Understanding, Nurturing and Working Effectively with Vulnerable Children in Schools

‘Why Can’t You Hear Me?’

Angela Greenwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367025441
• eBook ISBN: 9780429655692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In times of increasing pressure on schools and teachers, it is essential that teachers are equipped to understand the emotional and relational factors in learning and teaching. Vulnerable and disaffected children need understanding and nurture rather than reactive management, which can easily exacerbate their difficulties, leaving them unheard and defensive, and even undermine teacher confidence and effectiveness.

Understanding, Nurturing and Working Effectively with Vulnerable Children in Schools offers a comprehensive and accessible exploration of the difficulties faced by teachers and schools from at-risk and disaffected children, including repeated trauma and insecure attachment patterns. The book describes how a thoughtful 'relationship-based' approach can both alleviate such difficulties and offer a second chance attachment experience, enabling students to discover it might be safe to let down their all consuming defences a little; thus freeing them to begin to learn. It offers:

• practical suggestions in note form – making them easy to use, refer to and assimilate;

• numerous case examples and teacher friendly theoretical background material;

• a wealth of ideas for ways forward, including differentiated responses to children in the light of their particular patterns, developmental stages and unmet needs.

Written from extensive professional experience, this is an essential handbook and resource book for trainers, schools, teachers and school staff, and also for educational psychologists and those in children's services working with vulnerable children in pre and primary schools, as well as those in special schools and units.

Angela Greenwood has produced a series of educational posters to support teachers in understanding the emotional and relational factors involved in teaching and learning, freely available for download from: https://www.angelagreenwood.net/Posters.html

Part I

Part I introduces some helpful theoretical and background knowledge to give a framework for thinking about and understanding what might be going on under the surface for those children in school who trouble or ‘get’ to us. Understanding something of attachment theory, neuroscience, unconscious processes and the effects of trauma can make a real difference to how we respond and work with such children, and enable them to learn and develop. Out of the theory, practical responses and suggestions naturally arise and some are included here, while Part II goes on to emphasise and describe the practical, nurturing and relationship-based ways of working, drawing on the theory described in Part I.

Introduction to attachment theory

1

Figure 1

The chapter begins with attachment – the quality of our ‘affectional bonds’.¹ You could even say we are born with a history. Of course we all have a genetic inheritance, but we also come into this world with unique foetal experiences – of being in our particular mother’s womb for nine months with the sounds and hormonal flows of our particular parental environment, which even before our first breath, can prime us to expect calmness or fear stress, for example. What a difference there is between the infant who has regularly heard Mozart and enjoyed a relaxed calm foetal time, and an infant who has been subjected to shouting and screaming and frequent doses of stress hormones through the umbilical cord.

You could say we are born unfinished. Infants are born helpless and they won’t thrive either physically or emotionally without a closely attentive mother who engages with them, thinks about them and cares for them well enough. Sometimes, however, their experience is very different. In extreme cases like the severely neglected Romanian orphans, babies can even die without care. Whatever our early experience, it makes a difference. It makes a difference to our capacity for empathy and resilience, for example, to our need for defences and to our openness (or not) to curiosity and learning.

Secure healthy attachment makes all the difference. Through cries, reaching out and similar behaviours, babies are programmed to seek attachment with their mother or primary caregiver, who (ideally) responds to their needs and cries, providing not only for their physical needs of food, warmth and protection but also and increasingly meeting their emotional needs, through thoughtful reflection and understanding responses. This relationship is interactive. Even at birth the baby actively roots for the nipple. Baby and mother² are, and need to be, part of a dyadic interrelationship (described by many parent/infant psychologists³), which ideally enhances the emotional health and growth of both of them and leads to a secure base from which the baby can begin to explore the world.

This secure relationship enables the baby to look around and go away from mum for short periods, and slowly to experience being a separate self. This is a gradual process and it is puzzling for a baby to discover ‘what is me and what is not me’. Even in the first few months we can observe a secure baby with mother close by begin to look around, or crawl or toddle away and start to explore the outside world with all their senses. Then after a while, or when something unexpected momentarily rocks their security, they look or go back to mum for reassurance, before beginning to explore again and of course continuing to learn from experience that mum will be there when needed and that exploration is fun and interesting. This experience of feeling ‘inside’ the mother’s mind and of knowing that his needs with be taken seriously and eased and responded to is one of ‘emotional containment’, which we will explore, and link in to a child’s experience in school, in Chapter 5.

As Bowlby (often referred to as the ‘father of attachment theory’) said, ‘All of us, from the cradle to the grave, are happiest when life is organised as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.’⁴ Children with warm satisfying early relationships are likely to have similar relationships in the future. They are likely to be available, responsive and helpful. They are likely to have an image of themselves as potentially loveable and loved. They are likely to be confident and open.

