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Success Helper Thinking - I'm Worthwhile Crocodile!

I wrote a post call BAD, Breaking Approval Dependence about a teachers journey to unconditional self-acceptance, where their own self approval eventually held sway over the need for others to esteem them.

They had identified their errant, irrational way of thinking about their self, challenged its veracity and began to rebuild the kind of healthy, rational, self that would hold them in good stead, unconditional self-acceptance. 

Our early childhood constructivists are making sense of the world they live in. Ideas about self are formulating in their young minds and what they believe about themselves or their self will impact their emotional and behavioural wellbeing now and into the future.

Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) and General Semantics (GS) theories are used in counselling practice, where the individual is called upon to examine the personal philosophies that inform what they do and how they emote especially in response to unsettling happenstances. 

If we bring these tools of psychotherapy into the early childhood classroom, we can help children learn to develop unconditional self-acceptance via the Have a Go Spaghettio! Success Helper approach to social, emotional, and behavioural wellbeing. I'm worthwhile crocodile thinking and believing is the early childhood version of unconditional self-acceptance.

For those children who present with attitudes and behaviours that indicate a tendency towards unconditional self-acceptance we can reinforce these healthy habits of thinking. For those who are developing ideas that there are conditions attached to their worth, we can help them to change these destructive habits of mind. 

Albert Ellis, who created Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, said the future of psychotherapy is in the school system. By applying REBT principles in daily early childhood teaching practice, via the Have a Go Spaghettio! pedagogy, we are doing exactly that.

As we do this, we are ensuring that our young learners develop healthy Success Helper/Brain Friend (rational) ways of thinking so that they will be less likely in need help to Break Approval Dependence in the future.

Have a Go Spaghettio! and Give It a Try Banana Pie!

 


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