At NiBS, the essential focus of all our initiatives has been to foster a secure, healthy and happy environment for our children. We have been conducting “Growing Up Years” (GUY) workshops for parents in order to help them deal with some of the challenges they face in bringing up their children. The ongoing COVID-19 situation has only added to the challenges for all of us, with the most important one being to ensure the physical and emotional well-being of our children. GUY workshops in this year were focused on this aspect. The workshops also provided the basic understanding of physical, cognitive and socio-emotional milestones, changes and challenges of growing up from preschool years to school going years and through adolescence. GUY workshops were also conducted for children, where experienced psychologists addressed concerns of different age groups and genders separately. All workshops dealt with issues of health, hygiene, safety, communication and mental well being.

GUY workshops for parents of Ankur-Pallav and Grade I-V were conducted by child psychologist and counsellor Ms. Jyotsna Bharadwaj on August 21, 2020 and August 22, 2020 respectively. Each session was centred around positive parenting, raising responsible and confident children, letting the child learn from failures, ways to foster creativity in children, building up child’s self esteem and faulty parent-child relationships. The session for the parents of classes VI to XII was conducted on August 22, 2020 by Dr. Amit Sen, Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist and Director and Co-founder of Children First, an organization working with mental health issues of children. Dr Sen spoke about how the growth in human brain is an important indicator of the change in the way children think and react to their immediate surroundings. He also discussed about the impact of the surroundings and the pressure it builds up for the children and how we all can act as facilitators to help them ease the pressure.

GUY workshops for students of middle and senior school were conducted in the third week of August, 2020 by Ms. Jyotsna Bharadwaj, while the workshops for students of Grade I-V were conducted section wise from August 28, 2020 to September 4, 2020 by the School Counsellor.

The workshops were highly interactive and were well received and appreciated by parents and children.