One wouldn’t normally brag about being upstaged by a nine-year-old.
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But Associate Professor Kate Senior, from UOW’s School of Health and Society, couldn’t help but give her daughter Lily props for inspiring the creation of Life Happens Junior.
The educational game released earlier in June, enables young children to share their anxieties, work through the changes that may be happening in their lives, and conquer their fears in a safe, supportive environment.
The game follows on from the release two years ago of Life Happens, a board game aimed at encouraging conversations around sexual health in adolescents.
Both the adult and junior versions of the game use life-size bodies, or body maps, to guide their characters through relationships and issues.
But thanks to Lily’s intervention during a conference in Norway, being led by her mother, primary school students can now use the junior game to share and work though issues such as bullying in a fun, interactive way.
“I was discussing the original Life Happens at a workshop, and Lily was with me at the time,” Professor Senior said.
“She stood up in the middle of the workshop and said, ‘I want to make my own body map!’ And she started to create her own.
“She said this is what it is like to be bullied and this is what it feels like inside and this is how it feels when people call you names and this is how your body feels and this is what your mind feels like.
“It was a really profound moment because it allowed Lily to talk about experiences she had had with being bullied.
“It was interesting because she really responded to the method of the game, in which they discuss issues in a hypothetical way.”
Bullying was an important topic, but the kids were also keen to share the bully’s perspective, because they said no-one ever asks the bullies how they feel.
- Professor Kate Senior
Following this, Prof Senior, working with PhD student Laura Grozdanovski, enlisted the help of Lily and a team of children to create a version of Life Happens that would encapsulate the concerns and worries of their peers.
It was a revealing experience for the duo, who developed the original board game.
“It was fascinating working with the children to create the issue cards because we didn’t realise they felt such pressure. They felt pressure from their parents’ and their teacher’s expectations, but they were also worried about failing in front of their classmates,” she said.
“Bullying was an important topic, but the kids were also keen to share the bully’s perspective, because they said no-one ever asks the bullies how they feel.
“But they also wanted to talk about their parents, their siblings, what it feels like to fight with a friend.”
Researchers learnt children had few spaces where they could work through their concerns in a fun, collaborative way.
The game’s topics include dealing with divorce, fighting with siblings, how to cope with eating lunch alone or being left out of friendship groups, the death of a pet, and overcoming the pressure of a spelling test.
Life Happens Junior is aimed at students in grades three to seven.