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“Special Needs; All Children are Special” Keynote Address: Cleveland Association for the Education of Young Children (CAEYC) Annual Meeting 10/16/04 Barbara Streeter, MS SpEd, LPCC, Child Psychoanalyst When we give our Hanna Perkins Annual Fall Workshop, we always get a few requests on the evaluations for more visuals, handouts, and role playing. I’m not going to do that today – I’m not going to use any accessories and I’m hoping no one bothers to take notes. More and more these days, people are given the message that there are certain techniques developed for certain situations that – if you only knew them – would make your troubles go away. There’s a label for every problem, along with prescribed remediations tailored for each of those labels – or at least that’s what marketing leads us to believe. There’s a world of experts out there and sometimes we find ourselves believing that if we could just have access to those experts, they would come in with the magic key. Well – the fact is, it’s nowhere near as simple as that and we all know it. WE ALL KNOW IT. But sometimes we don’t listen to our own knowing. Sometimes we defer to the experts or the mandates. The reason I’m not putting anything up on a screen or passing out handouts is that my goal, during this next forty minutes, is not to give you new information. Instead, it is to think together with you about what we do know and how we can use that knowing in our work with children – all children - with all the variety of “specialness” with which they come. What I have done is to compile a couple of stories representing experiences I and my colleagues have had in our work as consultants, teachers and caregivers. They illustrate situations that I hope will resonate with some of the experiences you have had and help you think with me about the basic principals we need to keep in mind as we better define our roles in addressing the special needs of children. For some of you, what I have to say will be very familiar. It represents the same understandings illustrated in articles appearing in the CAEYC bulletins from the sixties and seventies - such as Edward Schiff’s article, “What Failures in Referrals Have Taught Us,” and Luane Raia Laskey’s article on “A Teachers Role in Guiding Parents Toward a Referral.” It also contains echoes of what we have learned from Mrs. Erna Furman, Dr. Robert Furman, and Mrs. Ruth Hall in their articles describing their consultations in day care centers. This includes Dr. Furman’s 1966 article, “Experiences in Nursery School Consultations” published in Young Children, and Ruth Hall’s workshop presentation on “Working with Parents.” What echoes through all of them is that we as educators can help many special needs children, while attending to the special needs of all children, considerably more effectively than we sometimes think we can when we 1) trust our own knowing; 2) allow ourselves to be observers and thinkers as well as “doers,” and 3) consider our cooperative work with parents and professional colleagues as an integral part of our work with children. Let’s consider these things in connection to David: When David entered a day care center at age four, he was aggressive and out of control, jumping off tables and poking at other children when at group time and in line. David’s mother described him as fearless and somewhat apologetically said it was okay with her if the teachers used firm discipline with him. Though she seemed in charge of things, the teachers noticed that she was inconsistent at drop off and pick up times. Sometimes mother would yell harshly at him and grab his arm. At other times, she would act as if she were oblivious to the fact he was doing cartwheels in the hall. David’s teachers, Ms. Jones and Ms. Samuels,’ first approach to helping David was to work on consistency with him in the classroom. They explained the rules to him, praised him when he was managing, and separated him from the group whenever he was unsafe or invaded others’ space. As they worked with him, they found that David needed someone on point constantly. This was hard to do while tending to the other fifteen children. Ms. Samuels was convinced that David had ADHD and that mother should take him for an evaluation. She also was bothered by the mother’s outbursts and wondered if they had a responsibility to consider abuse. Ms. Jones told her to hold off, to give it more time. She was determined to see if they could help David themselves: Ms. Jones worked hard to keep track of him while simultaneously working with the other children. David responded well to Ms. Jones’ ever present assistance, and, a month into it, he had an entire morning without incident. The teachers gained hope that they were over the hump. The next day, however, David threw blocks and refused to stay in time out. He claimed he didn’t care about the fact Michael got hit with one of the blocks he threw and he refused to stay in the time out area when sent there. I suspect you can well imagine how Ms. Jones felt. By now, she had worked overtime to help David, was quite invested and his return to difficult behaviors made her comparably disappointed and angry. She tried to renew her optimism, but David’s behavior continued to be erratic. When he lost it one day and kicked her in the stomach, she almost lost it, too. Tears streamed uncontrollably