We hope educators will find our tips useful as well. Our recommendations are drawn from findings from the science of flourishing and evidence-based practices in the field of Positive Psychology.
We recognize that every school district has its own way of reopening school buildings in terms of timing and rules. We also realize that these guidelines and decisions may be fluid depending upon the prevalence and community spread of virus cases in a particular country, community, county, system, state or region. Some schools may even be offering hybrid learning opportunities where students can be in a school building for in-person learning part of the day or week, and take classes virtually for the remaining class time. Some parents may have the option to not send their children to their school building at all, and do learning virtually - sometimes called remote or distance learning - exclusively.
At the time of this writing, there are continued deliberations about how and when school buildings will and should reopen as school leaders consult with medical professionals, educators, and families, in order to make decisions about how best to serve students, teachers, administrators, and staff. We recommend that you check often with your child’s school and local school district for continuing updates.
If you are still making the decision on whether to send your child back to in-person classes, please see our 'Questions to Consider' section to help you think things through. We hope that all stakeholders in education from parents to teachers and from educational leaders and staff members to students will find our tips useful in helping to successfully transition back to school, whenever, wherever, and however that may be.
We wish everyone well.
