Cultivating Resilience in Early Childhood

A Practical Guide to Support the Mental Health and Wellbeing of Young Children

Louise Jackson, Katie Waller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032135878
• eBook ISBN: 9781000504866
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Written to support the use of the Thought Bubbles picture books, this guidebook has been created to help teachers and practitioners initiate 'nurturing conversations' and cultivate resilience in young children.

Early identification of mental health and wellbeing needs by those who spend the most time with the children is key to offering the support vulnerable children need. This series takes a proactive approach to mental health support, creating a culture of trust and resilience long before crisis point is reached. Based on the author's extensive research and wealth of experience, this guidebook will help start the conversation, showing the reader what to do and say early on in a child's life, to help influence the way that they experience the world in the future.

This book:

• Offers practical, low-cost actions that can be easily adapted to suit different environments and contexts.
• Explores key topics such as effective listening, communication, relationships and environments.
• Is designed to facilitate the effective use of the four Thought Bubbles picture books, supporting the practitioner to elicit nurturing conversations.

Designed to be used in a range of childcare settings, this book is an essential resource for all those who care for and educate young children.

1. Changing the ‘at risk’ trajectory

DOI: 10.4324/9781003229988-2

The Children’s Commissioner of England produces local area profiles of child vulnerability, helping national government and local councils identify how many vulnerable children there are, highlighting groups at heightened risk, particularly during the coronavirus emergency. Vulnerable groups are those in overcrowded or inadequate accommodation, with fragile parents, young carers or without internet access. It became clear that there are hundreds of thousands of children in England who are living with multiple secondary risks that Covid-19 may exacerbate: lack of food in the house, homelessness or living in cramped living conditions, neglect, domestic abuse, substance abuse and parental mental health problems. As the UK entered a third period of lockdown and closure of schools, the increase in the numbers of children eligible to attend schools on the grounds of vulnerability demonstrated the impact the pandemic was having on children and their families across communities.

Children who are exposed to multiple socioeconomic risks in their early years are more likely to experience disadvantage in terms of their cognitive and behavioural development before starting school, highlighting the importance of early intervention in children’s lives to break intergenerational cycles of disadvantage. (Allen, 2011; Tickell, 2011). When funding and intervention in the early years are determined by social and economic ‘risk’ children may become marginalised; they may be subject to low expectations and may be given a label to describe their needs. This label can be disabling for a child, it may be interpreted in different ways leading to confusion and misunderstanding.

In many countries children at risk have rightly been prioritised over others; an overarching strategy to address inequality and reduce the ‘disadvantage gap’. Within the UK education system, vulnerable or ‘disadvantaged’ children have become a political focus for funding streams such as the ‘Free School Meals’, ‘Pupil Premium’ or, more recently, ‘catch up’ programmes. The reliable allocation of funding relies on effective communication and sharing of data across birth to five children’s services, and with parents and carers. Whilst these strategies are well-intentioned, the reality for many families is that funding to support early intervention may be accessed too late, with missed opportunities to target funding when it can have the most impact – in early childhood.

In the UK the measure, or risk, of vulnerability for children starting school will only be recorded when a child is ‘known’ to children’s health, education or social services; if parents make a choice not to reveal their economic status or the child has not yet been registered with health/social services they may be ‘invisible’ and unable to access the support and funding they are entitled to. This situation is exacerbated in a global pandemic where the definition of ‘vulnerability’ is constantly changing and means different things to different people. The issue was described in the report ‘Unknown children – destined for disadvantage?’ (Ofsted, 2016) highlighting the necessity of joined up thinking and sharing of information across health, social and education provision for under-fives. In January 2021 official figures show 174,000 children were identified by social workers as living with domestic abuse, but the Children’s Commissioner estimated that there were many more – as many as 789,000 children in this situation but who had not been identified by the system and who were likely to miss out on vital services (Longfield, 2021). Effective collaboration across health, education and social care services for families of children under five must be a priority for policy makers globally, the fragmentation of children’s services has had a serious and negative impact on an early educator’s ability to offer ‘early help’ when it is needed most. There is a risk that the needs of the ‘vulnerable’ in a global pandemic become impossible to manage unless we work together as a community with clear criteria and consistent terminology.

A formal screening process or system of identifying a child ‘at risk’ of vulnerability before they start school can be detrimental for the child. Early educators can be drawn into a deficit model from the start, focusing on what the child does not have and what they cannot do. So, the challenge for educators is to identify those children who need help without labelling the child; not easy when it is often the labels that provide access to funding streams and resources.