down her face. At the end of this day, she went to her director and suggested that David had a behavior disorder and needed a special placement – or at the very least an evaluation. She felt she just couldn’t deal with him and it wasn’t fair to the other children – either that she had to spend so much time with David or that they were exposed to his outbursts. Some children had started to copy his behavior. The director, Mrs. Rainey, agreed that it was time to meet with David’s mother, discuss their concerns and suggest an evaluation. Mrs. Rainey and Ms. Jones questioned, though, how to effectively broach the subject with David’s mother and to whom to refer the mother. Ms. Jones had not discussed David’s problems extensively with the mother prior to this, as she feared this would only upset the mother and make David feel bad. Now she worried the mother would be angry that they hadn’t let her know the seriousness of David’s difficulties earlier on. Mrs. Rainey was more concerned with the referral process. Mrs. Rainey recalled their previous experiences with other difficult children, experiences which had not turned out so well, and found herself feeling pessimistic. In one case, when they had encouraged a mother to get help for her overly active child, the mother took the child to her pediatrician. The pediatrician diagnosed ADHD, put him on Ritalin and offered nothing else. Though the drugs calmed the child down a bit, the parents’ problems at home didn’t change and the boy made little progress in school. In another case, the parents had enrolled their little girl in a half day intervention program which required bussing from their center to the other program in the middle of the day. Staff heard reports that the girl was making good progress in the intervention program – where there were two teachers and five children – but they didn’t see any evidence of the progress at the center. They felt the child was just more confused. At the parents’ suggestion, Mrs. Rainey had made efforts to connect with the intervention staff. As a result, the staff at her center were invited to the ISP meeting, but the meeting was scheduled during the morning hours when there was insufficient coverage for anyone to get away from their duties at the center. In still another situation the parents had accessed a psychologist who prescribed a behavior program for the teachers to use in the classroom. The teachers had gone through the motions of implementing the program, but without much success. From the start, the teachers had been certain it wouldn’t work: for one, because they felt somewhat insulted that a specialist was called in to tell them what to do in their classroom when they had already implemented a behavior program; and two, because they claimed the requirements of the prescribed program were very unrealistic given the other demands on their time. Mrs. Rainey had done her best to support her staff with their frustrations and concerns about these children, but at times found herself avoiding talk about them. This was because she began to feel personally attacked by the staff’s repeated complaints - about the children, the parents, the professionals involved. Mrs. Rainey felt that the underlying message in their complaints was, “what’s wrong with you that you so mishandled this situation, stuck us with this difficult child, and now aren’t doing something about it?!” As she thought about these situations, Mrs. Rainey sighed. She wished there was more funding available to hire someone to take on these cases. Her desk was piled with paper work that should have been done yesterday. How can we think about this situation without dredging up all our many personal stories of frustration? And without looking for someone to blame – whether it be the specialists or the parent or the teacher or the director or the system? The fact is, one we all know but easily lose sight of, is that working with children who have special needs, of whatever sort, can easily make us feel distressed and helpless. We are all in the helping profession and we all want to be helpful. But even more than that, as human beings, none of us like to feel helpless and witness to another’s distress. We particularly don’t like it when that person’s distress gets under our skin and we end up feeling attacked, hurt or rageful. When things are uncomfortable, it is human nature to get active, to do something about our discomfort and make it go away. If a child isn’t managing in the classroom, we want to DO something about it. The problem is that sometimes the “doing” is not what’s needed. Sometimes, what’s needed is an ability to sit with the feeling of helplessness and the not-knowing-what-to-do a bit longer than we’re used to. Let me explain: When faced with David’s aggressive behavior, Ms. Jones became active, setting up a consistent system of guidelines and consequences. She took on the responsibility of looking after David for as many minutes of every day as she was able. This was helpful to David to an extent, but something was still not working; at times he was still unable to meet the expectations. With this, Ms. Jones felt more helpless than before. She again responded by becoming active, suggesting an evaluation. Ms. Samuels became active in the face of David’s aggressive behavior in another way: she warded off her helpless feelings by looking for reasons and causes of