Reflecting and problem
solving around the emotional needs of disabled children
(0-13).
Emotional Needs is a theme
we provide considerable training on. Children
particularly boys with emotional needs are over
represented in special schools and within exclusion
statistics, and as they grow up they continue to be
overrepresented among those with mental health problems,
in prison and so on. Many reports have highlighted the
importance of such children experiencing respect, high
expectations, constructive feedback, clear limits and a
sense of humour from those around them! Emotional
Intelligence, emotional competence and emotional literacy
are so important to develop and teach especially among
ALL staff dealing with children. Here we explore what we
believe to be the keys to meeting emotional needs.
WELCOME AND LISTENING
Lets get the welcome right and then lets really listen!
Safety and security are everything!
see feeling
plagiarized
It has been said
that 90% of behaviour problems come from children needing
to be listened to. One study reported that the number one
request from suicidal teenagers was for adults to listen
to them. The medical power of listening has also been
proven by various studies. Clearly, we all feel better,
when we are heard properly. In addition, we feel better
when we are understood. In order to be understood, we
must be listened to. Often it is more important for us to
feel heard than it is to actually get what we say we
want. On the other hand, feeling ignored and
misunderstood is literally painful whether we are six or
sixty. It is about difference and celebrating diversity
It is about being valued for who we are, and not been
treated the same. To be a successful practitioner we need
to expect diversity to come through door, and have a
multitude of strategies on offer to suit all types of
children with all their different ways of having their
needs met. Being equal should mean that we are being
treated as individuals, differently, our individuality
MUST be respected. As humans, our basic needs are
similar, but the way we get them satisfied might be
diverse for different children.
On the most basic level if children feel safe, secure and
included, they can be themselves, and be honest about
what their needs are, so that these needs can be met.
Getting the understanding right applies to is both true
for the environment and the attitudes of the staff within
a setting. Sometimes the strategies that are needed to
make children feel included and safe are pretty straight
forward but all staff need to be aware and practising the
same strategies.
It is recognising that disabled children, like anyone
else, need to feel a degree of control about what happens
to them, both physically and emotionally. It is about
recognising choice (or its lack as an abuse of power),
and also recognising that there are some demands on our
lives where we cannot always make a choice, but being
aware, particularly as providers, of the difference
between choice and demand.
Circle of Courage
We have found this model extremely helpful to many people
trying to make sense of young peoples’ actions. The
4 basic emotional needs or ‘spirits’ of
belonging, achievement, independence and generosity and
the way in which pursuing these needs can so easily
become distorted gives many clues as to where to go next
with a young person's behaviour.
This circle entwines the 4 central tenets of belonging,
mastery, independence and generosity; all components
being equally important. In a holistic approach, it
becomes vital to understand these components and to be
proactive in maintaining the circle for every child in
the community.
The four colours of the circle represent four races that
are nevertheless as one. Belonging is the first of the
ideals.
They started out talking about
4 basic emotional needs, then they called them 4 central
tenets, now they call them ideals. It seems to me that
ticking with needs is more clear. For example, I don't
really know what they mean by belonging being an ideal.
Are ideals and needs the same? If I need food and water
are these ideals? It doesn't make sense to say "in
an ideal world a person would be able to get food and
water." I guess you could say "Ideally, a
person would get sufficient quantities of food and water,
or belonging." But this still seems less clear than
just saying we have physical needs and emotional needs.
The emotionally healthy individual
must be able to identify with and relate to others. So
many pupils with EBD labels in the UK and elsewhere
experience no sense of belonging in either school or
family life.
True - In fact, one of the most
common characteristics of depressed and suicidal people
is feeling alone.
Mastery/Achievement is the second
ideal: each person must be able to accomplish basic tasks
in order to feel worthy and maintain good self-esteem.
I basically agree but
"Mastery" doesn't seem to fit with
"accomplish basic tasks." Maybe competency
would be a better word here. Even "achievement"
implies more to me than competency in basic tasks,
although if they are talking about disable kids then
writing a simple sentence might be considered an
achievement.
The third ideal is Independence.
Independence follows logically from Mastery and enables
the individual to set, pursue and attain personal goals.
The fourth ideal is Generosity. The
person who is fulfilled has "extra" that he or
she can give to others.
