Managing the situation

I have spent today delivering a training course to early years practitioners.  The course was about partnership with parents and getting parents involved in their children's learning.  Now this might seem a million miles from what we're experiencing just now but when we were discussing how to involve one particular parent in one particular setting things started to connect.  There were barriers to this parent getting involved but it seemed obvious to me that the nursery just needed to look at everything from a different perspective, think of different ways to approach the problem and keep at it until they found something that worked rather than getting frustrated because what they were doing wasn't working.  Then I stopped as I realised that it took me several months to get to the point where that happened in this house.  All the frustrations of the first few months crowded in on me but I also realised that we have done that and everything is so much better because of it.  Every single person is an individual and one size doesn't fit all which is why, if one strategy doesn't work (or one stops working), we need to look for an alternative.  And keep looking until life settles back down again.  It can be done and we should hold onto that thought.