If we want to meet their learning needs, we first have to meet their relational ones. The reality is simple: children won’t learn if they don’t feel liked.
Brains will always prioritise felt physical safety and felt relational safety over everything – over learning, solving problems, thinking about the consequences of their actions, thinking rationally or logically, connecting, making thoughtful choices – everything.
If we want children to be open to learning, they first have to be open to the adult they are learning from – and they won’t be open if they don’t feel seen, safe, and cared for. It’s not always easy, it’s just how it is.
A helpful question to ask is: Who at school would you go to if something went wrong? Who helps you feel better when you’re not okay? Who’s your favourite adult at school?
If your young person can’t answer this question confidently, it doesn’t necessarily mean there is a problem at school. Relationships take time, and kids aren’t meant to feel safe with every adult. What it means is that there is some work that needs to be done. What’s important is that someone is taking responsibility for building that connection, and that building the relationship is being prioritised. If this is happening, the felt relational safety will come in time.
Another foundational need that has to be met before children can fully engage in learning is ‘mattering’. Mattering is about feeling valued and feeling like I’m doing has meaning. It doesn’t have to come from grades or schoolwork, and for so many kids, it probably won’t. But it has to come from somewhere.
Too many kids are struggling right now at school, even those from loving, responsive families and in loving, responsive schools. Sometimes these struggles show themselves with a roar, sometimes with nothing at all.
Too many kids are feeling no sense at all that they matter. They don’t feel they are doing something that matters, and they don’t feel like they matter to others.
Too many of them will go weeks at school without hearing their name in a way that makes them feel seen, cared for, and valued.
Too many of them are showing up at school, but they are noticed more when they don’t, even if only by the unticked box beside their name.
For too many kids, we are asking them to show up when they don’t feel like they have anything to offer, or anything at all to show up for. Why wouldn’t they struggle?
For school to matter to children, they need to feel like they matter at school. If we want young people to be engaged, regulated, and able to learn, the mattering and the felt sense of being liked have to come from somewhere. None of us can ‘show up’ fully if we feel unseen, ‘tolerated’, or as though we don’t matter.
There are so many ways to help kids feel seen, cared for, and valued that have nothing to do with schoolwork, but which can work to engage them in schoolwork. Little things make a big difference.
We also have to let our teachers and school support staff know how much they matter. They are the greatest providers of ‘mattering’ in our schools and for our young people.
![It’s the simple things that are everything. We know play, conversation, micro-connections, predictability, and having a responsive reliable relationship with at least one loving adult, can make the most profound difference in buffering and absorbing the sharp edges of the world. Not all children will get this at home. Many are receiving it from childcare or school. It all matters - so much.
But simple isn’t always easy.
Even for children from safe, loving, homes with engaged, loving parent/s there is so much now that can swallow our kids whole if we let it - the unsafe corners of the internet; screen time that intrudes on play, connection, stillness, sleep, and joy; social media that force feeds unsafe ideas of ‘normal’, and algorithms that hijack the way they see the world.
They don’t need us to be perfect. They just need us to be enough. Enough to balance what they’re getting fed when they aren’t with us. Enough talking to them, playing with them, laughing with them, noticing them, enjoying them, loving and leading them. Not all the time. Just enough of the time.
But first, we might have to actively protect the time when screens, social media, and the internet are out of their reach. Sometimes we’ll need to do this even when they fight hard against it.
We don’t need them to agree with us. We just need to hear their anger or upset when we change what they’ve become used to. ‘I know you don’t want this and I know you’re angry at me for reducing your screen time. And it’s happening. You can be annoyed, and we’re still [putting phones and iPads in the basket from 5pm] (or whatever your new rules are).’♥️](https://www.heysigmund.com/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed-pro/img/placeholder.png)
My oldest child used to be so liked in the earliest years of elementary school. Everyone knew her name and wanted to be her friend. But slowly over the years things have drastically changed. She struggles to go to school. She is quiet. She puts her chin down and cries a lot. It’s hard for her to smile, laugh or notice the happy and positive of the day anymore. She has made statements of concern about wanting to be alive. And when she’s around other kids close to her age, it is rare now that she engages. She still cries about this last school year. She was the only quiet kid in her classroom and not one kid in her class clicked with her as a friend. She felt like she never found a friend. I have tried so hard to teach her coping skills, friendliness skills, and ever talked to her teacher on a few occasions in person. Yet, she seems so much more defeated. How do I help her? I don’t want to remove her struggles but help aid her through it.
I am reading the book Never Enough by Jennifer Breheny Wallace and she talks about Mattering as well. She emphasizes that mattering only because of grades or excelling in a sport or instrument is unhealthy. And that seems to be the only times kids feel like they matter.