As I view it helping others or
feeling helpful is a natural emotional need. This is
similar to feeling geneorous. I agree that helping others
usually comes "after" our own needs are met.
This reminds us how important it is that children's and
teen's emotional needs are met by their home and school
environment.
Ultimately, then, altruism is
needed if a person is ever to be emotionally and
behaviourally stable. Opportunities for the most
challenging to be generous are usually severely
restricted! Yet this represents 25% of basic human needs.
I am not sure that it
represents 25% - this is just someone's guess I'd say.
What if we divided up my list of the top ten emotional
needs and said each one represented 10 percent? Would
this make it true? It is just too simplistic. And anyhow
I think a person's own need to help him or herself first
is probably more like 90% for certain stages of life. And
that brings up the question of life stages. A baby
doesn't need to feel very helpful. Yet an elderly person
whose other emotional, material and physical needs are
met might spend a majority of their time helping others.
So I don't think you can just say the need to be generous
is 25%.
The Long view
Who has influenced you? Who has been there for you in
your own life? What did they bring to the relationship
with you?
The answers to these questions provide clues as to how we
need to be with each other and how to meet emotional
needs in a deep and fulfilling way. ‘Love,
acceptance, just being there, believing in me,
encouraging and supporting’ are typical answers to
these questions….
We need to take the long view when planning provision and
placement for children with complex and challenging
requirements. Currently our system is too geared up for
short-term decisions which are often NOT inclusive for
challenging children.. Person centred planning tools
provide one process for helping us think longer term with
the child’s future in terms of dreams and
nightmares. As adults, we forget that the messages that
we received about ourselves when we were very young were
accepted without challenge. These ideas became our
truths, and it is very seldom that we are able to
challenge them in our adult life. Yet, many young
children are not faced with positive messages about their
difference. Society’s ideas and assumptions about
disability, will be remembered and acted upon by the
young who have been exposed to them for years to come.
For this reason non-disabled practitioners need to hear a
different message, that of disabled adults. This
understanding is positive and challenging about their
place as disabled people in the world today. It is this
thinking in terms of The Long View impact, disability
equality, medical and social model thinking, that will
prevent practitioners making similar mistakes to those
that have previously impacted on the lives of so many
disabled people .
Disability a social oppression
It is helpful in understanding to think of disability as
a social oppression. To recognise that this oppression
occurs, not because the child has an impairment, but
because the adults around the child will act on knowledge
they have received over years in society. Different
cultures will have different attitudes to disabled
children in their communities. Whether these attitudes
are positive or negative, they are charged, and will
influence people’s expectations of that disabled
individual.
There is a clear link to racism, sexism and classism when
we think about the impact of adult’s words and
actions around young children. We can all identify with
the impact that adult expectations have had on our own
lives. In terms of challenging thinking, it is important
to challenge our preconceptions and prejudices before
they impact on the lives of disabled children. In the
same way that we would challenge racist behaviour in a
playground situation, or when imagining the future
careers and life paths of girls, we have to be careful
not to let our own stereotypes, of black people and
women, limit our expectation of their achievement.
It is because disabled children can rarely challenge
adult prejudice that they internalise these ideas.
Particularly, if the adults around them persist in
backing negative stereotypes, children will find ways
make sense of the negative messages around them, in ways
that will fit their internal stories. Because adults are
in positions of authority in children's lives, they will
have an effect on how children perceive themselves, on
their actions and how they express their feelings. We
must be careful as adults that our negative ideas do not
influence children’s lives. Therefore, as
practitioners we need to be proactive about contradicting
negative messages in our own environments, by promoting
positive images and working with empowered disabled
adults, to enable children to be positive about their own
bodies and clear about their emotions.
If disabled children are not in the system, the system
will not change. It is highly unlikely that the
preparation needed to help a child to feel included can
be known without that child present. No training and
research in the world will be enough. It is within a
meaningful relationship, within the system, that
understanding will occur on how best to facilitate the
needs child. We cannot prepare for relationships, they
happen as part of interaction, with other young children,
as well as with staff.
