F-Words Life Wheel

The F-Words Life Wheel is an interviewing and coaching approach to facilitate conversations and goal setting for children and their families, caregivers and educators. The F-Words Life Wheel was developed by Lucy Charles and Arul Hamill of Paediatric OT NZ, and Kelly Reynolds from Kidsplus Australia in collaboration with CanChild Canada.

In 2011, Drs. Rosenbaum and Gorter developed CanChild’s six F-Words  that focus on childhood development domains: Functioning, Family, Fitness, Fun, Friends, and Future. The F-Words build upon the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) framework. CanChild hoped to encourage people in the childhood development field to adopt a more inclusive, strengths-based way of thinking and to apply these concepts in their work with children with disabilities and their families. 

Building on the work done by Rosenbaum and Gorter and CanChild’s F-words research group, Lucy, Arul and Kelly developed the F-Words Life Wheel, integrating coaching frameworks with the F words.  

They have found this an invaluable approach for facilitating rich and meaningful conversations, connecting with children and families, enabling meaningful goal setting, based on what is important to them within their lived in environments. 

This approach is taught through workshops as the coaching component is invaluable. Link for current information on upcoming workshops is: https://paediatricot.nz/#welcome