Why Self-Care and Renewal in
Schools? - Page 1 of 5
Given the crises we find ourselves and our children facing... we must ask ourselves, Shouldn't we be teaching these most essential life skills of emotional competence to every child--now more that ever? And if not now, when?
--Daniel Goleman, 1995
To this point, we have been focusing on ourselves and our needs so
far in this journey. That was an important step for us to take. The
self-care and renewal needs of educators is critical. If we don't do
a good job of caring for ourselves, it's going to become increasingly
hard for us to care genuinely for and extend ourselves to others. For
teachers, this may become a disabling condition. If we neglect our
own self-care for very long, we risk burnout. The longer we delay,
the more extensive becomes the process of renewal.
To understand the importance of teaching self-care skills to students, let's reflect for a moment on our own history with self-care. As infants, we are virtually totally dependent upon others for our well-being. Throughout childhood, we slowly gain more and more skills which allow us to feel independent. From the simplest act of feeding ourselves progressively toward more difficult motor and cognitive tasks, the gradual increase in autonomy is often rewarded and encouraged. As we go through the turbulence of adolescence, our desire for independence becomes far greater, while our lives become more complex in many domains. The increase in socialization and in meeting the demands of school, family, extracurricular interests, and, sometimes, a part-time job leaves us, perhaps for the first time, with too little time to do the things which we claim mean the most to us. Up to this point, we've not needed to know how to take care of our own mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual selves. If we have not been taught the skills to take care of ourselves, we likely fall into patterns of self-negligence. But where are we supposed to learn these skills?
As children, we believe what we witness, and when we observe
teachers modeling self-care habits, we come to believe that self-care
is important. If we believe self-care is important, we are likely to
be receptive to lessons about taking care of ourselves. Perhaps our
own difficulties with self-care came about because no one was there
to teach us about it when we were young. Now that we have learned how
to take better care of ourselves, it is our responsibility to share
it with others... other colleagues, friends, and our students.
Sharing will help them develop their knowledge and skills in
self-care and will help them learn vicariously from our experiences.
However, sharing will also help us understand ourselves better.
