 What practical tools can help children master assertiveness? That's what we're going to explore in this week's episode of Pukipondas. Let's dive straight in. Assertiveness is a vital skill for our children that can improve their communication, their conflict resolution, their self-advocacy and their self-esteem. Throughout this episode of Pukipondas I'm going to explore various techniques and practical exercises with you to help you support the children that you work with or care for to become more assertive. We're going to start with role-playing activities. Everybody's favorite. If I'm delivering a training session and I suggest to adults that we're going to do role-playing activities, well I just wouldn't do it to be honest because everybody hates it, but when we do with kids, a whole different story and we can have a lot of fun in the process. So role-playing exercises are interactive and dynamic tools that enable children to practice assertive communication in a safe and controlled environment. In these kinds of activities our children can take on different roles and explore different scenarios and they can explore various social interactions and experiment with their assertive responses. So it's completely safe. We've created a safe scenario for exploration through role-play and play. So some ways that we can make this work, we could use scenario cards. So we can create scenario cards with different social situations and have children take turns playing out each scenario practicing their assertive communication and you can change this up a little bit by doing it assertively versus doing it angrily versus doing it non-assertively versus you know doing it in different ways, but practicing what this scenario feels like when we do it assertively and feeding back to each other. Another idea, we can have peer partners. So here we pair our children up and we ask them to have conversations in an assertive way, so they role-play assertive conversations. One takes on the role of the assertive communicator and the other one takes on the role of listener, which is actually a really important role as well. Next we can try storytelling. So we can use our storytelling to describe assertive interactions in a more narrative form, put them in the context of a story, use some characters, make it fun and we can also encourage children to create their own assertive stories that can be done through speaking and indeed also through play with characters and so on. Next we can act out scenarios. So we might set up a little like mini assertiveness theatre where our children can act out scenarios that they've actually encountered in real life and then we can help them to brainstorm and practice different assertive responses. So in particular if they're reflecting on something that's happened and they wish they would have been able to respond differently, we set up our little mini assertiveness theatre. We step into character, put on the mask because that can make it feel a little bit safer and then we go, what if? What if I'd acted this way? What if I'd said this? What if I did this? And then finally we can have real life practice. So where we actually encourage our children to identify real life situations again where assertiveness could be applied and then role play out those scenarios with them. So other than reflecting, we're looking forward thinking about times when we could be assertive, when it would be beneficial and acting them out, practicing, making it feel safe to use those skills in real life because we've already been there, we've already done that in a safe space with a safe adult. So that's role playing. We move on next to eye statements, the eye statements technique. I mentioned eye statements in a recent episode and had some lovely feedback from some of my listeners on it so I was going to explore some other eye statements today and thinking about these is a means for assertive communication. So the eye statements technique is a communication tool that's used to express our feelings, thoughts and needs assertively whilst maintaining respectful and non-accusatory language. This technique is super valuable when we're teaching children how to effectively communicate their emotions and desires in various situations. When someone uses an eye statement, they structure the message in a way that focuses on their own feelings and needs rather than placing blame, shame, accusation on the other person. This kind of creates this like non-confrontational space for expressing ourselves and addressing our concerns. So what does that actually look like in practice? So an eye statement generally will have like three parts. So you've got the eye part. So we start quite simply using the word eye. This enables us to take ownership of our feelings. So I might say I feel, I think, I believe rather than you. So we're starting with eye. So that's the first part. The next part is the feeling part. So in this bit we're kind of identifying and expressing our emotions. So I feel frustrated. And then we have the cause. So we're going to explain why. We're trying to describe, explore what's going on for us here. So we're going to describe the situation or the behavior that triggered these feelings to provide a bit of context for the feelings, for the emotions. So for example, I feel frustrated when, fill in the gap, I can fill in the gap with many, many things there. So that's your eye statement. And we can practice these and explore them with our children. The thing is that these are super helpful. It's going to let our kids and great for adults to express themselves assertively, letting them communicate their feelings and their needs without resorting to that blame, that shame, that accusation. So it's going to promote like empathy, understanding and problem solving so that others can actually respond a little bit more positively. So we're much more likely to have a productive conversation rather than one that kind of degenerates into kind of anger, frustration or conflict. So like, for example, instead of saying, you never listen to me, it's your fault, I'm upset. A child might say, using their eye