These ideas are based on ‘Exploring Disability a
Sociological introduction', Barnes, Mercer &
Shakespeare, which describe the different faces of
oppression that face disabled adults in our society. It
is not hard to see where these attitudes will begin to
form within the minds of young disabled children. We
might not be talking about violence, exclusion or
alienation at this stage, but for some of the lack of
choice, the lack of encouragement to express free will,
ideas, dreams will begin a vicious circle of a
dependence, which will have effect on wider cultural
phenomenon such as institutionalised oppression,
violence, and made acceptable by some medical
interventions such as the late abortion of disabled
foetuses.
Medical and Social model of Disability
Disability Model thinking helps us understand the changes
in the way we have dealt with the emotional needs of
disabled children.
Firstly, the medical model describes our thinking in
historical terms: a medical approach to the problem. In
the past non-disabled medical professionals, who had
authority and control over disabled people’s lives,
predominantly defined disability theory. Disability was
always equated to illness in terms of research and
findings. Care and benefits were awarded as a legitimate
portion of the pie produced by society as a whole, in an
effort to compensate for personal tragedy. These ideas
have had a negative impact of how we treat a disabled
child.
Social Disability model thinking applied to provision
The Social Model of disability is a more recent approach
to disability thinking (developed in 1970’s by the
Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation) and
views the problem as a socio-political one, it has been
developed by the disabled people’s movement, and it
views disability as defined in terms of lack of access,
both as social and structural barriers. It is important
to acknowledge the fact that it is the first time
disabled peoples thinking that been part of this change
of perspective. Applying this thinking to a child’s
inclusion will have a positive effect on how they are
perceived and accommodated for.
Locating GIFTS and capacity
Social Model thinking shows a way of thinking in which we
are then free to think about the problem in terms of
attitudes and structures in society: the barriers. If we
now look at disability as a socio-political issue, and
accept that disabled people have a part to play in the
decisions about their lives, whether individually or by
adopting Movement thinking, we can move towards making
our settings more inclusive. Locating gifts, talents and
capacity in the individuals we work with is a much more
radical idea than it might seem. But it remains a vital
tool in the development of good practice.
We need to view even the most challenging behaviour as
communicative. The behaviour should tell us something
about the emotions underneath if we can step back and
reflect with others.
Emotional accommodations:
To promote a child’s emotional well-being, a lot can
be achieved by practitioners understanding simple
approaches, such as having chill-out zones where children
can wind down or using approaches such as ‘gentle
taching’. We must remember that, what we as adults
may label as bad behaviour might be challenging or
difficult TO US, it does not mean that the child is bad,
in fact their actions in their eyes will make sense.
Children with problems in expressing feelings are more
likely to learn more acceptable actions from their peers.
Being with other children of the same age is how all
children learn when what they DO is appropriate or
acceptable. All children need to be given the
responsibility to decide how they are going to show their
emotions, and to understand that certain actions will be
punished just like their friends, so that they can then
make a choice. Intentional Building of Relationships
We all need to accommodate each other and find new ways
of repairing the damage we can do to each other in our
school, family and community settings. Circle of Friends
is of course a key tool for entering the messy world of
relationships and can make an amazing difference to
individuals with the most challenging behaviour and hard
to reach emotional needs. When pupils challenge and
emotional needs appear complex involvement of other
children in support, mentoring or mediation roles can be
incredibly rich!It is all about TEAMS
This is a rich approach to encouraging staff to mutually
support each other with in depth problem solving and
emotional insights. It works even better with graphic
facilitation and synthesis as we have been discovering.
Solution Circles and Circles of Adults which can be read
about on our web site bring the team to life. Our
strategies will always be the richer when our teams are
diverse and problems aired and shared. When meeting
emotional needs gets hard then we should form teams. When
it gets harder we need to strengthen our teams
progressively involving others with different gifts and
talents.
This works links well to that of educational therapy.
Educational Therapy is a way of working with children who
have learning difficulties. It combines teaching with
therapeutic exploration of the emotional factors, which
may impede their learning.
The impact of loss and separation:
THE PARENTS’ PERSPECTIVE - Facing the oppression
“Most parents get on the steepest ‘learning
curve’ of their lives when they have a child with a
significant impairment. The close relationship with a
real disabled person, their own child, may well challenge
everything those parents thought they knew or understood
about the world, their friends, themselves. For most, it
is a lonely and painful journey because they are
discovering a vicious oppression from which they now
cannot hide or avoid.
The current world-view of disabled children, particularly
those who have very significant impairments, is so
negative that the birth of such a child is usually
thought of as a tragedy to be avoided at almost any cost.
