The Essex mother of two who champions mental wellbeing and is training to be a counsellor created KiddyCharts, a website that makes learning fun for children of all abilities.
When Helen Neale, 50, became a parent she noticed there was a lack of learning resources that her and her children could bond over.
Reward charts have been around for years, but the now mother of two wanted something that could “pique” the interest of her “high energy and strong-willed” children, offering something that they could “buy in to”.
That’s when Helen came up with the idea for KiddyCharts.
First established thirteen years ago with the intention to help her engage with her own children, it later “ballooned” as a platform to share things she had learned that worked with her kids, for other people.
“My children helped design the charts, we printed them out and then they were much more likely to stick with them,” Helen told Oh My Goodness.
“We talked about making it and then it [is no longer] something that you do to them and more something that you do with them and actually that was really important.”
The website provides free reward charts, colouring sheets, parenting tips, games, wellbeing exercises around bullying and a variety of competitions.
Recently KiddyCharts teamed up with publisher Quarto Kids to offer a free kids book club where they provide a free eBook every month to people who sign up.
“The eBook is worth about £7, but if you join the club, it is free and you get the chance to win a copy of the physical book. We give a few of those out every month to our members, as well them getting a new free eBook every month,” Helen added.
Helen emphasises the importance of wellbeing, not only because the book club focuses on wellbeing, but because she is training to be a counsellor.
“Positivity [and] good mental health habits are really important and I think they start basically from about zero.
“It’s about understanding yourself, what emotions are you having? What do they mean? You can have a number of different emotions at once. You can be sad, you can be happy. Being able to understand and have a name for those emotions from a really young age is actually really important.
“Emotions aren’t just about our brain, they’re about everything. The earlier you can instil that in children, the easier it is for them to understand growing up,” she said.
Alongside all the educational tools and resources on the KiddyCharts website, Helen works meticulously to ensure that all content is accessible for children of all abilities, especially those who are neurodivergent who Helen can relate to having learned that her two children are neurodivergent and so is she.
It is estimated 15-20% of the world exhibits some form of neurodivergence – including up to 10% who are diagnosed with dyslexia, 5% who are ADHDers and 1-2% who are autistic.1
“I think one of the greatest current issues is that we are failing our neurodivergent children and our adults.
“Most people don’t get diagnoses at the moment through the NHS for such a long period of time [and] a lot of them end up going privately and you’re having to pay then to find out. It’s a two-tiered system,” Helen added.
Neurodivergence has challenges that are largely misrepresented. The need for support can vary with every person. Unfortunately, due to a lack of widespread awareness within the health services, this gets missed.
Helen’s passion for knocking down the barriers and challenges that neurodivergent people face, knows no bounds.
Working for an ADHD therapy organisation called Headstuff ADHD Therapy and volunteering with mental health charity MIND, she says she wants KiddyCharts to continuously evolve and be able to “understand how neurodivergence can be supported”.
Helen is also selling a self-published colouring book with £1 from every sale going to the mental health charity MIND.
“There are 24 images in it and there’s an adult one and child one for every single one of the 12 animals that we feature and the idea is that it really just drives connection between an adult and a child.
“The idea is we have one more complicated one and one that’s a lot simpler and it could be and it has been used for this, for someone with dementia to use the slightly simpler one and the daughter or the son to use the other one.
“It’s to do [with] being in that moment with whoever it is that you’re sitting with and having that wonderful connection with the colouring, with the animal and with each other,” Helen said.
With over 10,000 parents on the KiddyCharts mailing list, Helen says she does not want to stop there in providing a platform that unites parents and their children together through education.
She mentions big plans to continue to progress that work and that she takes inspiration from an organisation called Genius Within, who support neurodivergent adults and the organisations that work with and employ them.
“It is [about] raising awareness. I’ve got a platform and so has ADHD Headstuff Therapy and I think that the point is [that] there are still many people that really don’t understand that neurodivergence is a different way of being and thinking. It’s all about the human being as a diverse individual. Our brains are all uniquely, and sometimes wonderfully different – let’s work with that and not against it,” Helen said.
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