Thrive: A differentiated developmental approach to working with vulnerable and challenging children
This simplified account tells you about the significant features within the Thrive approach. For more detail see Articles.
A Relational Approach that works developmentally
Our brains develop through experience which is why we always emphasise the need for the child to EXPERIENCE something in a safe and loving adult-child relationship before they can learn about it in the abstract. So our mantra is : Experience First.
A baby's brain is not fully grown or functioning at birth. The way the baby is received, cared for, nurtured, loved and attended to will contribute to the initial shaping of her / his brain. The quality of these early experiences will create in the child a sense of who they are, how they are and how the immediate world is. Brain science, attachment research and child development studies show us that our early experiences are very important if we are to thrive. However, they also clearly show us that it continues to be possible to shape the brain's neuronal pathways through experience so that the story does not end there.
We have distilled some of the key features of the relational experience that will support a child to grow a healthy sense of self. Our optimistic message is that, given the supportive relational experience, a child can do the next needed piece of emotional learning regardless of their actual age. We now know so much more about what builds healthy stress management systems. We know from the brain science what contributes to healthy emotional regulation and what supports the growth of empathy and what is necessary for a child to be able to think about their feelings or, even harder, to be able to think about their feelings whilst experiencing a strong feeling. We want our children to develop into capable, competent, creative, caring adults who are concerned for themselves, others and the world at large. We want them to relish beauty, to cherish diversity and to embrace collaboration rather than conflict.
The Thrive Assessment and Action Planning Tool
Our Assessment and Action Planning tool uses what we know to help us move from
- the behaviours that concern us about a child
- to understanding what the child might be defending against feeling
- to identifying the emotional learning the child needs to do to have more understanding and more choices.
Then it helps you to profile the child's current emotional and social skills in order to pinpoint the learning they need to focus on most urgently.
Then it helps you to select 1:1 support strategies, activities and teaching strategies to support the child to do that needed emotional learning. There are Home Activities too, so that parents and carers can also support this learning at home. There are also suggestions for what the school or care-setting might want to put in place to support this child (and others like her / him). These can be printed down into an Action Plan.
Once this Action Plan has been in operation for a while - and the strategies have been put consistently and repeatedly in place - you can then carry out a review of the child's emotional and social skills to see what progress they have made. A report can be generated so that records of any progress in emotional and social learning can be kept. This in turn helps the school or care-setting to review the Action Plan, choosing new skills as learning targets AND new strategies and activities to support the new learning.
Who provides the support for the emotional learning?
For the Thrive approach to work, it is essential that the adult who is to do the main emotional-learning support work with the child is a person who likes children. In particular, this person needs to be someone willing to find something they like about the child and willing to build a good relationship with that child. This building of a trusting, caring relationship is going to be key to creating an emotional alliance between the child and the adult. This alliance is needed for the emotional learning - and in our most vulnerable and challenging of children, the brain reshaping - to take place.
In our experience this person does not have to be in a particular role: it just has to be somone who has regular and frequent access to the child who can (and is willing to) build a relationship with them. In busy classrooms this might be the Teaching Assistant (TA) or the Higher Level Teaching Assistant (HLTA) or it might be a Behaviour and Learning Support Teacher or a Special Needs Co-ordinator or in a busy school, a Mealtime Supervisor or a parent-helper or a Family-Support worker. In a care-setting, it might be the key worker or attached nursery nurse or project worker.
The Thrive Core Training
Our training emphasises some key relational attributes, capacities and skills. The most important are listed below.
1. First build safety: develop security within the adult - child relationship.
The child who is interrupting their own or others' learning need to be contained safely. They need to feel safe. They need the adult to keep them safe. They need the adult to anticipate situations they cannot yet manage and NOT be put into those situations. This is the responsibility of the adult at all times.
2. Use the Adult-Child Regulating Functions (see Thrive paper in Articles): these are key skills for the adult to use in relationship with the child so that the child can learn them through experiencing them.
- Attunement
- Regulation and soothing
- Containment (physical, emotional and psychological)
[Please Note: When using physical restraint to contain a child, it is imperative to develop policies and practice on ‘Safe Touch’ and to train staff, e.g. with the Team Teach approach]
- Validation of the subjective experience
3. Develop an attitude that demonstrates: PLACE (Hughes, 1983):
 Playful
Loving
Accepting
Curious
Empathic
4. Understand the role of emotions in learning. This includes understanding the role and function of the limbic brain and how to develop frontal cortex capacity to think about feelings. This involves understanding the impact of facial expressions, body language, gestures, looks and voice (tone, pitch, pace, intonation).Use your eyes and face to communicate interest, care, connection and value.
5. Teach children to be able to differentiate between:
- Sensations
- Feelings / emotions / ‘affect states’
- Thoughts
- And teach the associated vocabulary
- Role-model recognising and naming them.
This includes exploring the language for bodily sensations (e.g. hot, sticky, fluttery, heavy, heart-racing) and core feelings:
Happy
Sad
Scared
Angry
Confused
This helps to build the child’s emotional vocabulary. Loss, shock and trauma arrest emotional development: they freeze energy, locking it in the body and in bodily held memories. Reconnecting children to their ‘felt sense’ and to the experience of safety in their bodies is centrally important. Containment, boundary setting and holding are key.
