Listen To Your Child

When a child presents with high levels of anxiety, the natural response of any well-meaning adult will be to remove or reject the difficulty in an attempt to reduce the anxiety.  I am a parent of two myself 14 and 12 and my strong in-built compulsion to protect them, to remove their fear, can result in them not feeling ’heard’, not feeling ‘listened to’.

I think this is also the natural response of the majority of teachers, the need to remove the distress and anxiety in order to ‘fix’ the problem.  The obvious outcome, however, is that if a child never addresses their problems when moving through their formative years – if a well-meaning adult solves every one of their challenges - they never develop the skills necessary to address problemscollaboratively in later life.  This is an issue that I often see when anxious children present with negative referencing, for example, have you ever heard the phrases “Everyone hates me” or “I don’t understand any Maths” or “I’m rubbish at Art” or even “My Art teacher hates me”.

I have been teaching for nearly 30 years now, and leading in Special Educational Needs for nearly 20 years – and I have observed countless times that when a teacher is told “I’m rubbish” (at Art, or Maths, or Biology – or indeed insert any relevant subject), the teacher’s instant reaction will be to contradict the student with “That’s not true, of course you are not rubbish”, perhaps they will go so far as to take out their mark book and prove to the child that they are wrong by evidencing their past success in the subject.  A perfectly normal, caring and protective response that in reality does very little to change the mind-set of the child.

As a qualified Therapist, this is where I rely heavily on the PACE approach to de-escalate high anxiety.  PACE stands for Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity and Empathy. The approach is designed enable adults to engage with children and young people who experienced a range of distressing emotions. PACE was developed by renowned child psychologist and family therapist Dr Dan Hughes, and is based largely on Acceptance and Empathy (the A and E parts of the acronym PACE).

When a child presents with negative referencing, when they tell you that they ‘don’t understand Maths and always fail’, the PACE approach suggests that we must accept their feelings, accept their point-of-view.  It is important here to make a clear distinction, we are not ‘agreeing with them’, but we are accepting what they are feeling.  This works to de-escalate the high-level emotion as the adult accepts and empathises with the child’s emotional state.

For example:

Child Negative Statement: “I cannot do the test because I don’t understand Maths and always fail”

Traditional Adult Response: “Of course you can do Maths, you did well in your last test, I have faith in you” (this will likely be translated by the child to “You are wrong, I am right, your feelings mean nothing to me”)

Adult response using PACE: “If you think you know nothing about Maths, I fully understand why you don’t want to do the test.  I’m wondering what we can do to make this work today?” (translated by the child to “I can see you are upset, I am listening and I understand, let’s work together to find a solution”)

After we verbalise that we accept the child’s feelings, their emotional state and mind-set, the next sentence should always start with “I’m wondering…” (e.g. “I’m wondering how we can make this work” or “how we can make the classroom feel safe for you” or “how we can change your point of view” or “if you need to take a time-out now” or my own personal favourite “I’m wondering what we can do to make sure that this this upset in School again”).  Quite often I hear a workable and sensible solution to the problem given by the child when I begin the sentence with “I’m wondering…”

Why does this approach help to de-escalate the high emotional presentation (it works equally well for high anxiety and high anger) – it is because the adult does not contradict the child, does not dismiss their (often inaccurate) point-of-view, does not create conflict by sending the message ‘You are wrong, I am right!’

A simple, but highly effective, change to language used when working with children that display high emotions.

Andrew Farbridge is a full-time SENCO (Masters Degree in Inclusion and SEN and also a practicing Mental Health and Trauma Therapist), he runs the extremely popular Supporting SEN Webinar series for Dragonfly and is available for on-line pupil/parental support purposes via Acadia Tutoring