If such a child does survive then parents are subjected
to an onslaught of professional interventions which, in
the past aimed at separation and isolation of the child
in institutions, and now more commonly try to turn the
parents into teacher/therapists at home. Their children
are declared defective, and from this position society
struggles to see their life as anything else but sad and
hopeless, unless medicine finds a cure.
Under the influence of this world-view many parents have
given away their children to residential hospitals or
‘schools’, or thrown themselves into organising
therapies, fund-raising for medical research, campaigning
for specialist and separate provision, and setting up
impairment-specific charities and support groups.”
Incurably Human by Micheline Mason, Director, Alliance
for Inclusive Education
Oppression at work
Few parents realise that they have become implicated in
the oppression of disabled people or even less that they
as parents face an oppression:
Experiencing the Medical Model of Disability at work
through the mouths of Doctors, Health Visitors,
Occupational Therapists, Physios, Teachers, LEA officers
and others may have a devastating effect on the
relationship between parent and child:
Love becomes conditional – segregation acceptable
Learning to challenge the hurtful myths
Many parents of
disabled children have become revolutionaries by the
simple act of refusing to stop valuing their children.
“The main difference between parents and
professionals is one of power. Professionals act within a
system, backed up by laws, regulations, colleagues,
resources, training, status, clerical support, large
offices, long words and emotional distance. Parents only
have their love for their child, and their desire that
that child should be given the best possible chance to
have a good life. How is partnership possible in such an
unequal state of affairs? It is only possible if everyone
involved is willing to examine the values and beliefs
which lie behind all our actions”. Micheline Mason,
Parents and Partnership, 1996
“…. The … issue for parents of children
who have “special” (meaning unmet) needs within
the education system is that other people who do not love
your child, who do not share your value system, could
have a greater influence over your child’s life than
you do yourself”. Micheline Mason, Parents and
Partnership, 1996
Many parents see how the oppression is hurting their
innocent child, whom they have come to love. But feeling
isolated and alone they often feel they are unable to
defend them against the forces in society. If they find
the courage to challenge the system they are often
labelled as ‘difficult’. This can make them
seem too ready for a fight and the professionals they
encounter can become defensive and unsupportive.
Understanding that these parents are challenging a
vicious oppression and looking for allies in this huge
task could make a huge difference to a child’s life.
ŠParents For Inclusion
Solution Circles:
Solution Circles : 30 minute Creative Problem Solving
Process for getting unstuck...Ideal for busy people!
Solution Circles are a Creative Problem Solving Tool
designed by Marsha Forest & Jack Pearpoint. This is a
short and powerful tool that takes no more than a half
hour. It is effective in getting "unstuck" from
a problem in life or work. Solution Circles are tools of
"community capacity". It assumes and
demonstrates that nearby people - in any community or
work place have the capacity to help - if asked. It
requires a person to ASK - not an easy thing in our
culture of privacy and "do it alone". This tool
puts all the values we espouse into practice and
demonstrates that TOGETHER WE'RE BETTER
Both processes can be learned and are powerful ways of
supporting inclusion.
Inclusion is:
In terms of outcome if we apply the social model of
disability to educational provision we can get an
inclusive setting. Inclusion is a process, which
recognises that all children / young people have to have
their needs met in order to achieve. ‘People can
integrate me, but only I can feel included’’.
Social Model thinking applied to educational provision
gives us a fully inclusive service, that seeks to achieve
the following:
Inclusion is more than the location of the child.
Inclusive settings:
- actively seek to remove the
barriers to learning and participation;
- meet needs in a positive and proactive way;
- approach inclusion as part of an overall improvement
strategy;
- engender a sense of community and belonging;
Being included means that children are not only
physically there, but they are accepted as part of the
community. The crucial understanding is that the child is
not expected to change. The starting point is that the
child is valued. there is no difference to the approach
to all the children in the setting - they are all
different; each one is central to the decisions made for
their individual learning and development. Inclusion
should guarantee that every child in the setting feels
they are valued. It is only by making sure that every
child, and their parents/carers, are participating fully
in their learning, that we can then ensure that they will
participate fully as adults, because they have the
self-esteem and self-worth to make their own decisions,
within the community they live in.
inclusive-solutions.com/
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