Abuse and Neglect Chapter 5
I'm Susan Turben and welcome to Chapter Five! This is Chapter 5 of a 5 part series on Neglect and Abuse.
"The Guide Book for Caring Adults Who Work with Issues of Neglect and Abuse"
This concluding chapter addresses the need for professionals to learn child development, as a prerequisite skill. The central methodology associated with working with parents and children, revolves around viewing children as developing persons, according to a wide range of normal developmental milestones.
Chapter Five concludes our discussion of the essential skills that make up a Health and Wellness approach to families: easy listening, goal setting, praising, and writing and explaining a teaching goals program.
V. Easy listening: Most of us, children and grown-ups alike, enjoy it when others are interested in what we have to say and demonstrate their interest by listening to us. Listening serves as a positive consequence of talking. Are you able to balance your ability to both talk and listen? A good listener makes talking a very enjoyable activity. It is also true that talking and having conversations can be frustrating or even irritating. Clearly, there is a big difference between listening well and listening poorly. It is important that we take the time and develop enough will power to listen, even when conversations are argumentative, oppositional and irritating! It isn't always easy to listen to children, or adults!
Taking time to listen to an adult, a family member or a child is an investment in building a healthy relationship. Gerald Patterson, author of the book, Living with Children, found that when parents whose children presented significant behavior problems took 10 to 15 minutes every day to listen to their children, those children were more cooperative and helpful. Listening, then, can be a powerful teaching and parenting skill.
Poor listeners are so anxious to get their own "air time" that they can hardly wait for the speaker to stop talking so they can begin. Even if they don't actually interrupt the speaker, poor listeners will communicate their lack of interest by losing eye contact, fidgeting impatiently, and failing to respond to a statement either verbally or non-verbally. Listening encourages an adult or a child to tell what they know. Most people over generalize and make superficial comments like, "I don't care" or "fine" or "Yea, I had a good time." Their vocabulary lacks meaning. A good listener asks questions about the speaker's topic or feelings about the topic, and does this without switching to his own topic. Asking questions does not mean interrogating the speaker, however. Good listeners avoid responses that seem judgmental or critical. "Why?" questions often can be interpreted as judgmental and should be avoided.
A good listener and communicator only gives advice and opinions when asked for them. Unwanted advice, like judgmental or critical statements, is a communication killer. When a situation demands a clear value statement or guideline for behavior, express it just that way. Don't make excuses for what you need to say. To encourage communication (particularly with adolescents), be selective and wise in your decision to impose judgment and opinion. If our goal is to encourage communication and sharing, professionals must be slow to judge and criticize and quick to listen.
VI. Setting adult change and child change goals: Parents can learn to be "teaching-parents." To avoid getting stuck in negative scan, parents need to re-tune their internal "kid radar" to a positive channel. In other words, they need to look for and reinforce positive rather than negative behavior. Re-tuning radar means setting positive teaching goals that are defined clearly enough so that parents can recognize and reward progress toward them.
Good teaching goals can function as antecedents to our own behavior as teachers and reinforcers of our children's learning. However, we must know in specific terms what behavior we are seeking to observe and attend to, behavior that is likely to trigger a positive response on our part. When we respond positively to a child's appropriate behavior, that behavior is reinforced and therefore is more likely to occur again and trigger yet another positive parental response. Good teaching goals can begin a whole chain of positive interactions. They can put us on a positive "roll" with our children and pull us out of negative scan.
Good teaching goals have several components. First, good teaching goals are stated positively. That is, the goal describes something the child is to do, rather than something he/she is not to do. If our child lies frequently to avoid punishment, for example, a teaching goal would be "telling the truth when confronted with misbehavior" rather than simply "not lying."
A second component of setting teaching goals is to pinpoint the goal in terms of specific, observable behavior. While we want to "catch the child being good," we need to define just what we mean by "good" in terms of what we can see or hear. A high degree of detail and specific description is necessary for setting goals for teaching positive behavior. The goal should describe the desired behavior clearly enough that we can recognize and reinforce that behavior whenever it occurs.
