James Preston, Author at Citywise

Make your Families Wishes Come True

(4-minute read) 2020. A new year and a new decade. The New Year brings the opportunity to reflect on the past year and on the future. We have discussed in other blogs how reflecting on ourselves and our experiences, as well as being aware of our desires for the future will motivate us towards growth! […]

How To Raise Strong Children

(4-minute read) Self Knowledge is one of the key foundational steps in our curriculum. It is important to know who we are, our strengths and development areas in order to know how we would like to grow, and who we would like to become. At Citywise we believe that we all have more strengths than […]

Our Kids are Kind!

At our After School clubs, we are currently exploring our virtues, ‘the things inside of us that make us better people’. The bread of butter of this is kindness. How often do we as parents find ourselves trying to persuade our children to be more kind? To share, to not hit, to use kind words. […]

An Easter Egg-stravaganza!

Spring Family Fun On Saturday 27th April 2019 we hosted our first Spring Family Fun event, and were delighted to welcome 20 local families to our Citywise Centre in Manchester! It was a massive success despite the seasonal weather, with lots of bouncing on the bouncy castle, baking chocolatey goodies, making junk kites and getting […]

Thriving Family Values

Certain values may have been drummed into us as children, “sit still at the table”, “Talk when you’re spoken to”, “Keep your room tidy”, “Your school work is important”, “Don’t give up, let’s try again,” “tell the truth”. Sometimes we may have rebelled against these or may see them as making us who we are […]

Growth Mindset: Setting our Children Free to Thrive

An experience with my daughter recently opened my eyes to the pressure children can feel to succeed, a feeling which I know all too well as an adult. It can be both a driving force and an extra stress in life. Whilst having lunch with friends, my daughter was drawing with her friend. I noticed […]

How to: Deal With Stress Purposefully

How do we respond when we are in high-stress situations? Our bodies react in certain ways: Fight, flight or freeze. This is to protect us from dangers, but in everyday parenting often the situations we are in aren’t necessarily dangerous to us or our child, yet we still react the same. At Citywise we know […]

What Means the Most to You?

In our day to day lives, it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture; food shopping, the school run, meal times and bedtimes, sometimes these things can become mundane rather than meaningful. But in fact, we are surrounded by meaning all around us; nature, work, moments of play and love in the […]

How to: Help Our Children With Self Control

One of the key things we focus on in our Citywise School Projects with the young people we mentor is Self-control. Our impulses are very much related to our emotions, that’s something that parents know altogether too well. Sometimes children can seem to be able to do very little about their impulses and their emotions, […]