Why I do this
The same children, the same patterns
Something is wrong within our system if we can predict, but not prevent, the same children failing and falling foul of the systems we have created. The aim is not to punish, but to help them learn. Conventional child development tells us to expect children to test boundaries; that is a normal and consistent part of growing up. But a breakdown occurs when we lack systems that normalise the behavioural challenges children and teenagers typically present.
Instead, our systems tend to highlight the individuals who struggle to adapt to what we ask of them, filtering them into a bracket we then have few effective ways of helping them out of.
The ideas of Acceptance, Curiosity and Empathy, drawn from Dan Hughes’ P.A.C.E framework,1 help us see that where a behaviour policy is applied and things do improve for a while, that improvement is rarely the result of the policy itself. More often it reflects a child’s own capacity to regulate, or to mask, their needs. For the children who are not yet able to do that, the same pattern returns. Behaviour tells us what a child is doing. It rarely tells us why.
1. These ideas form part of PACE (Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity, Empathy), developed by clinical psychologist Dan Hughes as part of Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy. See Hughes, D. (2017) Building the Bonds of Attachment: Awakening Love in Deeply Traumatized Children (3rd ed.), Rowman & Littlefield; and the DDP Network, the organisation Hughes founded.
Maybe it takes one to know one. That cheekiness that spills over. That trying to be clever, impress others and get the last word, otherwise known as the class clown. Not knowing when to stop until you were outside the head teacher’s office. I’ve always felt that I connected well with children and young people, and vice versa.
Many of the behaviour issues schools face are not deeply ingrained. They are exploratory behaviours, which are addressable through timely interventions and good information sharing between the services providing them. That’s what the EMspace approach is all about.
Many of the children I work with are used to being noticed only when things go wrong.
EMspace exists to change that. We look for what is driving the behaviour, we work with the child, their school and their family together, and we make room to celebrate what the child gets right.