statements, something like, I feel upset when I'm not heard during our conversations, can we talk about ways to make our communication better? That feels a little unlikely that a child would put it in quite those terms, but you get the idea. So instead of you do this, you've got this wrong, it's your fault, I feel this way, can we please? So we use our eye statements, we're trying to look for problem solving, constructive conversations here using our eye statements, owning it rather than showing blame and putting it on the other person, which just tends to cause blow ups and conflicts. So if we want to practice this, and it will take a little bit of practice because it feels a bit weird at first, we can do a few different things. So we could use feelings cards. So we could provide children with feelings cards that displayed various emotions and then ask them to create eye statements related to each emotion. We could use daily journals, we could encourage our children to keep daily journals where they write eye statements about their feelings and experiences that day, just to get them used to the idea of owning those feelings, giving them the eye treatment I feel each day, we can have a bit of a role reversal. So we go back to our role play, and we can have our children role play scenarios where they use eye statements to express their feelings and then switch roles to practice listening and responding empathetically. So they get to practice both saying the eye statements, but then also to see how that feels as a listener. And again, you can switch that up a bit by practicing also what happens when we go back to our you and our accusatory type statements and how different does that feel in both roles. We can do a little bit of conflict resolution practice. So when conflicts do arise, we can guide children to use eye statements to express what it is that's bothering them. We can use this to create a safe and assertive way to kind of address issues. So kind of in real life as it's happening, having already previously explored eye statements, we might say, I can see that you're really frustrated right now. Can you use your eye statements to tell me a little bit about how you feel? And we can try and find a way forwards together with this. And then finally, we can use positive feedback. So teaching children to use eye statements to give positive feedback and express appreciation. So reinforcing the positive aspects of assertive communication. So it's not always I feel and then enter the negatives, the doom, the gloom and all the difficult things. But also we can use it to say, I feel good and positive things use this to share positive feedback with peers, with parents, with staff as well. And this can be an important thing to begin to explore, because sometimes when we're thinking about things like assertive communication, we tend to assume it's all about overcoming hurdles and barriers, but we can be very sort of positive in our assertive communication too. And that takes a little bit of bravery as well, like being assertive in saying the nice things rather than them just being on our head being like, I'm going to be brave and I'm going to tell the person that compliment, that praise, that good thing I want to share with them is not always easy. So let's go there too. Next, let's have a think about body language and assertiveness. We couldn't talk about assertiveness without a little bit of thinking about body language, because body language plays a really significant role in assertive communication. It encompasses all the nonverbal cues such as facial expressions, gesture, posture and eye contact. Teaching kids to understand and use appropriate body language is really helpful, because it can greatly impact how their messages are received by others during assertive interaction. So this is tricky for some of us. So our neurodivergent facet of the community here, we don't necessarily read and understand facial expressions and body language quite so well. But if you teach us, we will learn better and we can begin to hack it. And we can begin to understand as can everybody that if I stand in a certain way or behave in a certain way, then it will be interpreted in this way. And also understanding other things like when you stand there with your arms crossed and your face looking grumpy and wrinkled, then even if you're really happy and you're open to communication, people will think that you're not. So we need to just think sometimes about consciously checking in with ourselves and repositioning our facial features and our body sometimes in order to convey the message that we actually want to. So some practical ideas for exploring body language is the mirror game. So we can play the mirror game where we put children in pairs and they take turns actually mirroring each other's body language. We can do this between parent and child as well if you're doing at home. And we would just really encourage the awareness of the nonverbal cues here like a kind of clue blinding game. Like what are we noticing about our body language? And we might give some prompts here about, you know, looking angry, looking excited, for example. So these are different feelings to prompt those expressions and see what they might look like and explore together how those different things might look and feel. We can do a bit of video analysis. So we could show children videos of assertive and non assertive body language and discuss the differences helping children to identify some of the cues there. You can use anything here. Use the kid's favorite TV show in order to do this, something that's going to actually engage them and then get curious about the different characters. Notice when people have assertive body language and just generally look for those body language cues and see what they can pick up on and what you've picked up on too. Charades. You could do like a modified game of charades where our kids act out assertive and non assertive scenarios using only body language can be fun. Or we can go back to role play role play with props. So using props like masks or puppets or other kind of toys and things to engage