David’s aggressiveness that were outside the realm of the classroom. If David had ADHD, then it would be no one’s fault and a psychiatrist could handle the situation. If it were parental abuse, the County authorities could handle things. Mrs. Rainey found herself struggling on another level. A part of her knew there was no easy solution; another part kept thinking that if only she could handle things better, things would work out better. The staff often complained to her about one thing or another and she worried that staff were right in being perturbed with her leadership. She found herself avoiding talk with them about their difficult situations. She didn’t want them to make her feel any more guilty than she already did. Sorting out guilt, figuring out what you are responsible for and what you aren’t, is a hard one. Sometimes we try to overcome feelings of helplessness by imagining we have more power than we actually do: sometimes, it is more tolerable to imagine we caused a problem than to realize we have no control over it and can do little about it. This is why so many children imagine they’re the cause of their parents’ divorce: if they caused it, maybe they can do something about it. If they didn’t, they’re helpless. It’s why parents sometimes imagine their child’s deformity was caused by some minor thing they did during the pregnancy. And it’s why some teachers can be so hard on themselves. What I am leading to is not a statement that we should feel less responsible or become less active. What I am leading to is the idea that sometimes it can be helpful to be active in a different way, active in sitting with the helpless and anxious feelings engendered when we don’t know what’s wrong or what to do and going a bit deeper in trying to understand what we are dealing with. Sometimes, it is best to first get active by observing and thinking together. This means observing the child, observing the parent, and observing one’s own reactions and thoughts. This means sitting down with colleagues you trust and being willing to consider the reasons for the problems before demanding that someone do something. As Mrs. Rainey stared at the paperwork piled on her desk, she began to wonder how it could be that David would go so far as to kick his beloved teacher in the stomach. Yes, he was generally out of control and his mother had trouble with being consistent, but this behavior was pretty unusual. She decided to speak more with Ms. Jones. She suggested to her that there must be some reason that this particular day David was having such a bad time of it, that it wasn’t just happenstance. Ms. Jones responded to this suggestion by reviewing the day, trying to remember if anything different had gone on. The one thing she recalled was that mother had picked David up an hour early that day. Ms. Jones had been busy with a scuffle in the large muscle room and hadn’t had a chance to talk to the mother. Mrs. Rainey encouraged Ms. Jones to call the mother and ask her if anything had happened or was going to happen that day. When Ms. Jones spoke with David’s mother, the mother initially denied that anything different had happened. “Well, was there a reason you picked him up early?” “Oh yes,” the mother said. “He had a doctor’s appointment.” As Ms. Jones asked more about this, the mother explained that David had a rare blood disorder and needed transfusions every couple months. Ms. Jones swallowed her surprise and calmly wondered if this might worry David. The mother said that David had been going to the doctor for this condition since he was a toddler. He was used to it and, because of that, it never occurred to her to mention it to the day care staff. When Ms. Jones reported back to Mrs. Rainey about this, they wondered together how it could be that the mother wasn’t aware that her son could have big feelings about his illness and the trips to the doctor. Here is where David’s mother’s helplessness comes in: there is little that can make a mother feel more helpless than when her child has a medical disorder, especially a life threatening one. Mothers of at-risk children have quite a variety of reactions to their children’s limitations – they all, at some point, want to rescue their child, make the limitations go away and make everything better. As I indicated earlier, some feel overly guilty, as if they were ultimately responsible for the defect. Some feel overly protective, for fear something worse will happen. Some get overly active, taking their child to one specialist after another. Some, like David’s mother, ward off their distress at having a defective child by following the doctor’s orders and denying to themselves that they have any feelings about it. Mrs. Rainey suspected that David’s mother couldn’t deal with the idea that her child had a medical condition that at some point could be fatal. If she couldn’t deal with her own feelings about it, then she wouldn’t be in much of a position to help David with his feelings about it. But what to do at this point? Ms. Jones didn’t want to make assumptions. She felt she could note the connection between the hard day and the doctor’s visit with mother – which she already had essentially done. However, she didn’t feel qualified to talk with the mother at greater length about David’s illness and the meaning it had to him. Mrs. Rainey also felt she was treading on sensitive territory. She didn’t