In a webinar, The Education Hub’s early childhood specialist Dr Vicki Hargraves shared insights from our new course on supporting neurodivergent children in early childhood settings. To learn more about the course, click here.
Working with neurodivergent children must begin with a deep investigation of our own beliefs, assumptions, and understandings about diversity and difference. It is also important to critically interrogate our thinking and assumptions around developmental differences and diagnostic labels. The medical model of disability, which regards neurodivergence as comprising deficits and disorders within the individual that need to remediated, is pervasive in our society and in educational settings, as are developmental discourses which regard children’s development largely in terms of normality and abnormality. By contrast, the social model of disability and the neurodiversity paradigm encourage us to celebrate the natural diversity within the population, and to reframe our view of so-called deficits as being the product of a mismatch between the individual and their environment. By taking this view, we can consider how adjustments to our ways of thinking and teaching, and to how we design and set up our environments, may ameliorate some of the challenges that children with a range of needs can experience.
Adopting a relational approach is highly beneficial in the highly complex work of understanding children’s needs and being able to respond appropriately and inclusively. We all have the same needs – for nutrition, for movement, for sleep, as well as for belonging and participation – and considering how we can meet those needs in a variety of ways rather than offering specific adaptations in specific cases can help us to create more genuinely inclusive environments.It is important not to pigeonhole children based on a diagnostic label, for example (although diagnostic labels are important for some families and whānau). Kaiako can use the image of the child here to think deeply about how they view the neurodivergent children they work with, to interrogate any normative assumptions they may have, and to consider how they can place the child’s right to full participation and self-determination at the heart of their practice.
Building knowledge about sensory processing differences and executive functioning is highly valuable within this relational approach. It enables kaiako to attend to particular considerations, such as the way a child experiences the sensory environment at different times and within different activities, or the way a child focuses their attention on different tasks, to develop a deep understanding of how that child can feel calm and safe while fully participating in the life of the setting. Learning more about how to interpret and understand differences in movement and motor planning, as well as in speech, language, and communication, can help kaiako to develop a range of adaptive strategies that they can use with children with different needs. Due to the complexity of neurodivergence, this is a likely to be a more useful approach for working with children of this age than learning a set of strategies specifically suited to children with, say, autism (although building your knowledge about autism, FASD, and other forms of neurodivergence is also valuable!).
Learning about dysregulation and what can lead to a child becoming dysregulated is also highly beneficial. Episodes of dysregulation rarely occur out of the blue and are usually the result of a series of triggers that have built to the point where the child becomes overwhelmed.It is important to remember that the behaviour we see when a child is dysregulated is not wilful or intentional. Dysregulated behaviours are often highly challenging for teachers and families, but children are not being deliberately challenging when they behave in a dysregulated way, and, while we must acknowledge that many dysregulated behaviours are distressing for and sometimes even harmful to others around the child, we must balance this by remembering that the child is likely to have lost self-control and likely behaving outside of the values and understandings they have about behaviour when they are more regulated. Children are often mortified by their intense reactive behaviours during a period of dysregulation, and can experience a deep sense of shame afterwards. Being observant about and building up a deeper understanding of the kinds of experiences that can act as triggers for children, such as sensory sensitivities or events like transitions from one activity to another, can help us to support children and co-regulate them during challenging moments.
This work is so important because it is well documented that neurodivergent children go on to experience statistically disproportionate levels of mental health distress during their school years and beyond. The most important thing that we want children to learn in their early childhood years is that the setting is a safe space for them to be themselves, where their participation is valued and wanted, and where they can learn in their own way and at their own time. While it is important not to downplay the challenge and complexity of working with neurodivergent children in early childhood settings, if we can move to thinking less about challenging behaviour and more about dignity and safety, we are on the right track.
