Keep calm and learn

Childhood trauma is on the rise, as more and more children deal with a host of difficult experiences at home. For instance, far more children are being referred to the fostering service following the outbreak of Covid-19 than was the case before and for some of them, the pandemic has been just another layer of trauma added into their already complex lives. According to the NSPCC, more than one million children suffering abuse or neglect live in an area of the country with inadequate provision for their mental health needs.

So, there are few signposts pointing to a way out of this awful situation, which is where Shahana’s work comes to the fore. 

Since last September, a Wellbeing Curriculum has been rolling out across England and at the Childcare & Education Virtual Summit, she delved into that curriculum to give early-years settings a few ideas on how they could improve their support of children’s emotional and mental health.

“Nearly all of those vulnerable children go to nursery or school,” she says. “So the people educating and taking care of them in these settings are a in a brilliant position to have adequate plans for their mental health needs with the right training and awareness.”

That’s where the therapeutic techniques come in. “Even with the most vulnerable children, you can change their lives and their understanding of themselves with regards to their own mental health just by the way you approach situations with them. Being able to manage your own emotions comes from the really early experiences of someone guiding you through it.”
Lots of children who have experienced trauma will not have been guided through these emotional experiences before and early-years settings are the place where this can begin to happen. “If you’re a child who always feels threatened or who has an abusive family member at home, your rational thinking brain will never be active because you’re constantly in survival mode and a state of stress. So problem solving, reasoning and understanding your own emotions is very difficult. It’s like the brain becomes a bit faulty and an alarm is constantly going off. They become hypersensitive and this can impact on their experiences when they come into your setting,” says Shahana.

Children in that position will be full of stress hormones, which might make them fidgety, disruptive or aggressive towards others. “There’s this energy that needs to come out of you and you can’t concentrate or settle and the knowledge that you have to go home later increases the stress levels,” she adds.

For the early-years professional looking to be more therapeutic, the priorities change. “What we need to be doing is focus first on mental health and wellbeing,” says Shahana. “The feelings of stress and worry get in the way, so our job becomes one of calming down their reptilian brain so their rational brain kicks in and they can learn, flourish and develop coping mechanisms that are healthy. We need to help them to have insight in to how they are feeling and develop those essential emotional intelligence skills.”

So what can you do practically to help in your setting?

“The biggest thing you can do,” says Shahana, “is focus on the way that you respond. Instead of focusing on responses around their behaviour, I want us to start focusing on feeling. There is always a reason for behaviour and that reason is always from a feeling – the feeling of not being good enough, of not being heard or of being a bit overwhelmed. If we can give the child insight into what that feeling is then we will start to make them more emotionally intelligent, i.e. they understand how they feel and how other people feel and can do something about it. Learning changes behaviour and enables them to do things differently next time.”

Start to use reflective language, she advises. “This keys into what’s really going with the child. What is going on in your brain? Why have you behaved like this? This creates a real connection with the child, calm them down and teach them at the same time. Look at the situation and what the child has done and pick out the feeling that the child is having. First say their name, then say their feeling (you’re feeling really angry right now) and then say their behaviour (I can tell because you just pulled down the display). Then you can unpick that a bit more – you might say ‘you did that because you felt no-one was listening to your idea’. I’m not saying you don’t tell them off for pulling the display down, but the first point you come from is a place of connection.” 

By showing a child that you understand what they are feeling, rather than immediately pulling them up for what they are doing, your connection and empathy will support them in building self awareness. Once you have calmed them down, you will be in a better position to ask them to say sorry, or to put right whatever it is they did wrong in the first place. “Children need to be calm before they can show empathy or reasoning,” Shahana says. “When they feel connected to you and not like they are under attack, their reptilian brain will turn off and they will be able to empathise with their peers, hear another way to do it next time and they will learn from the scenario.”

For children to BE calm, they need to FEEL calm, says Shahana, so have a think about your environment.

• Think about your setting’s space
• Is it calm?
• Is it overwhelming?
• Does it make you want to learn?
• Is it helping children to get into the rational brain?

“A really simple thing to do is introduce relaxing music as the children come in in the morning, after breaks and dinner. Things might have been stressed at home or on the way to you, but this will help to decrease stress, calm down the brain, regulate the heart-rate and decrease blood pressure.” 

TPC Therapy is a children's mental health service working with organisations to support the mental health & wellbeing of children, parents and staff. Visit https://www.tpctherapy.co.uk for more information.

The views expressed in articles do not necessarily reflect the views of Morton Michel.