Children living in the most deprived areas start school with higher levels of mental health difficulties compared with the most affluent children, and this disparity widens dramatically over the first three years of school. In one Scottish study, the strongest predictor of having mental health difficulties at age seven years was having mental health difficulties reported at age four years, and there was a more than threefold widening of this disparity over time. By the age of seven years, children from the most deprived areas had rates of difficulties three-and-a-half times higher than their more affluent peers. Children’s demographic backgrounds strongly predicted their age seven scores (using the Goodman’s Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire) but it was clear from this study that schools and settings made a significant contribution to mental health trajectories (Maryatt et al., 2018). If educators were equipped to identify those children at increased risk when they start in an educational setting, the children could be monitored carefully and additional support could be offered to narrow inequalities and change this trajectory.

A child’s risk factors can be viewed as external or internal – whether the child is adopted or fostered, whether the family is on a low income, known to social services or known to have been exposed to violence, separation and loss. Internal risk factors might include birth trauma, postnatal medical needs, hidden disability or familial experience of depression, loss and separation. The information that is collected ‘on entry’ into early childhood provision from parents and carers sometimes provides details of these potential risk factors. Further information relating to concerns about a lack of food in the house, risks of homelessness or living in cramped living conditions, neglect, domestic abuse, substance abuse and parental mental health problems may become apparent during a home visit, but it is clear that this kind of personal information will only be shared within the context of a strong home/school early support network rather than with a stranger.

We have an opportunity to change the lens that we use to observe children in need, moving from a deficit model to a ‘capability’ observation model which focuses on the mental health competencies which really matter in early childhood, and which will lay the foundations for mental health and wellbeing in the future.

Parents and carers should always be given an opportunity to share family information if they want to; but early educators will need to have developed an open, honest relationship with families, helping parents and carers understand how this information is relevant for the education of their child, offering reassurance of confidentiality and trust. In some situations it may be appropriate to shift our focus away from ‘risk’ factors in the early years, especially when the information about a child is incomplete. Knowing about the ‘risks’ is helpful when working with young children, but the information will need to be contextualised, especially if it is used to determine the allocation of funding and resources. A targeted approach to ‘risk’ alone may no longer be useful or developmentally appropriate in the early years and may have limited success when funding and interventions are applied before children are able to articulate and express their own feelings (Wichstrom et al., 2012).

When practitioners are asked to select which observable characteristics provide them with the most valuable information about a child’s mental health and wellbeing, they say that a holistic view of the child’s capabilities is important. A wide range of observations are described (see Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Indicators Used by Research Participants to Assess Mental Health and Wellbeing

Mental health competencies	Representing objects	Sense of achievement	Making links	Managing feelings and behaviour
Persistence	Health and self-care	Involvement/ participation	Moving and handling	Having ideas
Curiosity	Making relationships	Communication signs/pictures/speech	Focus and concentration	Understanding
Self-confidence and self-awareness	Taking risks	Reviewing	Listening and attention	Wellbeing

A much clearer picture of the child’s state of mind is seen when risks are considered alongside mental health competencies. A universal, child-centred approach is where young children are accepted, valued and given opportunities to engage in meaningful conversations with people they already trust. The child shows what they know and can do. When early educators implement a screening process that involves observation, interaction and dialogue with the child alongside collating the information gathered about risk factors, they can build a much more detailed picture of the child’s overall mental health and wellbeing. The early educator can prioritise their attention, funding and resources to the children who need it most and at a time in their life when it will have greatest impact. The child becomes an active participant in the screening process, no longer dependent on someone else to notice and judge when and if mental health interventions are needed (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Research into practice 1.

When is the right time to act?

The transition period from home into education has been described as a time of increased anxiety and stress for a child. It can be a period when mental health and wellbeing are challenged, put under strain or intensified for many young children; a time when their responses to anxiety and stress are made clearly visible. Many children during t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Changing the ‘at risk’ trajectory
• 2 A new measure of risk and competency
• 3 The provision of physical and mental space
• 4 A participatory pedagogy
• 5 A listening pedagogy
• 6 Nurturing environments
• 7 Nurturing relationships
• 8 Nurturing conversations
• 9 A change in the balance of power
• 10 Practical actions
• Appendix 1: Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index