Tooled Up
We were delighted to welcome Dr Kathy Weston to speak to parents, Junior and Senior, to launch our new partnership with Tooled Up Education.
Introducing our new resource, Dr Weston highlighted the importance of ensuring that families and schools are aligned to enable children to reach their potential and thrive. The Tooled Up digital platform provides parents and staff with practical advice and evidence-based tips to develop pupils who are self-confident, self-sufficient and full of self-worth. Providing our whole community with access to Tooled Up helps to cement a ‘joined-up’ approach – a vital asset for our pupils.
During the launch event, Dr Weston took parents on a whistle-stop tour of some of the challenges parents face: from the management of young people’s screen time to the very real rise in cases of anxiety in girls and young women. She acknowledged that adolescence is a particularly exciting but also vulnerable time. She gave parents advice on how to be supportive in building resilience, encouraging parents to ‘catch’ them being resilient and asking the child to articulate how they managed. In this way, children can learn their own strengths and acknowledge their own successes, creating powerful reserves to draw upon in the future.
My aim is to empower you, so that the parenting journey becomes easier and more rewarding.
Dr Weston also encouraged parents to coach rather than to soothe their children when they feel strong emotions, pointing parents towards resources on the Tooled Up platform such as the ‘Coping Menu’ which empowers young people to choose, for themselves, how they are going to overcome the emotions they are feeling. She also reiterated the importance of parents spending quality time to connect with their children and cited psychologist John Bowlby, the pioneer of Attachment Theory:
If a community values its children, it must cherish its parents.
The session provided many other nuggets of fantastic advice, all of them eminently sensible and based solidly in robust research and advice from experts in their field. If you missed the webinar, you are strongly encouraged to watch the recording. Login details for the Tooled Up platform have been shared with our parents and we encourage further exploration of the resources available. A significant proportion of the material is prepared specifically for parents, including webinars, worksheets, and recommended books for further reading.
For our community, Tooled Up is already becoming a go-to source for advice; we are grateful to the generous support of the Junior School PTA and the Friends of South Hampstead (‘FOSH’) for making this possible. Read more about Tooled Up here.