Q: I have been trying to talk with a child's parent about his behaviour, which is consistently challenging, but they are telling me it is because of his special educational needs. How can I deal with this?
A: Behaviour that we describe as 'challenging' always raises anxieties for both parents and practitioners. Both essentially want the child to behave in ways that are predictable and similar to other children they know. Anything different takes us out of our comfort zone and can leave us feeling deskilled and overwhelmed.
The first thing is to consider how we think about 'behaviour.' Developing a collective view of behaviour as a means of communication is a very positive starting point. Our behaviour is affected by context, past experience and the sense we make of current events.
MAKING SENSE OF BEHAVIOUR
Specific behaviours can have a range of possible underlying reasons. We continually construct hypotheses to help us understand. Sharing our thinking and knowledge of the individual helps refine the hypothesis. For example, biting may be communicating the following:
- Someone has come too close and I feel threatened by their invasion of my personal space.
- Others are getting more of the available resources because they are quicker than me.
- In my exploration of the world, including other people, I am using taste and oral sensations to gather information.
- Bringing together my emerging use of words and articulation is laborious, so biting is a much more effective and efficient way of communicating my needs and emotions.
Dangers arise when adults make impulsive or snap judgements and are closed to new information.
SEEING THE PARENT'S PERSPECTIVE
Parents will have a range of views about children's behaviour, but are inevitably trying to help their child to be 'good'. Being a parent is an unpredictable and uncertain journey. Moving from the idealistic expectations during pregnancy to the realities of day-to-day life with a challenging toddler can be dispiriting as well as joyful and exciting.
Each of our children is an individual and we are learning about them, as much as they are learning about the world. Reactions that were 'successful' in response to our first child's behaviour may not be effective with siblings, leaving us confused and at a loss as to what to try next.
SHARING THE JOURNEY
Building a shared understanding with parents about a child's development begins with the first conversations, during initial visits and admission procedures. This is the time when practitioners give important messages about their attitude.
It is tempting to gloss over possible future difficulties or challenges, but knowing that these are 'normal' can help the parent share concerns. Our professional experience tells us that there are times when behaviour communicates that a child is finding it difficult to makes sense of their world.
During the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), every child goes through amazing developmental changes. As they make rapid progress in their language, thinking, physical ability and relationships, it is reasonable that there will be times when they are apparently 'out of sync', as areas develop at different rates and impact on each other.
As a parent, this can be surprising and confusing. Our role as practitioners is not just to support children but also to combine our specialist knowledge with that of parents to increase the holistic understanding of the child as an individual. We need to highlight the competence we see, offering constructive help when appropriate and emphasising our genuine interest in their child.
COMMUNICATION LINKS
Parents see their children in a wide range of situations and over a sustained period of time. They, therefore, have specialist knowledge about their child's development and progress.
Practitioners engage with larger numbers of children and receive training in typical child development and so have different specialist knowledge to share. However, two common stumbling blocks in communication can arise between parents and practitioners:
- Using different language to describe what we understand.
- Taking for granted the knowledge that we have because it seems 'ordinary'.
- Our job is to listen carefully to parents' descriptions of their child's play and activity so we can highlight developmentally important elements. Making links with what the child is doing in the setting helps build parental confidence that they, as the child's primary carers, are important partners in our growing understanding of their child.
INTERPRETING WHAT WE SEE
In particular, professionals can contribute by being alert to implications of impending developmental progress. For example, as children become more independently mobile, they are likely to increase their interactions with other children. While this is positive, it is likely to involve many misunderstandings, misinterpretations and upsets as children explore how to connect and share meaning in their play.
The adult role is to encourage the interactions, but also to support thinking about the intentions involved. For example, a child taking a toy from another may be intending to make contact and join play rather than taking the toy for themselves.
It is this interpretation of what we see that needs constant exploration in our dialogue with parents. This does not mean long involved conversations, though these can be helpful too, but making best use of daily interactions. Sharing with parents our interpretation of the 'taking the toy' example would lead to more open future conversations than simply saying the child 'grabbed a toy'.
DIFFERENCES OF OPINION
During this process of interpreting what we see, there are bound to be differences of opinion. Parents and practitioners have inherently unique relationships with the child and see them in contrasting circumstances. This does not mean that one is right and the other wrong, however - rather that they are seeing different aspects of the child's growing understanding of the world.
If a parent feels their child is having difficulty with a particular area of development it is important to listen to that concern. Whether we agree or not in the first instance, gathering information and reflecting on what it tells us is essential.
Our discussions with parents should encourage them to talk more deeply about their concerns and help us to appreciate a different perspective too.
ASSESS, PLAN, DO, REVIEW
The problem-solving process - looking at the information we currently share, devising a hypothesis to inform our strategy to help the child make progress, and agreeing when we will think again about how effective our strategy has been - clearly fits with the assess, plan, do, review cycle in the SEND Code of Practice. It is also the core of our EYFS observe, assess, plan process. Regardless of whether a child has special educational needs or not, this would be our course of action.
Through using this process, our shared knowledge of the child and their approaches to learning will increase in detail and depth. If our strategies are increasingly having a positive effect, it is likely that the adults understand each other's perspective more accurately. They will also be confirming their shared desire to do the best they can for the child.
Where progress is not evident, it is likely that the strategies and interventions are either not consistently applied or not sufficiently tailored to the child's needs and approaches to learning. Particularly in the case of behavioural concerns, if a parent feels their child may have a special educational need, it is important that this is explored.
Advice from beyond the setting, with parental permission, including conversations with the local authority early years team, the local health visiting team or speech and language therapy team is helpful and reassuring for parents.
In many local authorities, specialists provide advice lines and/or basic factsheets as a useful first step. Each authority is also now required to publish their 'local offer' of special educational needs provision and most can be easily accessed through their websites. In some cases, of course, there will continue to be differing views, though it is important to remember this is unlikely to be a static situation. We are all constantly learning, especially when situations challenge our thinking.
As professionals, we must seek to create relationships with parents that allow for both parties to amend and change their thinking as understanding grows. There is no 'winning the argument'; it is much more productive to demonstrate that we are open to acknowledging and trying to understand other views to deepen our own understanding.
MORE INFORMATION
- SEND Code of Practice:0 to 25 years, Department for Education (2014), www.gov.uk/government/publications/send-code-of-practice-0-to-25
- Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage, Department for Education (2014), www.gov.uk/government/publications/ early-years-foundation-stage-framework-2
- Kay Mathieson will be one of the speakers at the Nursery World Show, in London, on 6 and 7 February 2015. For details, visit: www.nurseryworldshow.com.