want to frighten David’s mother away by suggesting the blood disorder was the cause of his behavior problems. This was a mother who seemed determined that her child be considered normal in every way. Mrs. Rainey decided to get active by enlisting the assistance of a mental health consultant before getting active by meeting with the mother. The consultant helped them think through just how to approach the mother. They settled that Ms. Jones would speak with the mother since she had developed a rapport with her. Ms. Jones would suggest that David’s unsafe behavior at the center might be his way of letting them know that he was feeling very unsafe and scared. It was hoped that by phrasing it this way, Ms. Jones could encourage mother to work with the consultant to better understand what he was trying to communicate, and, if it was about feeling unsafe, what it was that made him feel that way. Now, this story could continue in several different directions. I know of many instances where such referrals have been effective, parents have been helped to address their children’s concerns and it has been possible for the child to be maintained at the center. I know of others where the parents’ defenses have interfered with their ability to work with a consultant and they either haven’t followed through or they have come back with reports about the outrageous things the consultant said. In the case of David, the mother was able to work with the consultant for a couple of months. In this context, mother was able to talk about her own feelings about David’s condition and then to talk with David about his feelings around the condition. Gradually David acknowledged his rage that he had to have the transfusions and his worry that he might die. These ideas were quite mixed up with his many other feelings and it took the consultant’s careful guidance to help mother help David sort it all out. In the meantime, the consultant worked with the teachers to help them deal with David’s behavior in the classroom. They learned to pick up on David’s unsafe behavior early on, for instance when he began to tip his chair back. They would remind him that the classroom was a safe place and that they would help him keep himself safe – and this included keeping all four legs of his chair on the floor. When David responded to their reminders by becoming more unsafe, tipping the chair back even farther, Ms. Jones let him know that she knew he was talking with his mommy about his unsafe feelings. She suggested they could write a note to his mom letting her know he was having the unsafe feelings at this particular lunch time. Hopefully, he could help himself with his feelings this way instead of showing them with unsafe behavior. David could use Ms. Jones’ help to manage his behavior better at such times, because he felt listened to and understood. This impressed Ms. Jones, who became able to feel instinctively how unsafe David felt. She realized she had felt the message in his behavior all along – but she had felt it by feeling unsafe herself and getting very active with the consistency plan – instead of by addressing his feelings. Some of the other children in the class noticed Ms. Jones’ sensitivity to David and asked her why David was so unsafe. Because they saw her addressing the issue in words, they could share their questions in words – instead of showing their worries by copying David’s behaviors. David’s classroom behavior gradually improved and the teachers were relieved that they had not sent him off to a special program. He was a child with special needs, but one whose special needs could be addressed in the context of their program. This was possible because Ms. Jones and Mrs. Rainey had taken the time to reflect, explore and problem solve. They had listened to their own concerns, and to each other; they had communicated with David’s mother, they had worked with a consultant and they eventually were able to listen to David. The communications with David’s mother and with David were possible because Ms. Jones had formed a caring relationship with David and David’s mother. They trusted her. It was only after the fact that David’s mother told them that the staff at David’s previous day care had told her that David had a behavior problem, too. She hadn’t liked that center, though, because there was so much staff turnover that it seemed that every time she went there, there was a different person running the classroom. That’s why she had pulled David out. It is not easy to achieve the positive outcome of the sort I just described, because of all the potentials for miscommunications and hard feeling that can occur when dealing with children with difficulties – whether they be of the less specific behavioral sort or the more identifiable physical challenges. In order to empower ourselves as individuals and as a profession, we need to be able to let ourselves use our own knowledge as well as be able to know how to deal with what we don’t know. There has been a trend of late to increasingly categorize and label and provide a variety of interventions for young children, a trend that has followed increasing community awareness of the importance of the first five years of life. This has come with State mandates to school systems to provide early intervention services, the proliferation and extension of Head Start services, County efforts to improve systems of