Say it the way they were taught

A kid under pressure reaches for the words they drilled. If yours are different, they have to translate first, and translation is the step that fails.

Why the words matter

The course gives your kid a small set of phrases and uses them in every lesson, on purpose. The Dial, the Four Moves, the Emergency Order, the Two Questions. By the end they are not learning them; they are simply what those situations are called.

If at home you say use your gut when the course says check your dial, or run away and shout when the course says leave, be loud, your kid has to hold two vocabularies for one thing. Under stress they will drop one, and it may be yours. So use theirs. It costs nothing, and it means that when they say my dial went Twitchy at the table, you know exactly what you have just been told.

The Feeling Dial

Five settings: Fine, Funny, Twitchy, Scared, Angry. At this age it is used to read other people and situations, not only their own feelings. The question at home is where was your dial, and it works for the walk home, a message on a screen, or a grown-up who said something odd.

Two rules for you. Ask it about ordinary days, so it is not a big deal when the day isn’t ordinary. And never tell them their dial is wrong. Funny about a neighbour you like is still information, and if you argue with it once you will not hear it again.

The Four Moves

Say it. Leave. Be loud. Tell tonight. The first three are the kid’s. The fourth is shared, and it is the one the course pushes hardest, because telling is what kids skip and it is what actually works.

Your half of tell tonight is to make telling cheap. Say the promise out loud and mean it: if you tell me something, you are not in trouble for telling. Then keep it, including on the day the thing they tell you is that they broke a rule. The rule can be dealt with later. The telling gets thanked first.

The Emergency Order

Am I safe? Call. Do what they say. Write it down. Four questions, not an acronym, because kids remember questions. Your kid is taught to put their own safety first and that this is not selfish, to call rather than decide whether it is serious enough, to follow the operator, and afterwards to write four lines: what happened, when, what they did.

Alongside it they learn to message like an adult: first line says the thing. Water coming through the kitchen ceiling, I’ve turned off the tap, I’m in the garden. When you message them, do the same. Kids copy the shape of the messages they receive.

You will hear the Order used for things that are not emergencies at all, and that is fine. A kid who says I wrote it down about a broken plate has understood that the last step is the one everybody forgets.

The Two Questions

Do I have permission? Would I be happy telling Mum about this after? These two carry the whole curriculum and scale from six to fourteen. Swap in whichever parent or adult is the natural one in your house, and tell your kid which name it is.

Use them yourself, out loud, on small things. Would I be happy telling Grandma I did that? A kid who hears an adult run the questions learns that they are a tool, not a rule for children.

The two sentences

The door: nobody comes in. They can talk through it; they never open it. The phone: they can’t come to the phone right now — can I take a message? That is the whole script, and it is never that they are alone, to anyone. If you answer the phone that way yourself once or twice, you will find they copy it.

The reason for never that they are alone is worth saying to them once, plainly and without drama: it is nobody’s business who is in the house, and the sentence is true anyway, because the person can’t come to the phone. Write your household version of all of this on the card below and put it where the phone is.