Our monthly e-newsletter is packed with information for parents and educators of tween-aged girls.
Tween Tribe mission: At Tween Tribe, we turn cliques into communities; celebrate the best in each girl; and create a circle of Tribe sisters who learn tools for life. Our mission is to help girls understand their own emotions, trust their inner wisdom, and learn how to create authentic, nurturing friendships. Our curriculum includes original stories written by us for Tween Tribe, circle sharing, performance and movement, and creative arts. Tween Tribe is owned by The Tween Scene LLC.
Parent Tribe mission: Parent Tribe is a an e-newsletter for parents and educators. Its mission is to share our research and observations with parents and caregivers of tweens (whether in our groups or not) to increase positive interaction between adults and tween-aged children. Parent Tribe is available free to all. We hope the insights shared here will enhance communication and understanding.
Why Tween Tribe is vital
The tween years, now defined as 6-12, are crucial years for our girls. Their academic and extra-curricular lives are exploding. And, unlike previous generations of tween girls, they’re blitzed by media messages promoting sophisticated fashion, makeup, “attitude,” and self-esteem based on popularity. The sad fact is that among tween girls nationwide depression, sexually risky behavior and eating disorders are on the rise.
Our girls desperately need help. They need an opportunity to explore their social and emotional challenges. They need to learn how to trust their inner voice and how to create friendships that are supportive, not toxic. They need the wisdom of adults.
Each month, the girls explore a theme, such as: how to create true friendship, how to express anger, how to cope with rejection, how to feel good about our bodies, and how to project a great self-image.
Meet the Leaders
Sarah Suatoni and Macdara MacColl bring 40 years of combined experience in the arts, community building and mind-body therapy.
Sarah Suatoni, President, The Tween Scene LLC, holds a BFA in Dance from the Julliard School and an MA in counseling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She worked for many years as a dancer, choreographer, and movement teacher in New York City. Sarah's choreography combined storytelling and dance to explore psychological themes. She has taught movement ranging from gymnastics and dance to fitness, and movement mediation for 25 years. Sarah has spent years investigating the mind body interface through her study of dance, yoga and various healing techniques.
Sarah began leading psychotherapy groups during her clinical internship at Goldwater Memorial Hospital. Leading groups slowly became an area of expertise. She became committed to the belief that we can affect great change through group processes and by working in community. Sarah is hired to lead groups and act as a consultant specializing in the interface between psychology and the body. Recent work includes holding an advanced position of on the Hellerwork faculty, consulting for Enact (a drama therapy group that works in inner city schools), and working with Kari Henley of Gather Central leading woman's groups.
In addition to her MA, she is a certified Hellerwork practitioner, and has a private therapy practice on the Connecticut Shoreline and in New York City. Her work combines talk therapy, movement instruction, and deep-body tissue work. She treats adults, couples, and children for both chronic pain and emotional stress.
Sarah ran a center for movement and bodywork in New York City for 15 years and recently moved to Killingworth, Connecticut with her husband and their two daughters, one dog and four cats. Their home is also the site of the Pondhawk Retreat Center.
Macdara MacColl, Executive Director, The Tween Scene LLC, has spent her professional life working in the field of communication. She holds an MFA in Theater from the University of Alabama/Alabama Shakespeare Theatre conservatory program. After working in professional theater, she moved into publishing by serving as Managing Editor at Theatre Communications Group where she had the great pleasure of working with such playwrights as Tony Kushner, Athol Fugard, Edward Albee and Steve Martin. Her short stories have appeared in several literary journals and she has contributed theater reviews to several newspapers.
She became fascinated by the possibilities presented by the Internet and moved to iVillage, where she spent four years. She spearheaded iVillage's interactive community development. Working to build early online communities, Macdara realized the profound need for community in the lives of over-scheduled Americans. In recognition of her extraordinary work in the arena of online community, Vinton Cerf invited her to serve on MCI's Safe Surfing Workshop series, one of the early parent education efforts on Internet safety for children. She also served on the Markle Foundation's Email For All advisory panel. She has been a featured expert at many conferences and in many articles, including in Fast Company, Washington Technology and The New York Times. She was a keynote speaker at the White House in 1997, sharing the podium with then IBM CEO Louis Gersnter, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.
Later Macdara consulted with The Basex Group, serving as senior analyst in charge of community programming. In this capacity, she conducted industry-leading research in the area of virtual community building and its impact on business. She lives in Madison, Connecticut with her husband and their wonderful tween-aged daughter and twin boys.
Curriculum
The Tween Tribe curriculum is designed to teach girls social and emotional skills and insights. We offer the girls both techniques and insight tools.
Our original stories present a difficult situation and then, through the intervention of various magical creatures, the girls discover tools to deal with the challenge. The curriculum is reinforced through fun arts and crafts activities, like creating Wisdom Boxes and Life Masks. In addition, we use movement to explore the ways feelings reside in our bodies. Through dance, yoga, and performance, the girls get in touch with how it feels to be shy, assertive, scared, brave. They practice social skills and learn how to feel their feelings fully, so they can let them go and move on.
Our curriculum themes are:
- Social
- Community , not cliques
- Tribe sisters
- Respect, Compassion and Empathy
- All girls want essentially the same thing
- Respectful behavior towards adults and peers
- We can use our own pain to have compassion for others
- Techniques for making friends, getting along
- Emotional
- Understanding self
- We all have complex emotional lives
- Our emotional experiences happen both in our mind and our body. Feeling emotions in our body helps us to understand them and release them
- You are not a label or coping strategy (whiney, bossy).
- You are not alone – all people want essentially the same thing
- Expressing self appropriately and fully
- Once we understand and feel our emotions fully, we can respond, instead of react, in difficult situations
- Strong emotional life can be source of creative inspiration
- Feeling good about self
- You are different, and that difference is what makes you interesting. Express it
- Feeling good about yourself is the key ingredient to creating community, not cliques
- Techniques for projecting a good self-image
- Body awareness and how we express ourselves through our carriage and dress
History
In the spring of 2005, Kari Henley and Sarah Suatoni—then partners in Gather Central--saw their own young daughters facing social and emotional challenges and realized the girls didn’t have the tools to deal with them. They also knew studies show that children who gain more insight into their emotional lives are better able to cope with the distress and anxiety inherent in moving from childhood to adolescence. So they created a monthly group for girls from different towns and grades to come together and learn social and emotional tools. A year later, they renamd the group Tween Tribe, and Macdara MacColl joined the team, adding her skills and professional experience in theater, publishing, the internet, businses and community-building. Kari continues to work with women through her business, Gather Central.