‚It's so awful when I can't reach a child at all for the whole lesson, when not a single good moment or contact has been made at the end of the lesson. And that every week! That doesn't help. Not for the child, their family or me!, complained a colleague recently in a workshop full of honesty and in search of answers and strategies.
Children with little drive of their own
If we observe the child's behavior and interest more closely, we can see the following:
- The child usually has an initial interest in making contact with the world, even if it is perhaps only very fleeting, e.g. it grasps and holds objects in order to tap them; it ‚explores‘ the room with its legs by running back and forth or jumping up and down or by lining things up with its hands or making them spin.
- But they are stuck, as if in a dead end, and cannot move forward on their own. They don't have enough drive of their own - usually due to sensory-motor or other underlying difficulties or challenges.
- That is why it has settled into this developmental cul-de-sac and uses its repetitive behaviors (which torment us so much because we see its developmental potential stagnating) for self-deprivation purposes.
- By the way, this is not self-regulation! Because Self-regulation means regulating oneself in order to relate actively and with interest to the world. These children are stuck in their repetitive behaviors because without co-regulation from an empathetic counterpart, they cannot regulate themselves on their own in order to actively participate in the world.
- Each the more the child ‚practices‘ his or her self-deprivation behaviors every day, the learns less: because it makes (almost) no new experiences about itself in relation to its world. This is because a child must first actively explore the world of things with its own hands in order to understand and learn about it.
- But the child doesn't care, because it knows nothing else and can endlessly indulge in its comfort zone with its usual self-deprivation behaviors. They don't know that this is a huge trap and developmental dead end that will affect the rest of their lives.
- But we do care! Parents, caregivers, therapists and all adults involved feel desperate and helpless. We must take responsibility for helping this child to gain other experiences so that it can learn and develop. If not us, then who?
So what can we do?
How can we meet the child in its developmental cul-de-sac and find a way out with it so that it can continue to develop? The best thing I have found on this (which is not behavioral training or ABA, although it may look like it from the outside) are the observations of the English child neurologist Dr. Geoffrey Waldon and the method he developed from them to help just such children in their basic development.
The adult as an auxiliary motor
Here, the adult acts as an auxiliary motor, so to speak, to provide a listless child with the necessary drive to get out of their predicament. In practice, this means ‚we do it together‘. The adult supports and guides the child non-verbally and shows through their attitude: ‚I'll make sure that everything goes well and that you always feel safe and understood. You don't need to be afraid of expectations that you can't fulfill. We only do things that you can already do and that build on each other in small steps so that you will develop new skills effortlessly. Here the adult relies on a clear understanding of the basic movement skills that are necessary for cognition, thinking and all further learning.
