There’s no such thing as a right answer to any working parent challenge. There are, however, answers that are right for each individual parent and their family.
– Harvard Business Review
Workparents - Parenting our future leaders
Supporting parents to be better leaders at home and at work
Workparents – Parenting our future leaders
The last few years, with many of us working from home, has forced an intersection between our professional and personal lives like no time before – the impact of which we are just beginning to understand. These shifting boundaries have placed a huge strain on working parents, and employers have an important role to play in supporting their employees in this area. There is a huge potential for a win:win here. Learning how to be an effective leader at home offers transferable skills, enabling more effective leadership at work. Ultimately, this programme is about creating balanced lives and fulfilled people at work and at home. This is a topical subject, as in July 2021 Harvard Business Review recognised this and released “The Workparent Toolkit: Essential Support for Working Parents.”
Talking Ape’s ground-breaking 4-stage programme offers working parents (with children aged 5-11) impactful solutions to ever-changing parenting challenges and priorities. Delivered face-to-face or virtually, using qualified social workers and cutting edge psychological research we create the psychological safety to ensure that parents feel open to talk and even more open to try new things.
This programme offers a well-rounded approach to developing self-awareness and leadership skills, at home and at work, drawing on ground-breaking research from the Harvard Center on the Developing Child, and well as recent work by the NSPCC in the UK.
The programme has four elements
Phase 1 Precourse and contracting phase. (Virtual or document.)
Phase 1: Pre-course and contracting phase
To ensure that each person gets the greatest benefit from the programme, there will be a brief virtual 1-2-1 meeting with the programme facilitators before the course begins. This will include a short questionnaire as well as an opportunity for delegates to highlight particular parenting challenges they might be facing.
Phase 2: Building strong brains (half day workshop)
Phase 2: Building strong brains (half day workshop)
This programme has been designed to support parents to support their children to build strong brains. We will create a safe space for leaders to explore challenges they may be facing in their own lives, and how these might be impacting on them as parents. There will also be space for delegates to reflect on their own childhood and what they may want to bring forwards and what they may want to leave behind. We will then consider four simple but powerful and highly effective tools to support healthy child development, and how these tools might also be applied in the workplace.
Phase 3: Experiments
Phase 3: Experiments
We believe in the power of experimentation – to take what we’ve learnt in the room and apply it to our lives. Parents will have 3-4 weeks to conduct “safe-to-fail” experiments and document their experience, which we will review together in the second workshop.
Phase 4: Building resilience and boundaries (half day workshop)
Phase 4: Building resilience (half day workshop)
After reflecting together on the experiments, delegates will explore the concept of resilience and how they might support their children to build their resilience. We will explore different types of stress, and the impact on brain development, before considering some more tools to support children to strengthen their brains and in particular, their ‘executive functioning’ – sometimes known as the brain’s ‘air traffic control’ system. The session will also touch on boundaries, consequences and choice theory, concluding by reflecting on how these tools might be applied in the workplace.