children in role playing body language in just a kind of fun and interactive way. This can work particularly well with younger children. And then finally we can do a bit of like a personal space exercise here. So we can teach children about personal space boundaries and some of our children will need that personal space more than some of their peers. And so this could be particularly helpful for them. I'm one of them. And we can practice different assertive ways to communicate discomfort if those boundaries are being crossed. That's going to be about you exploring with a child in your care. What are ways that feel comfortable to them to let other people know that they don't want them in their space rather than what we sometimes end up with just pushing away or suddenly exiting? What are some assertive ways that we might be able to with our body language communicate? No, this isn't OK for me right now. Next we're going to step into self advocacy skills. This is a bit that I feel really passionate about because I do so much work with our neurodivergent children and young people. And one of the things we were thinking about in a previous episode, which triggered this episode, thank you for the suggestion from one of my patrons, was thinking about for our neurodivergent youngsters helping them to identify some of the adjustments and things that can help them and then being able to assertively communicate these are the things that will help me. Please will you help me? And this is amazing if we can get it right. It's something I still work on every day as an adult. It's difficult to advocate for yourself. But if we start with our children when they're young, we give them permission and the skills to self advocate. Hopefully they'll find this journey on and up through a little bit easier than perhaps some of us have done. So self advocacy is the ability to assertively and effectively communicate our own needs, preferences or concerns in various different situations. It's going to empower our children and adults to speak up for themselves to make informed decisions and take an active role in their own lives. So how are we going to do this? How are we going to teach this? So first of all preference sharing. We can encourage children from a really early age to share their preferences to let them own what they think what they feel. So for example their favorite foods or activities by using I prefer statements. Actually letting them own that rather than telling them what they like. And this is something just to watch out for particularly with younger children. Sometimes as the parent, the carer, the adult in the room we tell people she likes this he likes that. Actually maybe let's encourage the child to own this themselves and tell us what they like. I discovered just a few years ago but many years into the relationship with my husband that he prefers white wine. And I remember the moment I discovered this quite vividly. We were out with one of my very dear friends, Carol, who I've known if it's slightly longer than I've known Tom, but both of us have known him for many, many years by this point. And he said this preference for white wine and we just looked at each other and went, we thought you preferred red. And it just came to mind right now that you know I've known him for a dozen years or more at that time and didn't know his preference when it came to wine, which feels like a little bit of a worry. So I've clearly got some work to do here on making sure that other people can own their own preferences and make them known. And we can encourage our children to do the same rather than assuming and stating their preferences for them. Nothing we can do here choice boards. So we can create choice boards for children to practice making assertive choices and to foster independence and self advocacy. So giving them the opportunity to choose between different things. And again, that might be about foods, that might be about activities, that might be about what they're going to wear, could be about anything, but creating choice boards with limited choices when we give children unlimited choices that can feel scary and too much, but a choice between black and white, a choice between busy and still that kind of thing might feel a little bit more possible, let them choose for themselves. Next, we can think about problem solving scenarios. So presenting children with scenarios where they need to advocate for themselves. So create a scenario, real life type scenario, and guide them through the process of finding assertive solutions. This kind of problem solving role playing type scenario can be especially helpful when we're preparing for things like joining a new class or club or being with new people, thinking specifically about how will I make my needs known here, what are good, polite, engaging ways of having these conversations that will help people to help me. And building on that, we can do role play with authority figures. So having children role play scenarios involving specific authority figures, thinking about teachers and coaches in order to practice the self advocacy in respectful ways and ways that are like very much in line with what might be expected of and hoped for of them from schooling in those various activities because we need to tread the line really carefully here. Our children need to learn to self advocate, but they also need to play the game and be able to communicate in a way that is well received. They're much more likely to have their needs met and have people make the adjustments, for example, that they're asking for, if they're able to ask in a way that engages well the person they're talking to and which is seen as respectful. So proactive is okay, but disrespectful is not. And sometimes those two can kind of go unfortunately together. So let's practice getting that right. And then finally advocacy letters. So we could teach our older children to write assertive advocacy letters when they encounter issues or concerns, which can provide a bit of a written outlet for their needs and allow them to really get it all out. Again, trying to make sure that we're proactive and