care for children and families, and advances in the scientific studies of the brain and behavioral responses to chemical substances. We embrace these developments for the support and endorsements of the work we do on behalf of young children. At the same time, many of us bemoan the red tape, regulations and paper work that come with it. Some of us are grateful for the diagnostic services and specialists available to our programs; some of us remain a bit mystified as to what actually is meant by the diagnoses and what is actually accomplished by the interventions; and some of us at times are annoyed with the interferences that include transporting children from one program or service to another with little opportunity for the professionals involved to work together with each other. Those of us who have no access to special services sometimes feel overwhelmed by the stress entailed in caring for children with a myriad of difficulties and imagine that special services might make more of a difference than they really do. The bottom line is that the increased community focus on young children and special needs is a great thing, but we need to be thoughtful about how to view and utilize this in the context of our daily care and education of children. In my role as therapy director of the Hanna Perkins School, I often get calls from parents reporting that their child has been diagnosed as having ADHD or Asperger’s Syndrome or OCD. These terms are helpful to me in a descriptive way: When they report the diagnosis I get a general impression of the kinds of symptoms this child is struggling with. However, I refrain from making any assumptions until I’ve met the child and parents and taken a complete developmental history. I’ve learned that presenting symptoms can have quite a wide range of causes and origins, that no child fits any particular diagnosis exactly, and that, regardless of the diagnosis, there is no magic cure nor foolproof approach to helping a labeled child make developmental progress. The diagnoses sometimes feel helpful to the parents inasmuch as the parents and the caregivers of the children tend to be more tolerant of a child’s apparent misbehavior, lack of cooperation or unresponsiveness. When there’s a label given, everyone lets up on the need to blame someone for their frustration or the child’s distress. Most of all it helps everyone be more patient and willing to accommodate for the child’s sake. On the other hand, labels can frighten and confuse parents. They hear that something is very wrong with their child and worry that they and their child are destined for lifelong problems. The worst outcome is when parents and caregivers use labels to abdicate responsibility and fail to expect the child to make developmental progress. I’ve seen children whose development was actually delayed because of the lack of expectations of age appropriate behavior both in their special needs classroom and their day care setting. I’ve also become familiar with Multi-Factored Evaluations, Individualized Education Plan’s, and Individualized Family Service Plan’s. These carefully thought out plans can provide a helpful framework for communication amongst various professionals and parents regarding what is understood about the child and how the educational and intervention plan is carried out. However, it is up to each service professional and teacher to determine how to achieve the identified goals. Sometimes, as with proficiency exams, a teacher can get so concerned about making the child meet the goals (yes, I meant to say “make” instead of “help” as sometimes it begins to feel that way) that she loses sight of the child’s feelings and fails to enlist the child’s own motivation to master the tasks. Sometimes, the goals apply to one aspect of the child’s functioning, such as speech and language, when the child care giver sees more global delays than just speech, but no one seems to have acknowledged this. Sometimes, the IFSP’s aren’t even shared with the regular teachers. I imagine that most evaluators and special needs providers would welcome the opportunity for communication with each child’s regular teachers. They may be challenged by logistics, administrative expectations and scheduling constraints. More so, perhaps, they may be challenged as teachers are challenged. They want to help and they get active in implementing the programs they are paid to implement, sometimes not taking sufficient time to consider the total child’s needs, a consideration that sometimes presents painful realities. When they actually do meet with caregivers, there is opportunity for considerable working together as long as each professional shares with and listens to the other. This is an area where I hope early childhood educators and care providers can become active: in reaching out to the other professionals, asking to be included, and working to understand the parameters of their roles. It can sometimes happen that care providers simply take directions from specialists and specialists feel this is what’s expected. The result is not as much of a working together as it could be. I also hope that on the other side, the specialists can become more aware of the crucial importance of the children’s relationships with parents and primary care providers, and enable the primary care providers to actively carry out the interventions they have determined helpful