A third component of good teaching goal is to make the goal an incompatible alternative to problem behavior we are trying to correct. In other words, the teaching goal should be a behavior that the child can do instead of the misbehavior. It should be one which, by definition, allows no room for the misbehavior and therefore is incompatible with it. In the example above, if our child tells the truth when we confront him/her with a misbehavior, he/she cannot at the same time lie to avoid punishment for the misbehavior.
A fourth component of a good teaching goal is that the goal should be broken into realistic, smaller steps if necessary to ensure that the child can actually do what is described well enough, often enough and for a long enough time to be successful with it.
A good teaching program makes success achievable so that it builds the child's confidence in himself/herself while it teaches specific social skills. A good teaching program starts with where the child is now with respect to a behavior (rather than with where we think the child ought to be or where we wish he was), then helps us to recognize and reward small steps toward the full teaching goal.
A final step in setting good teaching goals is to review the goal statement and look for possible "loop holes." If our goal is too general or vague, or leaves out something important, the child may not clearly understand or feel obliged to do what we think we have requested. For example, if we want to teach our teen-ager to be home "by curfew" each evening, but fail to specify what time we have in mind, we cannot fairly expect (nor are we likely to get) our youngster to be home when we want him to be. In setting teaching goals, we try to anticipate how the child will respond to the goal statement as a specific guideline for behavior. We ask ourselves the question, "If my child does this goal behavior as I have described it - and only as I have described it - will he actually be doing what I think I am describing? What loop holes have I accidentally built into my goal statement?"
Clear goals are essential for effective learning and teaching. Good teaching goals give children the concrete guidance and promise of success they need to learn and to risk change. Setting good teaching goals is a skill that helps parents to specify recognize and reward learning - and to become the teaching parents the children need.
VII. Praising: Pure descriptive praise is a praise statement that:
(1) describes a person's behavior and which (2) contains no zaps, zingers, or buts that may qualify and weaken the impact of the praise. (People Places, 1987). Praise that is descriptive describes a person's specific behavior. It does not describe the whole person. For example, the following statement is a good descriptive praise statement because it describes behavior: "Thank you for keeping your agreement by being here on time." A poor descriptive praise would attach the praise to the whole person, as if their worth as a human being depended on a single behavior. Such a poor descriptive praise would be: "Gee, Michael, you are a really terrific person for getting her on time."
Praise that is pure contains no criticisms or qualifications. It contains no sarcasm. There are not buts attached to it. In other words, no one is the butt of the statement. A good pure praise statement would be: "I really appreciate your arriving on time." A poor praise statement would have a zap, as with the following: "I really appreciate your arriving on time, for a change."
VIII. Writing and explaining a teaching goals program: Now read a sample behavioral and temperamental change plan for Patrick Smith that illustrates the role of the professional in teaching parents. In this role, the professional acts as a partner with parents, taking their view, and identifying their strengths, and works in parental attitudes and beliefs into the plan. Remember, a good teaching plan is not your plan, it is the parents' plan for change.
Once we have designed and ABC teaching program, we must communicate that program clearly to child and seek the child's agreement with it. Any ABC program is only as good as the child's understanding of it. We explain a program in order to make our expectations and the planned consequences clear to the child. If the child does not understand what he/she is expected to do and why, the program is not likely to succeed. For older youngsters, participation in the planning process should be invited to maximize chances for reaching agreement on the program. Explaining a program to an adolescent should include some elements of negotiation, as indicated in steps #6 and 8 below.
The steps involved in explaining a program are:
1. Set a time when you can talk with the child.
2. Start with a positive statement that is linked to the teaching goal.
3. Describe positive behavior (teaching goal) the child is to learn.
4. Give reasons for behavior and need for program (plan).
5. Describe the consequences/contingencies.
6. Give the child choices.
7. Ask child to repeat the program (i.e. what is the behavior, what are the consequences, when should the behavior occur, etc.)
8. Close with a clear agreement by parents and youth (ask youth, "Do we have an agreement on this, then?").
Chapter 1 - Neglect and Abuse
Chapter 2 - Neglect and Abuse
Chapter 3 - Neglect and Abuse
Chapter 4 - Neglect and Abuse