July 2017

14 APAC / July 2017 , HKB17007 Education Support Services Queenie Tan is Asia’s elite parenting coach, providing a wide range of education support services to a vast array of clients. The firmwas recently awarded the Best Parent Education and Support Services accolade, after whichwe invited teacher, parent and teacher trainer Queenie Tan to tell us more about the services she offers. Drawing on her vast experience in the market, Queenie Tan helps parents by teaching them applied child development psychology so that they will know how to ‘read’ their children’s cues, to interpret them accurately and to respond appropriately. She outlines how she came to enter this niche market and the key drivers behind her phenomenal success. “Personally, I believe that children have the natural drive to thrive and when their environment is compromised and is less than an ideal for them to thrive in, they will let us know, often in ways that look like misbehaviours, tantrums or being socially withdrawn. Prolonged exposure to these less than ideal environments often leads to childhood anxiety which affects the child’s learning, growth, ability to form meaningful relationships, resilience and their chance of living a happy, fulfilling and successful life. “My inspiration to be a parenting coach came about when I was lecturing and training in-service teachers at a local university here in Hong Kong. It was then that I started noticing more and more students who are enrolled in early childhood education courses, not because they wanted to embark on a teaching profession, but rather because they wanted to learn how to be better parents and to be able to understand their children better. I saw a shift in parents who are a lot more aware of the need to give their children a good head start in life during the formative years, so that they will have the skills to stand out from the crowd in an increasingly noisy and crowded world. “More interestingly, I’ve also noticed an increasing number of parents who are aware that the mainstream inclination of pushing academic work onto young children is causing them more harm, and that is mentally, socially and emotionally damaging to young children. The focus for early childhood education is shifting towards a more holistic approach of helping children develop a strong foundation in good character traits, high EQ, creativity and social skills which inevitably leads to the development of resilience, soft skills and happier people. It is also moving towards a more personalised approach that focusses on identifying every child’s very individual needs, skills and abilities so that they are able to thrive and stand out from the crowd.” She later became aware of a lack of high quality parent education services, which left parents inundated and confused by the plethora of random (often conflicting) information on the internet, and a sharp increase in children suffering from childhood anxiety and a rising number of childhood suicide cases in Asia. As such she started her business, and is keen to explain how she has been growing it to suit the ever-evolving needs of her clients. “Over the past 4 years, I have been carefully crafting, designing and running various parent mentoring courses where I have could incorporate my 16 years of preschool teaching experience, my Montessori classroom teaching and teacher training experience, and more than 10 years’ worth of lecturing and mentoring trainee pre-school teachers at universities. My approach is to teach parents of young children how to apply child development psychology within their home environment and to help them customise their parenting approach to meet their own parenting styles with their children’s learning styles and personalities. As such, I don’t teach tips! Instead, I share strategies which parents can use repeatedly by applying it to different situations, the most common ones being temper tantrums, teaching children to be respectful, internet safety, handling bullies, sibling rivalry, difficulty focussing and paying attention, teaching internal discipline, and preparing them for school. “As an educator, I know that for any kind of learning to be effective, a few conditions need to be met such as small group sizes, opportunities to develop skills vs. learning random info, and being with a community of like-minded learners. As such, I understand that my role is to provide small groups of parents with simple step-by- step strategies, to hold their hand every step of the way and to create a community of like-minded parents so that they can get the support that they need that is congruent with their new-found parenting skills. At the end of the day, I hope to help parents increase their parenting intelligence so that they will not only have the skills to deal with the daily challenges of handling their children’s tantrums and misbehaviours but also to use every one of these opportunities to help their children build a strong foundation for resilience, creativity and character development.” Overall, Queenie believes that this tailored approach is vital to the success of her business, as she proudly concludes. “My bespoke parenting programmes, mentoring sessions and mastermind groups are specifically tailored to meet the needs of parents with infants all the way up to the early teens, and it is designed to provide well- defined principles grounded in child developmental psychology, step-by-step instructions for the effective implementation of these principles and on-going support to help parents develop their Parenting Intelligence.”