to the child. Certainly the Technical Assistance Program of the Achievement Center, the Day Care Plus Program coordinated by Starting Point and the Positive Education Program, and the Hanna Perkins Center Child Care Consultation Program have made major inroads on this front. I also think it would be helpful if policy makers and administrators were helped to keep the child’s and parents’ feelings and needs in mind when planning intervention programs. Sometimes it seems that there’s a tremendous amount of energy put into identifying and documenting disabilities, developing and monitoring individualized service plans, and filling out reimbursement forms for all the time spent identifying and documenting and implementing and too little energy put into thinking about what the child is experiencing. When that one child was transported from the center to the special program in the middle of the day, did anyone think about what that meant to her? Being placed on a bus with a relative stranger to go to another place all by herself? With no one adult knowing of all the different people and events she was exposed to during the course of her day? When that parent was called to an IFSP meeting and asked to sign on the dotted line, was she really ready to grapple with her child’s difficulties? Or did she feel she had to cooperate at the time, but then didn’t follow through with appointments? I do not mean to knock the good intentions of all involved in working with young children and parents. What I mean to point out is that we, as early childhood educators and care providers, have the advantage of having the ongoing relationships with children and parents and the advantage of being in touch with how children and parents feel. We can speak up where possible and mitigate the problems encountered in other situations. I know one director who personally accompanied children on the bus transporting them from one program to the next. But more than all this, I’d like to suggest that we can best approach the challenges of working with children with special needs by becoming pro-active at our centers in treating all children as special and preparing the way to work with the parents of all children from the very beginning. If Mrs. Rainey had made it a policy to go over every child’s medical history as well as general history with the parent at the time of making application, she would have learned of David’s blood disorder before he even entered Ms. Jones’s class. If it was also a policy that parents stay with their child at entry until everyone agrees the child feels safe, David’s mother would have had better opportunity to form a working relationship with Ms. Jones from the start. Certainly some of the failures I’ve experienced would have had more of a chance if their child’s care giver had formed more of a close working relationship with parents from the very beginning (that means at time of application). It’s not because the anxiety and guilt feelings stirred up by their child’s troubles would have been any less painful, but because the relationship with the caregiver could have helped them through the hardest moments. Parents can find it so difficult to tolerate the feelings engendered when their child is suffering or not making it that they flee – by denying or minimizing the troubles or blaming them on someone or something else. They cannot flee so easily when the child care giver they like and trust, the one they know has their child’s best interests at heart, gently helps them gain a perspective and find the strength to face what needs to be faced in order to help their child. Hard situations are always best handled in the context of an established, trusting relationship that is secure enough to weather the ups and downs of distress, disappointment and anger. Communications tend to be more frequent and, if there is a misunderstanding or a big feeling, each side is apt to feel more comfortable in addressing it. Including parents more in the beginning also supports the establishment of a more sound and empathic relationship with the child. If David had had his mother with him during the first days of school, he might have been less anxious and therefore less aggressive. He might have felt like a more competent and likeable boy in Ms. Jones’s eyes, instead of experiencing himself in relation to her as the bad boy who always messed up. Some years ago I received a call from a mother of a Kindergarten aged child inquiring about our Kindergarten program. She explained that she had taken her son, Jason, to the Kindergarten entrance examination at her local parochial school and been told that Jason might have ADHD. The principal had indicated that they would be glad to consider Jason for their Kindergarten program after the mother had had him evaluated by a psychiatrist. Mother assumed that this meant: “we will take him if you put him on medication.” Mother did not want this for her son and wondered if a placement in our school might be a better choice. I asked mother how her son behaved at home and she said that she thought he was a good boy. She didn’t see him as hyperactive. I wondered how it was that the Parochial School personnel saw him differently. "They said he wasn’t cooperative with the examiners. Instead of doing what they said, he started laughing and running around the room. He couldn’t stay in a chair for more than two minutes,” she