It can be truly alarming. The evidence about child health outcomes is everywhere you look. We have such large numbers of stressed out children who are difficult to teach. Such large numbers of stressed out teachers, and such large numbers of confused parents who have given up trying to hold the reins. Yet instead of stopping to take collective stock and ask a few basic questions about what might be happening and why and about our community priorities, the answer seems to be to offer more and more curriculum directives, accept more and more exclusions, insist on more and more and more paperwork and risk assessments, all eating away at the time and motivation that is required to do the very thing that could make the biggest difference. We have too many children in our schools and communities who cannot manage because of what we as Adults are currently providing. Our children need us Adults to stop for a moment and think. There is an elephant in the room, by the name of child development. There is some key well-established evidence on what children need from adults to be able to thrive. How much longer will we choose to ignore it? You however could be an Adult who is willing to learn and an adult who is then willing and able to take action in your home or work setting to help yourself and the children you care for. If you are potentially such an Adult, why not click to check out I Matter Foundation Training? Dr Cathy Betoin, Clinical Psychologist, Teacher and Parent www.imatterproject.com
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When a baby is small it would seem to be fairly obvious who is the Adult in charge, but one of the things that often happens in families of children with complex needs is that confusion sets in about this issue. Children with complex needs are often more challenging to manage because they are developmentally younger. Their responses tend to be more intense and more difficult to make sense of. The level of supervision that is required is higher and goes on for longer and the adults are more prone to becoming exhausted. All of these factors contribute to a very frequent disorientation of the adult. When the child is not easily settled by the common parental behaviours that would settle a typical child, the exasperated parent can move between becoming i) tougher, less tolerant and more authoritarian, and ii) softer, more laissez faire and generally more passive. Neither Authoritarian nor Passive are effective with complex children but exhausted parents or teachers will commonly find themselves offering one or both. Fortunately, the 'direction of travel' as we say in I Matter is to increase the intensity of the firm supervision and boundaries AND the intensity of the love and nurture and compassion. Every complex child, however disagreeable and challenging in their overt behaviour, is a child who is struggling with a state of overwhelm in which they feel unsafe around the adult on whom they depend. Of course, a child who does not trust adults is hard to care for, so the challenge is to find the right balance for this particular child of nurture and firmness, and the right sensitivity to their developmental as opposed to their chronolgical age. And then the challenges is to sustain that balance over time so that the respect and trusting relationship that is at the heart of a happier parent-child relationship can flower. The thing I love about my work, is that it is never too late for that to happen, even if the relationship has gone very off track. It occurs however, if and only if, the adult is willing to learn to read the signs, learn the skills and be very very patient. Remembering that if the task is to help the child mature, one of the most important roles of the Adult is to be able to take a longer view. So who is in charge in your home? Have you got the balance right? If you would like to learn more about some of the starting points of the I Matter Framework, why not sign up for the free E-course Five Steps to Success with Complex Children One of the most common responses I find when people begin I Matter Training and start thinking about a child's challenging behaviours is that they begin to become more aware of their own angry responses towards their own child. Then they find that they are not sure what to do with that anger.. "I know it is not very helpful to be angry with my complex child they tell me, but isn't it normal to feel angry if my child is hitting me or hurting their brother or sister?" In I Matter practice I like to encourage people to begin to make a distinction between i) healthy controlled anger which can be channelled into asking clearly for what we want - I call this form of healthy anger "Outrage" - and ii) toxic anger which is the primitive often out of control anger we associate with red route. This red route anger may be expressed outwardly towards your child in your own uncontrolled way, or it may be more suppressed and emerge in the form of persistent and equally toxic resentment and quiet but intense dislike of your child. Being in touch with the ability to feel outrage is vital to your own well-being and to the well-being of your often strong-willed egocentric complex child. The movement of outrage arises from a healthy and primitive part of you that works to keep you safe. You will know you are in touch with it, when you become aware of your own needs and your own healthy wish to be treated well by others - one of whom is your child. One of the reasons that living and working with complex children is so challenging is that we have to be able to stay in touch with very conflicting emotions. We may for example feel deep empathy and a sense of understanding for a child who has experienced neglect and trauma or who struggles to get on with a peer group. We may feel pain and sadness for them. But in so doing we mustn't lose touch with our own healthy outrage when because of their own challenges they treat us disrespectfully. In contrast to an emotion like sadness, outrage is a healthy, strong, determined movement of energy that allows you to stand up for yourself and set a strong boundary to others. Your child needs you to maintain your position in the hierarchy if they are to be able to mature. One of the reasons that this is so important is that many children with complex needs are developmentally younger and confused about their own boundaries - ie confused about where they start and stop in psychological space. They do not find it at all easy to remember that they are surrounded by other human beings who have thoughts and feelings of their own. Setting the boundary about how you want to be treated, and being firm and vigilant in policing that boundary demands daily effort but allows your child to gain a much stronger sense of themselves. It is vital to their ability to mature and become able to manage and make sense of their own emotional responses to Not-wants. I advise that the simplest place to assert and monitor the boundary in your relationship with a complex child is by monitoring the day to day way in which your child speaks to you and treats you and others. If you co-operate with a child who is abusive and aggressive to you, without finding a way to draw their attention respectfully to the fact that this attitude will not win your co-operation you are making their journey to greater maturity much more difficult. So next time you feel that rush of emotion in response to something that your child has done, don't be afraid of it, but instead remember to create a gap so that you can think then trust it and channel it into asking yourself - how am I going to engage and coach my child into treating me and others the way I know I want? And how am I going to do this in a very determined way with myself as a role model? If your determination is fuelled by your understanding that what you are asking your child to do is even more difficult for them than it is for you, you will know that you will be travelling down green