Positive Relationships: Behaviour - Mother and son

We have a very difficult mother in our nursery and the problem is made all the worse as we have quite a few difficulties with her son's behaviour. He's big for his age (three years) and has been seen hitting other children. His mother will have none of it. She is convinced that other children are at fault and that the staff are picking on her child. Her attitude is making it very difficult to bond with the child. What can we do?

It is a sad fact of life that in every nursery there is always a parent whom staff find difficult to like. Normally we do our best to avoid conflict, tell ourselves that we're professionals, that we're here first and foremost for the children and get on with it. Sometimes, though, we find it very difficult when we have to endure a barrage of complaints that imply we're not doing our jobs properly. It is especially problematic if the child is displaying challenging behaviour. When the point is reached when our relationships with the child are affected we must act fast to address the problem.

I remember a very similar scenario in a nursery I visited as an adviser, and there are lessons that you can maybe take away from this case. The child (we'll call him Ben) was behaving aggressively towards the children yet his mother claimed he was absolutely fine at home playing with friends and that Ben was merely defending himself from the 'rough children' whom staff failed to stop from picking on him.

It came to a head when the children went on a nursery trip to an art gallery accompanied by the parents. Ben kept running off and totally ignored his mother's pleas to come back. Although she was embarrassed, she turned her fury on the key person when she tried to intervene. The next day one would have hoped she would have asked for support and advice but no such luck. She complained that the venue was inappropriate, the trip was badly organised, staff were incompetent and so on.

The manager had tried to talk to her on several occasions to find a solution to the problem but each time she had turned on the manager. Everyone had reached the point when they just wished she would take her child to a different nursery and couldn't understand why, if she thought everything was so bad, she didn't. The question was 'What to do about it?' This was when they called me in.

It wasn't an easy situation to resolve because there were lots of hurt feelings and defensiveness among the staff. We started the process by my observing Ben's interactions with both children and adults. At the end of the day we had a staff meeting to discuss what I had observed and what had occurred in the past.

It was important for everyone to to talk honestly about how they felt, especially the child's key person and the manager. Although everyone in their hearts still wanted the child to leave, some practitioners admitted to feelings of guilt that they were overreacting to some of Ben's behaviour.

GOOD IDEAS?

We decided to examine the problems of the mother and child separately, beginning with the child. We discussed whether it would be sensible to change his key person since the relationship between the mother and practitioner had all but broken down.

We looked at the pros and cons and finally decided that a very experienced and confident practitioner, who had been Ben's key person in the Baby Room and had a reasonably good relationship with Ben's mother, would swap roles with Ben's current key person. It was normal nursery practice to occasionally move practitioners to work with different age groups to keep their experience up to date.

I had observed some of the triggers for Ben's aggression. It was very clear that not only did he find turn-taking and sharing extremely difficult but he also appeared to be doing virtually anything in order to get adult attention. We talked about how staff had responded to these incidents and they admitted that they had allowed themselves to become more irritated when Ben did something than they would if another child had done the same thing.

Once the staff could talk about their feelings and how it wasn't Ben's fault that he had a difficult and often unpleasant mother it was straightforward, with SENCo support, to develop strategies to deal with Ben's aggression. Although, ideally, one would devise action plans in partnership with the parents, it was agreed that in these circumstances it would be done, at least at first, by the staff alone.

STRENGTH OF ANIMOSITY

How to deal with the mother was more complex because of the strength of animosity she had created. She had returned to a demanding senior management job when Ben started nursery at six months old and had told his key person that she found it hard managing both a full-time job and a child. She said she felt guilty because she was not giving Ben sufficient time.

The staff reported, from what mum had said, that Ben spent very little time with children out of the nursery and although they had not found his mother particularly easy to work with, they had not experienced the same kind of problems that were happening now.

We looked at possible reasons for this and came to the conclusion that the Baby Room staff had been able to give her more time to talk. We speculated that as Ben grew older he probably demanded more of his mum's time and as a result of her tiredness she was probably over-compensating by not setting appropriate boundaries.

We discussed how his being bigger than average possibly led people to believe he was older than he was and, therefore, expect more mature behaviour from him. The nursery trip had probably brought the mother's guilt to the fore and because she found it hard to ask for help she had instead gone on the attack. Once we had stopped demonising her it was much easier to understand her behaviour and put ourselves in her shoes.

IN AN UPBEAT WAY

The next day the manager talked to Ben's mother and explained that he would have a different key person and told her who it would be. She explained the reason why staff occasionally changed rooms.

Ben's new key person started in a very upbeat way as if nothing negative had happened since Ben left the Baby Room. She made time each day to share Ben's Learning Journey with his mother and ensured there was always something positive to say.

At the same time she and the staff worked hard on implementing the strategies for developing Ben's positive behaviour and gave him lots of praise for his achievements. Ben loved being given responsibilities such as looking after younger, smaller children. He gradually learned to share and take turns and left the nursery at the end of the year much better-prepared for school.

As for his mother; she mellowed. She didn't miraculously become everyone's favourite parent but she stopped complaining constantly. As Ben's behaviour improved she also appeared less stressed. And when she gave birth to her second child she put his name down for the nursery!

Sue Chambers is a senior LEYF associate (www.leyf.org.uk)