positive and respectful in those communications, but this can be a really good way to begin to explore what's going on and perhaps to make a start on making things change. Next, we're going to touch in on some conflict resolution skills. So conflict resolution skills refer to the ability to address and resolve disagreements, disputes, conflicts in a constructive and assertive manner. Oh, key skill for life. And again, one that I'm a lifelong learner of don't always get this one right does anybody. But if we can teach our children from a young age how to navigate conflicts effectively, and then that's going to be really helpful for their social and emotional development. So we can do this in a whole variety of different ways. So for example, we might use a conflict resolution wheel. So here we'd create like a visual conflict resolution wheel with steps like state the problem, listen, brainstorm solutions, agree on a solution, and use this as a guide during conflict discussion. So this is something we would agree ahead, we would work out what our steps would be, what feels comfortable for us and the child. And then we would revisit if we have these type of conflict conversations, having it kind of created in a sort of visual form that we can revisit, and then being able to explore this with a child in the safe scenario will mean that they're able to kind of pick up the skills that they learn here and apply them elsewhere. And they don't have an adult with them who has written the conflict resolution wheel with them. But having practiced with you many times, they're more likely to be able to use those skills. And we can do problem solving sessions. So we can host a problem solving session where children would come together to discuss common issues and collaboratively find assertive resolutions. Kids can be really brilliant here. So if one child, maybe anonymously or maybe not, comes up with a problem and it's shared amongst a group, children are very, very good at suggesting different ways that we might approach this problem. And we really want to focus here on respectful, assertive solutions to this conflict or problem. And in creating a safe environment for children to explore where ideas are all heard, but where we can respectfully disagree sometimes or suggest a different direction is really, really crucial here. Back to role play, we can do conflict resolution role play. Of course we can. It's all about role play today. So we can encourage our children to role play conflict scenarios and practice assertive communication to resolve them. And again, we can do this based on imagined future interactions or on actual interactions that have happened in the past. We might role play what happened, what we might do differently and have ideas about how to deal with it well in the future. We can do conflict resolution mediation. So we can appoint a mediator when conflict arises, teaching children to use assertive communication techniques to mediate disputes. This can help having this kind of third neutral party involved in discussions. And equally when children get the opportunity to practice being the mediator in some of these discussions sometimes, it can help them to see conflict type conversations from a different point of view, which can again impact on the way in which they handle conflict in the future. So that can be an interesting thing to explore. And then finally we could try a peer conflict journal. So we provide conflict journal for our child where they'd write about conflicts that they've experienced and reflect on their assertive responses and think about possible solutions in the future. So this is giving them space to reflect on things that have happened. Think about the things that are worrying them. Think about the difficult interactions that they've had. Reflect on what has gone well, what has been assertive, what has been positive, but also reflect on what might happen differently another time. And then finally we're going to think about our emotional regulation techniques that our chest starts. So emotional regulation and the ability to recognize, understand and manage our own emotions effectively. It's really important when it comes to assertive communication because having good emotional regulation will enable children to express themselves assertively without becoming overwhelmed by intense emotions. So practical ideas for trying this out, emotion charades. So we can play emotion charades to help children recognize and express their feelings assertively through their body language. Being able to name those feelings enables us to be able to tame them. So this kind of dovetails with some of the other stuff that we thought about earlier about being able to own those statements. I feel let's recognize them. Let's have a look at what that looks like and act it out together. A feelings thermometer. We can use a feelings thermometer to help children identify their emotional intensity. So how far up the scale are we and practice assertive ways to communicate based on their emotions. So how am I going to communicate when I'm at eight on the anger scale? What's that going to feel like? What could that look like for me? What are the things that I need to do in order to rein that in to manage it so I can make my point well? And again, these are skills for life, not just for children. I can remember having to explain to Lyra how when she would have a challenge at school, I'm thinking of one particular incident but there were many, how actually when she would call me and ask for help or sometimes the school would call me and ask for help with regulating the situation, that often the things that were happening would make me feel really angry. This is my child and she doesn't feel safe and things aren't going well would generally be the feelings that would be going around for me. And that would make me very, very angry. However, I knew that in order to get the best out of the scenario to help my child to regulate, to enable the school day to continue off for her to exit, but still be welcomed back the next day, that I would need to handle that situation calmly, in