Thrive approach
Every child needs to feel valued, involved and appreciated.
We know more now than ever before about what helps to develop healthy, curious minds and happy, confident and creative children.
If children have been emotionally thrown off track, either temporarily or over longer periods, Thrive helps us understand the needs being signalled by their behaviour and gives us targeted strategic and activities to help them re-engage.
What is the thrive approach?
Thrive is a specific way of working with all children that helps to develop their social and emotional well-being, enabling them to engage with life and learning. It supports them in becoming more self-assured, capable and adaptable. It can also address any troubled, or troubling behaviours, providing a firm foundation for academic attainment.
thrive help adults prepare children and young people for life emotional ups and down.
Based on neuroscience and attachment research, Thrive is a rigorous, targeted and measured approach to emotional and social development. It is preventative, reparative and pragmatic.
The training tools we provide helps children with differing, and sometimes challenging behaviour, to engage with life and learning.
How does Thrive work?
Children sometime exhibit behaviours that are challenging and disruptive, restless or withdrawn.
Current brain science shows that for many of these children, their stress management, emotional regulation and seeking/exploring systems are not yet sufficiently developed for them to access learning.
Thrive draws on the latest development in neuroscience, attachment theory and child development and identifies and targets chlidren’s underlying needs with creative and play based activities that develop emotional resilience.
Why use the Thrive approach?
Addressing the emotional developmental needs off children, the Thrive Approach:
- Builds resilience and resourcefulness
- decreases the risk of mental illness
- reinvigorates the learning process
- helps those children who are at risk of underachieving
- Help those at risk of exclusion stay in school and re-engage with learning
The Theory and Science
Our brains are hard-wired to ensure survival. Our instinctive reaction to any perceived threat is to fight, take flight or freeze. Behaviours that are linked to the fight, flight response include aggression, defiance and hyperactivity, withdrawal, disengagement, or over compliance.
Many children have not had the life experiences to develop appropriate stress regulation techniques. Their response systems are immature, leaving them with poor resilience and limited capacity to recognise and respond to threat appropriately. The role of adult is to help support the development of the stress regulation system as well as the impact of stress and trauma.
Our emotional state has a significant impact on the way we thin, act and learn. If our emotional regulation circuitry is inhibited by stress, our behavioural choices are limited.
The developmental strands
Thrive uses a simple model to illustrate how we all develop as human beings. The strands of emotional development are:
- being
- doing
- thinking
- power and identity
- skills and structure
- interdependence
As a child develops, each strand comes into play sequentially. Once strands are in place, they remain availablelable and open to growth and development throughout life.
Holes in our emotional development
The reality is that we all have holes in our emotional and social development. Sometimes life events return us to early places in our emotional development. with repeated ‘positive’ experience we can build resilience.
But if there is a ‘gap’ in some aspect of our emotional development our ability to bounce back from difficult experiences is compromised.
Thrive helps to identify those children where the gaps need to be filled and/or where strand development needs a helping hand.
An online screening tool is used to whole classes needs. This can then be used to design a suitable PSHE curriculum that can be embedded in all areas of learning to support the development of all children. The class screening tool will then identify any individual children who require additional support. Once children are identified action plans can be created to support the child’s needs providing enough positive experiences to build resilience. The online tool also enables children’s progress to be tracked creating detailed case studies.