responded. I wondered to myself if the behavior Jason showed during the evaluation was actually his way of warding off the anxiety he felt about being in a strange new situation without his mother present. I wondered, too, if he felt inadequate and worried he wouldn’t know the answers to the questions he was asked. I suggested mother come in and meet with me. Jason was accepted into the Hanna Perkins Kindergarten and began as all children do at our school. His mother was in the room the first day and the separation process was carried out in small increments over the course of a month. His teacher was available to explain everything about the room and the rules and made it clear to Jason that he didn’t have to participate in learning activities until he felt ready to do so. When Jason entered the room in the morning and the teacher asked him if there was something in the room that interested him, Jason looked at his mother without uttering a word. At this, the teacher commented that she understood that he must not be sure about her and this new school. It would take time for him to get to know her and her to get to know him. It was understandable that he might be feeling a bit nervous and worried. This gave the message to Jason that, in this place, his feelings would be acknowledged and respected. Jason never showed hyperactive behavior in the Hanna Perkins Kindergarten. He did show anxiety about learning and some delay in skill acquisition. His teacher addressed this sensitively, and as they worked together over the course of the year, he learned to apply himself, made up for lost time, and began to enjoy learning. It was clear, in retrospect, that my original suspicions were correct: Jason’s hyperactive behavior at the Kindergarten assessment was his way of trying to escape his anxiety about his learning abilities, what would be expected of him, and whether he’d be safe without his mother present to help him. Now, some of you may be thinking that that principal should have known better than to jump to conclusions. Others may be thinking that that mother shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions about what the principal meant. And still others may be thinking about the advantages to be had at Hanna Perkins – such as the prolonged separation process and favorable teacher-pupil ratio -that aren’t available in other settings. These are all valid points, but I hope your concerns about the limitations at your various centers don’t keep you from considering the gains to be made by keeping an open mind. The points I hope you will get from Jason’s story are that 1) it is important not to take children’s behaviors at face value and 2) it is important to consider how you as caregivers can provide children with an environment that is designed as much as possible to understand and respond to their individual needs. All children. You’ve got a much better chance of assessing a child’s needs if you arrange beginnings in a way that responds to all children’s needs, their need for a thoughtful separation and well prepared entry into a new situation. Providing such an environment requires not only that you be a good, caring, knowledgeable educator. It requires that you recognize the value of your relationships with the children, that you make every effort to establish working relationships with the parents from the very start, and that you are able to work together with your staff or co-workers and other professionals. It requires that you consider observing and problem solving as much a part of your job as planning and doing. It requires that you believe in yourself and have conviction about what you know. I certainly am aware of the many challenges centers face when they suggest to parents that they need to take time off from work or when a director suggests to her administrator that she needs staggered entry or when staff want to meet as a group and there’s no time during the day when they can make it work. I am as aware of those hurdles as I am of the anxiety entailed in trying to make relationships with some of the more intimidating or illusive parents and the rivalrous feelings among staff when they disagree on the way things are best handled. But I have been impressed at what some centers have been able to accomplish in spite of the barriers and BECAUSE of their convictions – their conviction that they know something, their conviction that children’s behaviors are their ways of trying to communicate feelings that need to be heard, and their conviction that what they do within the context of relationships with children and parents has a lasting and potentially life-saving impact. And most importantly, because of their conviction that when things get tough, it is better to sit back, reflect and problem solve, than to get too active too quickly. It is ultimately more productive to tolerate painful feelings, admit one’s limitations, and work together, than to take over, thinking you can change the child yourself, or to hand over, by referring the child who challenges you too quickly to specialists. This work is not easy and cannot be done alone. We need to support each other and share with each other. We’re in the business of addressing the needs of young children together – whether we’re caregivers, educators, specialists, consultants or mental health professionals. |
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