Bowlby talks of each of us as having an ‘internal working model’⁵ – an internalised model of how the world is, how people will respond to us and how we are or should be, derived from our earliest attachment experiences. A secure internal working model facilitates the development of mental and emotional health.

Ambivalence

As the healthy young child’s attachment matures they can increasingly integrate the ‘bad mummy’ who tells them off and isn’t there just when they need her, with the ‘good mummy’ who returns as expected and hugs them after bad times into an experience of integrating these opposites, and into ambivalence:

Sometimes things and people are OK and sometimes they are not so OK, but that’s OK because I am really loved and remembered. And even if I make mistakes it’s not the end of the world. Mummy might be cross – but she will always love me. I can apologise, and anyway we can always talk things through.

This is resilience.

Separation

Attachment also derives from a child’s experiences (and understanding responses during experiences) of separation and loss. Experiences of separation and loss can evoke feelings of anxiety, fear and anger, but if these experiences are talked through and processed, they can lead to emotional growth and learning. Without comforting support, however, such experiences can be difficult or even damaging, as we shall see in Chapter 3.

This process is both experiential, fostering emotional capacity and security, and also neurological, fostering connections and hormonal flows in the brain relating to (particularly intense) experiences (see Chapters 2 and 3).

Joy and delight

Crucially, secure attachment and emotional health relates also to experiences of interactive joy and delight as mother and baby engage playfully together, enhancing dopamine and opioid production (Margot Sunderland calls these hormones ‘joy juice’⁶), fostering enjoyment of learning and relationships and developing personality. Frequent experiences of joy and fun are wonderful and lead to high levels of aliveness, enthusiasm and energy for life. But babies also need help to ‘come down’ from these heightened states. Sunderland continues:

Intense feelings of joy produce lovely chemicals in the brain, but also high levels of arousal including activation of stress chemicals, so an essential parenting function is to help your child handle ‘the stress of joy’ so that she does not feel overwhelmed by it.⁷

Secure parents do this naturally of course, but TAs in school, adoptive and foster parents and other significant adults may need alerting to this crucial function with children when they engage with them in (essential) moments of delight, excitement and attachment-based play.

This early attachment-based play progresses on to ‘play in the space between’ the mother and the toddler (also called ‘potential space’⁸). Gradually the secure base allows the toddler to disengage from the relationship for a while and become interested in the objects and activities themselves, introduced initially by the mother. Through repeated experiences like these a child begins to become a separate person with the capacity to engage with play, creativity and learning, and to relate naturally and confidently with others.

Language

From the very start parents put child-friendly words to their musings and understandings, and even babies pick up on tone of voice and gestures. But as the infant becomes a toddler and then a child, so language begins to play a more conscious role in the understanding and processing of experiences. As parents communicate their understanding and empathic support as well as their delight through language, tone of voice and actions, slowly children begin to make sense of their feelings, and take in their parents’ timely words. Through talking through and processing their experiences children learn to think about and differentiate feelings, and to label and integrate their affective experiences. This leads to empathy.

The reason that I have gone into such detail about the secure child’s good-enough attachment and their emotionally nurturing and containing experiences, is that through understanding in some detail the importance of healthy supportive attachment relationships, and of a facilitating environment for emotional security and exploration, we can begin to have some idea of what is missing in some children as well as gaining a clearer picture of what a second-chance attachment experience (see Chapter 7, pp. 138–155) might look like.

Difficult, insecure and traumatic beginnings

The aim of attachment behaviour is to seek comfort, proximity and contact with a strong attachment figure, especially at distressing times.

With insecure vulnerable children we are thinking about children who very often have not only not had a secure nurturing beginning, but have very often had all sorts of hurts and parental projections dumped on to and into them, which they have no capacity to cope with or process. Their inner world is so very different from that of the secure children described above.

In the classroom, for example, a child who has not learned to expect his difficulties to be supported and tolerated or his anxieties to be understood, will find it hard or even impossible to tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing or the fear of not managing something. The fear of no support, or worse still of humiliation when things go wrong, can easily lead to overwhelming anxiety and ‘stuckness’. As well as the possibility of becoming stuck in early developmental stages (see Chapter 7), such feelings can be unbearable and need to be expelled immediately – through defensive ‘projecting out’ i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Boxes
• List of Case Studies
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I
• Part II
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1 Nurturing School Checklist
• Appendix 2 Self-Assessment of Skills in Emotional Holding, Containing and Strengthening
• Appendix 3 Possible Unconscious Meanings and Causes of Common Behaviours
• Appendix 4 Possible Unconscious Meanings of Learning Difficulties and Behaviours and what they Might be Communicating
• Appendix 5 Safe to Learn: An Eight-Session Powerpoint Training Course
• Index