6. Use creativity, imagination and arts-based activities to build a bridge between right brain and left brain capacity, in particular to be able to sense, communicate and express feeling states safely. For example, use puppets, story-telling, books, sandtrays with miniatures, painting, drawing, clay & playdough, musical instruments, drama and role-play, games, circle-activities, photograph sequencing, video footage etc..
7. Teach the child how to regulate their emotions by role modelling how to use the breath; how to recognise tension and how to relax; how to know their own body edges and the potency ( and limits) of their power and how to feel the physical support of the ground beneath them e.g. of feet on the floor, seat on the chair, back against cushions etc. .
8. Help the child to develop a continuing sense of herself / himself. This is especially important for the child who has experienced disruption, loss and disconnection. Do this by being reliable and predictable, building and using routines, using music/song/rhyme/rap to create shared memories, remembering details about the child and retelling the stories, connecting through shared memories.
9. Embody and role model the behaviours you want in the child:
- Develop self-awareness: know your own emotional triggers and be able to self-regulate
- Take responsibility for yourself
- Use the language of responsibility: say ‘I’, not 'we' or ‘one’ or 'everyone' or 'they'
- Demonstrate being able to think about feelings and to think and make choices while having strong feelings
- Teach: 'Sense - Feel - Stop - Think - Choose - Act'.
These 9 features above comprise the baseline emotional skills that are essential if the adult-child relationship is going to support the emotional learning the child needs to do next.
The Thrive Approach places all of these skills and attributes within a framework that describes emotional development. Thrive offers two ways of thinking about emotional and social development:
(i) the Building Blocks model (see model below) and
(ii) the Developmental Strands model (see image above).
Each way recognises that development happens sequentially as the child grows in age. Each way also recognises (due to the plasticity in the brain as well as recognised 'growth spurts' in brain development) the possibility of revisiting developmental learning that has not yet been secured or indeed has resulted in behaviours that are harmful to the child him/ herself or to others (through the ways the child behaves towards or when with others).
Life events can impact at any point resulting in a 'wobble' in the sequential building of the child's emotional capacity. If any developmental phase is limited, impaired, damaged or shaped by fear, threat, loss or shock, the child's capacity in that developmental area will be distorted or arrested. This can be re-addressed at any subsequent stage because the child can do some new and different emotional learning if the circumstances are right and the support ( and opportunities) are provided. This is because we are always recycling our developmental tasks throughout life. Our brain is always growing: it is periodically reshaped through growth spurts and through the pruning of neuronal pathways that no longer serve us. Life is dynamic, change is inevitable- and with optimal experiences- we can learn what what we need to in order to thrive. This very important perspective underpins the Thrive Approach.
We use two visual models to depict this process. See image above: this Developmental Strands model shows the sequential onset of each developmental strand, each building on the other. Once a strand is opened up, it stays open to development and change throughout life. Damage or loss or impairment in any strand might be depicted as holes within the fabric of the strand. A full healthy strand would be vigorous, solid and robust.
The second depiction is the model where each developmental phase is represented as a building block made up of experience.
Good-enough experiences at the appropriate developmental age result in a solid-enough block of experience. Harmful, hostile, difficult, harsh or sometimes just benignly lacking emotional experiences in any one stage result in thin, poorly formed blocks. So sometimes the child just needs to revisit in an age-appropriate way the kinds of experiences that would have been helpful earlier in their emotional development. Each stage has its own emotional tasks to be addressed as the child develops. These developmental tasks can be addressed at any point in life. It can take longer to change emotional learning that has gone awry because patterns of behaviour become fixed. So it takes repeated intense attention to these needed relational experiences to get the fixed patterns of behaviour ( or expectation) to change.
In Thrive we use 6 Building Blocks. We have adpated the work of Jean Illesley-Clarke and Connie Dawson, with permission, to make a model that supports adults working with children in all kinds of settings. These Building Blocks are shown in the figure below:
Being: the adult acts as nurturer, regulator and container of the child's emotional experience. This connects the child into human relationships. This helps the child to build trust, develop a sense of her/his inner value and a capacity to access inner support.
Doing: the adult acts as a co-adventurer inviting the child into engagment with the world. Safe sensory exploration supervised by the adult (acting in loco-parentis) helps the child to be comfortable in their body. This develops curiosity, initiative, enjoyment in doing and a willingness to engage with life and learning.
Thinking: the adult acts as a co-constructor of meaning, lending her/his adult brain to help the child to make sense of their sensations, feelings and experiences. This shared sense-making builds connections between experience, language and meaning helping the child to recognise, name, communicate and express feelings.
Power and identity: the adult acts as an interested facilitator of the child becoming a social being with a strong enough sense of her/himself. This supports the child to come into relationship with others, feeling a sense of their own power without needing to bully or be bullied. This builds the child’s emotional resilience, resourcefulness and willingness to engage with others. If everything has gone well so far the child will be able to demonstrate a capacity for empathy, concern and care.
Skills and Structure: the adult acts as a role model for values. With a principled adult to look up to, the child develops a sense of right and wrong. This is a time for learning new skills and having familiar ways of doing things challenged by diverse new experiences. The adult supports the child to have appropriate responsibilities and to understand the need for rules and regulations.
Separation and Sexuality: the adult acts as a safe haven and boundary setter as the young person turns more to their peers for self definition. The adult also acts as a 'values barometer' for the young person to test themselves against as they move towards a stronger, more independent self-definition. During the second major growth spurt of the brain, the young person recycles all of the previous developmental tasks.This is a particularly challenging time for the adults and the young person alike.
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