Thrive and Family Thrive
Helping young children
Thrive promotes children’s and young people’s positive mental health by helping adults know how to be and what to do in response to their differing and sometimes distressed behaviour.
Based on established neuroscience, attachment theory and child development, the Thrive Approach provides training and an online profiling and action-planning tool to equip adults with the knowledge, insights and resources needed to develop the relationships that help children and young people to flourish and learn.
To learn more about Thrive, click on the link below.
About Thrive
What is Thrive?
Thrive is a systematic approach to the early identification of emotional developmental need in children so that differentiated provision can be put in place quickly by the adults working most closely with the child. It is preventative, reparative, pragmatic and easy to use.
What are the guiding principals of the Thrive approach?
There are four guiding principles of the Thrive Approach:
◊ Every child is a unique person, constantly developing and learning in different ways and at different rates, each with his/her own abilities, talents and potential to be fulfilled.
◊ Children’s healthy development, emotional well-being and learning are crucially dependent upon, and promoted through, positive relationships.
◊ Children flourish when they are confident, self-assured, capable and resilient.
◊ Children thrive in enabling environments, in which their individual development, learning experiences and needs are understood, responded to and supported through strong partnerships with parents/carers.
What are VRF’s?
Attune: This is where you are alert to how they are feeling. You demonstrate that you understand the intensity, pitch, pace, volume, expansiveness or special experience of the child’s emotional state.
Validate: This is where you are alert to the child’s experience. This needs to happen before you move to help them regulate it. This is the beginning of being able to think about feelings.
Containment: This is where you demonstrate that you understand the pitch, intensity, quality of their feeling or mood and that you can bear it. This is where you show that you can take their deep distress, raging anger or painful sorrow and make it a survivable experience.
Catch it, match it and digest it by thinking about it and offering it back, named, in small digestible pieces. This builds trust for the child: in you, in adults and in the world. Soothe, calm, and stimulate: This is where you must be alert to how they are feeling and demonstrate emotional regulation by soothing and calming their distress. Catch it, match it and help the child to regulate the feeling up or down. They need to experience being calmed before they can do it for themselves. Thrive Practitioners are trained to use VRF’s and are happy to demonstrate them and encourage any staff member to use them too.
Does this approach reward bad behaviour?
When we realise a child has not had the appropriate experiences to learn how to do fractions, we provide additional reparative experiences to address that issue. Thrive is no different. It recognises that behaviour is communication (even if that behaviour is seen as ‘bad behaviour’) and helps adults to identify the gaps in children’s emotional development. Thrive provides the necessary information and skills to address those gaps. Emotional and social learning is essential and intrinsic to academic learning. Some of the activities suggested in the action plans are usually associated with children who are much younger and less able than the one being assessed. This is dependent on the outcome of the assessment. Many pupils require the experiences from their younger childhood to be re-visited to enable the pathways in their brain to become established.This can be observed as a “reward” when it is actually “therapy” for that particular child.
What are the benefits of Thrive?
Thrive teaches the understanding of children’s behaviour as communication, improves learning skills and leads to greater attainment. ◊ It promotes productive learning for all children. ◊ It creates practical strategies that can be implemented the next day. ◊ It supports and empowers, providing the confidence and competence to work with challenging and vulnerable children, and with parents and integrated teams. ◊ It leads to better relationships at home and in school. ◊ It provides ongoing support through a peer group of fellow trainees, Thrive-Online support tools and continuing professional development. ◊ The Approach is targeted, rigorous and measured.
What kind of behaviour does Thrive help with?
The Thrive Approach helps children who are, temporarily or more permanently, restless, withdrawn or underachieving as well as those with attachment issues or challenging and disruptive behaviours. Schools that have introduced Thrive report improved attendance, reduced classroom disruption, better educational attainment and fewer exclusions. Parents report significant improvements in their relationship with their children as well as improved behaviour. The children themselves say they feel better understood and they get more out of school.
