If you answered yes to this question, you might also like the old saying “children should be seen not heard”. You may have even found yourself raging at recent BBC reports or similar showing that more teachers reported behaviour in schools in England worsening.
But could these kinds of attitudes be shaming parents and teachers into heavy handed discipline methods to deal with children “playing up” by insisting on children obeying them without delay or any answering back. Parents and teachers can be left feeling like failures if they can't keep their children under their control.
At last week's Play Summit, Teacher Tom ran a workshop called “speaking with children so they can think.” He estimates that 80% of what children hear from adults are commands. Like Alistair Bryce-Clegg's who featured in a previous blog, he thinks this level of adult direction can be unhelpful for learning and brain development.
According to Teacher Tom (Hobson) commands can turn some children off and trigger power struggles. Instead of commands Teacher Tom advocates information statements, “the book is on the floor”, “it's time to go” are examples of information statements that open a range of outcomes instead of only the 2 outcomes resulting from a command - compliance or non-compliance.
With our Therapeutic Approaches we avoid shouting at, telling off, using fear/intimidation. Instead, we focus on building positive relationships and helping children through modelling and encouragement to learn prosocial behaviour reducing attention seeking negative behaviour. Most of all we help children to learn how to find positive resolutions and to learn about kindness, sharing, empathy, patience, fairness and rules.
Tom Hobson's talk caused a stir at the Play Summit with equal numbers of comments pro and anti. This video related to tidying up gives a flavour of Teacher Tom's leanings. For parents, teachers and early years practitioners there is no one size fits all approach. Most of us have found bribes, sanctions, and threats necessary at times whether we thought it a good approach or not! Most of us can't help ourselves, so it's useful to be able to experiment with other approaches and discover the effects of pulling back, slowing down, making space, letting be. Some children, some adults too, might respond more thoughtfully, more co-operatively, more wholesomely.