Social Emotional Developmental and Mental Health

Topical Highlight: Relationship Based Approaches to Working with Young Children

Introducing Mark Melton, Ed.D., LCSW, PC

 Question: “What is a relationship based approach?”
One cannot talk about “behavior” until s/he has a relationship with the child. Within the context of a relationship, children can learn to trust in significant adults; to take pleasure in relating to significant adults; to recognize and regulate affect around significant adults/others; to look at self and redefine actions that are more “joining;” and to develop more effective strategies for relating. Within the context of a relationship with a significant adult, as children mature they can increase their abilities to delay immediate gratification needs and tolerate increasing amounts of frustration. They are also able to accept disappointments without “falling apart,” and exercise self-control by “remembering on purpose.” Moreover, children learn to please parents, teachers and other significant adults.
Temperament should be considered in all relationship-based interventions and strategies should focus on the following basic skill sets:

• Orientation: a child’s ability for attending to others and “tasks-at-hand,” including the ability to consistently notice family norms, expectations and priorities.
• Regulation: a child’s ability to self-manage decision-making and behavioral responses based on norms, expectations and priorities and in relationship with others.
• Reciprocity: a child’s ability to demonstrate “give-and-take” in communication and group work-demonstrating the ability to be both a follower and a leader.
• Turn-taking: the basic behavior in reciprocity; a continuously taught and practiced skill in the school years.
• Positive Guidance: telling a child “what to say or do” to guide prosocial behavioral sequence instead of negatively-noting a problematic behavior.
• Positive-noting: commenting on expected and emerging skills targeted for prosocial behavior.

Question: “How do you motivate children to manage their own behavior in positive ways?”

First, allow children to experience frustration before intervening. Be certain to acknowledge children’s frustrations, though without relaxing expectations. Allow the “drama to unfold”—let children “fall apart and re-group” as practice for containment of emotional life and self-regulation.  Once you do intervene, be certain to scaffold children’s problem-solving; rather than “doing for” children, we should support them in developing thinking skills. In your interactions with children, provide useable information that helps them to take action; increase directive language while reducing questions and explanations.  Encourage children to use environmental scanning as a way to connect with others’ values, norms, and expectations. Organize your classroom, the social environment, so that consideration of “others” is the norm. Model this consideration of others. Specifically, script responses to support children in shifting to your ideas and to the ideas of others. Be flexible in regard to time. Allow time for children to get “organized” in their thinking and emotional life before moving on. Forget the “almighty schedule” and pace events and activities as appropriate for developmental levels.  As the teacher, consider your relationships with children and your interactions. Establish a firm, consistent, but welcoming stance. Positively note approximations of skills and admire children for tolerating the emotional turmoil of compliance.

Question: “With regard to attachment, what is the theory or reasoning behind abused children not "telling on" or "not admitting" their parents abuse them."?
Children are wholly dependent upon adults for their safety and well-being. Often, "the system," even when they believe children are in danger, cannot get the evidence to remove them. Therefore, children learn early that societal safeguards are not as strong as represented. More importantly is the "idealized view of the parent" that children have. We all want to believe that we have strong, benevolent parents. For example, it is not uncommon to hear young children talking about their "beautiful mothers and their strong fathers" in the early phases of idealization. The need for strong/effective parents is significant. In Spitz's early studies regarding attachment, he offered seminal research on this issue. In his study, he divided live monkies into two groups--both groups had an inanimate mother figure with one made of cuddly/furry material, the other made of wire. The young monkies found the "cuddly" figure nurturing and therefore visited "her" sporadically as they moved toward their own autonomy. These monkies "checked in" with the mother figure and after "cuddling" returned to play. However, the other group of monkies could not get the "nurturing feeling" from wire monkey so therefore would not leave her side and repeatedly returned to "her" in an increasingly frenetic fashion. Eventually, these monkies became overwhelmed with depression (the analytic depression). The moral of the story: we seek what we can't find b/c we believe we deserve it--and we do. We deserve both from our observation of others and b/c we are "wired to attach." Therefore, children often get stuck in repeated patterns of "looking for the good parent"--no matter how evil they may be. It's a sad scenario leading to a lifetime of hurt.

Question: “How do you assess and deal with attachment issues with children on the spectrum?”

I first attempt to understand more fully how children are using the relationship with their primary caregivers. Generally, children "on the spectrum" use adults like "tools" for their own needs--being somewhat self-referenced and self-absorbed. I also pay attention to issues of temperament. Are they slow-to-warm, quick-to-react, do they have sensory issues that make everything feel "intrusive?" From that standpoint, I begin to work with caregivers to calibrate their approaches to more closely mirror the "starting point" of the child and use that as a foundation for scaffolding new behaviors that are recognizably prosocial/joining to caregivers and others. For most children "on the spectrum," approaches associated with reasoning and cajoling are ineffective--b/c they are typically not as invested in the relationship as "the other" and/or they do not formulate their emotional world as most do. Therefore, I do A LOT of patterning related to orientation (eye contact/demonstrated interest in others ideas) and regulation (containing emotional reactivity, even when it's difficult to do so) to teach smoother patterns of relating that tend to make the attachment "happen." In other words, what should evolve naturally does not. You assess for the child's deficits in effective engagement and pattern/train new skills that create a trajectory toward a stronger bond/alliance that feels safe/effective for both parties.

Dr. Melton will be a featured guest speaker at the upcoming Summer Institute, SPED 220.10: Special Topics in Guiding and Supporting Families: Culturally Diverse and Multi-Stressed Families.