Paying attention: Home and school values

Home and school environments play pivotal roles in influencing children’s behaviour.
This is according to Consultant and Social Worker, Koren Norton.
“In terms of the home environment, the main thing that we have to remember when we’re raising children, is that children learn mostly from what they see… the children look at us and learn how to handle anger… how to deal with persons that upset us,” Norton said.
She added that “aggression and violence” are sometimes “learned behaviour” that can be taken into schools.
 “We need to teach them [children] from early about sharing, about compassion, about knowing when to walk away from situations, about turning the other cheek,” the social worker explained.
Norton also stressed the need to address situations before they happen.
She highlighted that it becomes difficult when parents go into schools to bicker with teachers who would have disciplined their children.
She explained that “it has to start somewhere… teachers need to be good role models… we all need to be good role models.”
With respect to individual incidents at schools, Norton said the public school system has many more students than private schools, so it’s expected that more incidents would happen in the public system.
She also highlighted that policies at private schools are different to those of public schools as she noted that private school students are required to pay tuition fees and the tolerance for violence is lower in private schools.
“They [public schools] tend to be more lenient because they’re handling [the] majority of the nation’s [school-aged] population,” Norton said.