route. If you want to learn more why not consider signing up for an I Matter Training course? Attachment Theory? What's that? In my work I regularly encounter significant lack of understanding amongst professionals and parents about the meaning or relevance of Attachments for those who work with children. However in my view Attachment Theory is one of the most important areas of psychological thinking for anyone who works with children with complex needs. It is one of the key foundations of the practical framework that I call The I Matter Framework. Attachment Theory refers to a body of work first developed by a researcher John Bowlby and by a research group which included Mary Ainsworth best known for her work on something called The Strange Situation Studies. This specific studies are some which I think it is vital for all professionals and parents to understand. The original works, listed below, deserve a read if you ever have a very long holiday as they represent an extraordinarily detailed piece of careful observational work, but, if you don't have time for this, even a basic understanding can take you forward. Attachment Theory is now a very well-established body of work which describes the relationship that a child has with the adult figures on whom he or she depends. It makes a very clear distinction between children who have a secure relationship with their key carers and those who have an insecure relationship. This research has clearly established a powerful link between patterns of early attachment relationships and a wide range of educational and mental health outcomes. Here are 5 reasons why I think Attachment Theory is so important: 1. Attachment Theory provides a universal framework - that helps us to understand ourselves and our own reactions, not just those of our children An attachment refers to the relationship that a younger vulnerable person develops with a bigger more powerful older figure that he/she depends upon - it is usually used to describe the relationship between a infant and his or her first primary carers. Attachment Theory draws our attention to the fact that for young children this need to depend on someone else for care is as universal and fundamental as hunger. As children we all had a basic need to look to the adults who were responsible for our care and to whom we depended totally for our safety and survival. The challenge of growing up is to learn to transfer some of these needs for assistance to ourselves. However, loss of access to the adult we depended upon when we were small was very alarming to all of us. As adults, we know this rationally to be true, but it is interesting to me how as adults we can forget that we are now the adults on whom our children legitimately depend for their experience of safety and well-being when they are feeling wobbled. Attachment Theory invites us to think about ourselves and our own reactions as they are influenced by our own past experiences and this awareness can increase our sensitivity to why so many of our most complex children really are struggling in their relationships today. 2. Attachment Theory helps us tie many diverse observations together in educational practices and in mental health A huge body of research has now demonstrated that early attachment histories are powerful predictors of educational and mental health outcomes. Children with a relatively secure attachment history with key carers (ie children who have parents who are responsive and helpful in attending to their physical and emotional needs) tend to be more prosocial and skilled in co-operative relationships, they tend to feel better about themselves and have better mental health and they tend to experience greater ease of learning in the classroom. Relative security of attachment clearly is an important variable. 3. Attachment Theory provides a developmental understanding for a wide variety of challenges seen in complex children that become labelled as if they are discrete issues. In work with complex children there is a very powerful drive to try to label behaviour that challenges adults as discrete psychiatric disorders: ASD, ADHD, ODD, OCD, Anxiety Disorder, Depressive disorder, Reactive Attachment Disorder. This labelling tends to suggest separateness. Implicit is the belief that if we can give a cluster of symptoms a name, we may be able to find a useful discrete drug or 'treatment' that helps. Apart from the obvious concern about more and more children being prescribed medication because a certain label appears on file, this labelling of the child too often prevents adults from thinking about the relationship issues in which they are personally involved, and the way in which these difficulties are so often connected. 4. Attachment Theory encourages us to focus on relationships between children and their key carers not just on the child. As a psychologist and an educationalist, I am interested in understanding how different patterns of behaviour develop in the context of relationships. We know there can be genetic vulnerabilities to specific challenges, but more often than not, challenging behaviour, poor learning, or mental health issues develop when there has been a sensory processing issue, a disruption to the relationship or more critically a poor fit between the fundamental needs of a child, and the adult care and life opportuntiies that is and have been provided. We have very little control over a child's DNA or sensory processing (at least not yet!) and even as adults there are a lot of things we cannot controrl, but adults do have control over their own choices. So learning to fit our care provision to the needs of the child rather than expecting them to adapt to us, beyond their capabilities, is a process that can make a powerful difference to a wide variety of outcomes. 5. Attachment Theory provides a very clear and practical direction of travel for therapeutic and educational work it is important to remember that the distinction between secure and insecure is NOT a value judgement - a securely attached child or adult is not BETTER than an insecurely attached person. On the contrary, insecurity in attachment relationships can become a powerful driver for achievement in business for example. However, given that there is such a powerful body of evidence of the benefits of greater security in our key attachments, for both mental health and for educational outcomes, attachment theory can provide a very strong framework to guide the priorities of our policy making and practices. Thus any step that can be taken to encourage key adults to respect and respond appropriately to a child's attachment needs and thus increase their attachment security will be fundamentally important ones. Attachment Theory is an extremely powerful organising framework. In The I Matter Framework therefore, attachment relationships form one of the most important organising ideas in the frame, but attachment is not the only organising idea. I have found that by adding in ideas that are well-described or more elaborated in other psychological approaches, an even more powerful and practical framework can emerge. More on this in future blogs! How much have you read about Attachment Ideas? Let me know how they have influenced you, or what you would like to know more about! Or why not join a course to find out more about how attachment theory is built into the I Matter Framework. References:
So, this video represents a lot of successes for me! I created a powerpoint, figured out how to record my screen to create a video, managed to get a voice over and upload it to youtube and put it in a blog! Yay!! Tonight I feel quite proud of myself!
Is there something you care about deeply? Something you have been putting off perhaps, that means that you may have to learn some new skills if you decide to take action? Let me know!! If I can do it, I'm sure you can! |
Dr Cathy BetoinDr Cathy Betoin The I Matter Prof Blog:
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