The Thrive Approach

The Thrive Approach brings together four areas of research; neuroscience, child development, attachment theory and creative play. It supports children’s emotional development and builds resilience.

Think of emotional resilience as Jenga blocks. Our emotional resilience is tested all of the time; we lose our keys, our family pet dies, the car breaks down. Our reactions (how much our Jenga Tower Wobbles) will depend on how our stress regulation system reacts (resilience).

For children, life events also cause wobbles in their emotional tower; a new baby is born, a family member passes away, child starts school. Each event can cause an emotion Jenga block to pop out of the tower. Everybody’s tower wobbles.
 

With resilience, our towers may wobble a little, but with no resilience, towers may completely collapse.

The Thrive Approach looks at the interruptions in earlier emotional development and plugs these holes through meeting these needs in real time. By building the Jenga Tower from bottom up and ensuring the foundations are strong, emotional resilience is created.  And lives are supported and changed.

At St John’s we embrace the Thrive principle and support all of our children emotionally so that they will indeed ‘thrive’.