control, positively, proactively, and certainly not do what came to me most naturally in those moments, which would be just to shout and scream and rant and rave. And I remember having these conversations with Lyra saying, when I feel like that, what I want to do is shout and bash their heads together and tell them off, but that's not going to help you, that's not going to help me, it's not actually going to help anyone. So we need to really exercise big emotional regulation in those moments to bring those feelings down, to rein them in and to communicate in a more effective way to get what we need. One little caveat I would say there is when we do that, it's essentially like a form of masking and it can be quite tiring. We need to give ourselves space, time, permission to explore those feelings afterwards and have a bit of an outlet for them. So you might need to go off and actually work through those big feelings. For me, I'd often go for a climb or a run or something physical like that, just to allow those feelings to work through, otherwise they'll tend to fester and hold you tight and not feel good at all. Beginning about emotion coping strategies with our children, so teaching them various strategies like deep breathing, counting to 10 before we speak, taking a break when they feel overwhelmed in order to use these things during assertive conversations. One thing that I often teach to teachers is if we're finding that we feel overwhelmed and particularly if we begin to feel angry about what's going on in a conversation with a child, that actually just turning away for a moment, taking a breath, reminding ourselves that we've got this and turning back can make a really big difference. That's one I use as a parent as well because we want to be that cool, calm, collected, in control adult. We are the adult in the room at the end of the day and sometimes we just in need a moment to take a breath, to collect ourselves, to gather our thoughts so we can be the adult that the child needs at that moment. But these similar skills can help our children as well when they feel those feelings about to bubble over the deep breathing, counting to 10 before we say something we might regret. These things can really, really help. We can use emotion cards, making emotion cards with different pictures of different emotions or maybe using emojis and asking children to select the cards that match their feelings during assertive interactions. So one of the things I love here is what's called chatty's card, C-H-A-T-E-E-Z. These were created by a social worker called Natasha who is brilliant. The cards are amazing. You can get big ones and you can get little ones that you carry around on a key ring. They're essentially emoji cards and they represent so many different feelings and have been co-created with children. A child who's maybe not able to tell you how they feel can often show you using these kinds of cards. I would highly recommend that my children carried little copies of them around with them when they were still going to school in order to be able to show people how they felt when they didn't feel able to tell them and it made a really big difference. Finally we can go back to our journaling, love a bit of journaling and have a bit of a feelings journal. So encouraging children to keep a feelings journal where they write about their emotions before and after assertive communications is going to help them track their emotional regulation progress. So were they able to regulate their feelings during that conversation in a way that they felt proud of? Was there anything that they needed to feel differently? What went well? What didn't? Just a bit of space for reflection here can be really helpful and it doesn't have to be completely directed like that. Your kind of feelings journal can be less directed and it might involve things like drawing as well as writing but a place to reflect, to recognise our progress, to understand the things we think we might be able to do better but also to notice the things that we're really proud of that we managed to do well is really important and even when conflict arises and the result is perhaps not a situation that the child might be proud of it can actually be very helpful to look back into there and say was there anything that did go right there? Was there anything that you were proud of? Because sometimes what happened was the child was managing up to a point and then they weren't and we can explore that point and that's important but let's understand what was going well at the beginning and then ultimately what calmed them back down and got things to a point of resolution afterwards and what can we learn from that? Just being reflective, being curious, exploring all the time can really help us tap into what works and what doesn't for a child, where their current strengths and challenges are and what steps we might be able to take together in order to start to move this forwards. Okay so I hope you found this episode of Pookie Ponders insightful and inspiring. These assertiveness skills are a gift that our kids will carry with them throughout their lives as I've alluded many times in this episode these are things I still work on every day and I'm sure the same is true for you as well it's going to enable our children and ourselves to communicate freely and effectively to build strong relationships and just generally to navigate the ups and downs of life with confidence which is something we would all aspire to and if you liked what you heard today please subscribe and share my work. You can support my work further by joining me over on Patreon where you get early access to all my resources and the chance to influence what I work on next or you could invite me to come and give a keynote talk at your next event or in your setting or you could ask me to do a webinar for you equally. Thank you so much for listening today and for everything that you are doing for the children and the young people in your care it really really matters this has been Pookie Ponders with me Pookie Nightsmith until next time stay curious stay compassionate and keep pondering over and out.