Know

How adults in your program guide the behavior of children and youth is critical to preventing child abuse and neglect. You set the tone for how child guidance will be enacted in your entire program. The approaches you emphasize and the interactions you recognize will carry your program forward. This is a great deal of responsibility, but it is also a great deal of opportunity. To meet the challenges of this position, you must do three things related to guidance and behavior:

• Set clear expectations for the appropriate and positive guidance of children and youth
• Clearly delineate appropriate, inappropriate, and harmful interactions
• Develop and enforce your program’s Guidance and Touch policy

Supervise & Support

This video will help provide more context about your role in promoting positive behavior and preventing child abuse and neglect.

Clear Expectations for Appropriate and Positive Guidance

As a group, managers have had a variety of experiences in classrooms and programs. Therefore, we think it is important to clearly define what is meant by positive guidance. This may be a review for you, but it will ensure that you provide a consistent message to staff members. There are a variety of positive guidance techniques. All of them work best in the context of a strong relationship with each child. The following list of techniques is adapted from the Massachusetts School-Age Coalition and expands upon work by Hearron and Hildebrand (2013):

Appropriate expectations for children’s behavior: Rules, expectations, or guidelines help create a positive climate in your program. All of the staff and management in your program might work together to develop program-wide expectations. Staff members can then involve children in developing rules that align with the expectations. Limit the rules or expectations to a few key ideas that apply broadly. They should be positively stated and be posted in learning spaces along with visuals. It is easier to remember a few rules like, “Respect each other” or “Be a responsible citizen.”

Managing space, time, and energy: Adults arrange and rearrange the physical space and the activities of the day to meet children’s needs. A common example is moving furniture to eliminate a large open space that children used for running. Another example is providing many activity choices, so wait time is minimized or used productively. Teach staff to look at their environments when a child has a problem in the setting. Help them see how the organization of space or time influences the decisions children make.

Experiences that engage the whole child: Curricular programming is key to ensuring child engagement and learning. If children are bored, over-stimulated, or disinterested, they may engage in challenging behavior. Busy learners don’t have time for challenging behavior! Teach staff members how to use your curriculum or programming and observe regularly to ensure they are using materials effectively and well.

Maximizing relationships: Guidance is based on relationships. Strategies develop as you and staff members get to know individual children. This occurs when staff take the time to observe, talk to, and listen to children. It is based on finding the positive attributes of every child and recognizing them. Make sure staff members spend “neutral” time with children, just listening, playing, and enjoying time together.

Expressing feelings: Adults who help children express a wide range of feelings nurture empathy. A staff member might say, “I can tell you’re sad about what just happened between you and Terese. Would you like me to help you talk to Terese about it?” or, “You look so excited to see Emmett today! You have a huge smile on your face”. Adults must also be genuine and express their own feelings. A staff member might say, “I’m feeling a little bit frustrated that I can’t get this computer program to work. I’m going to go find someone who can help us.” You might say to a staff member, “I’m really disappointed that we didn’t get the new playground equipment. We’ll try again next time.”

Notice and recognize positive behaviors: An important part of positive guidance is encouragement. We notice and describe accomplishments or positive behaviors. A staff member might say, “Jonah, I bet you are really proud of yourself for solving that problem…” Or “I noticed that you gave Sonya a turn on the computer. She really appreciated that. That was friendly. Thank you.” Teach them how to stop and notice all the positive behaviors that happen each day. You should take the first step: stop and notice all the positive things your staff do each day.

Provide short, clear, and positive directions: Staff members use a natural tone of voice and make eye contact. They check in to make sure children understood. Teach staff members to tell children what to do instead of what not to do.

Provide choices: Whenever possible, staff members offer children a choice. This promotes independence and self-regulation. It also minimizes challenging behavior. Any time staff members have to say “No,” you might suggest they offer two acceptable choices to children. For example, they might say, “We use walking feet inside. If you want to run, you can go to Zumba in the gym, or you can join Ms. Stephanie outside.”

Redirect children to appropriate behaviors : When a challenging behavior occurs, adults must know how to get the child back on track. “No,” “stop,” and “don’t” do little to help a child know what to do. An example of a positive redirection is, “Keep the scissors in the sewing area” or “Walk in the hall.”

Facilitate social problem-solving: Staff members help children know what to do when they have a problem. They help them learn to recognize their problem, come up with solutions, make a decision, and try it out. Teach staff members about the resources available to help them do this work (see the Lesson Three of the Training & Curriculum Specialists’ course for resources).

You should help staff use these strategies each and every day. Positive approaches to guidance are foundational to preventing child abuse and neglect.

Delineating Appropriate, Inappropriate and Harmful Interactions

You and all the staff members in your program have a professional responsibility to keep children safe from harm. This includes emotional, psychological, and mental harm. There are certain types of staff behaviors that have the potential to inflict harm and model aggression. When staff members use aggressive techniques with children, they and their families learn that aggressive responses to behavior are OK. That is not the message we want to send children and families. You must make sure staff members know that the following practices have no place in child and youth programs:

• Corporal punishment: You may not, under any circumstances, strike, hit, whip, spank, or use any other form of physical punishment on a child of any age.
• Withholding physical needs: You may not, under any circumstances, withhold food, sleep, physical activity or other needs like toileting from a child as punishment.
• Yelling, shaming, belittling, or threatening a child: You may not, under any circumstances, intentionally make a child fear for their physical or psychological safety. You may not call children hurtful names, threaten children, or make children feel shame.
• Isolating a child: You may not punish a child by leaving them alone (i.e., leaving a child on the playground alone because they did not line up with the group) or by putting the child in “time out” in an enclosed space like a closet, restroom, or cardboard box.
• Binding or restricting a child’s movements: You may not punish a child by preventing them from being able to move or speak (i.e., covering a child’s mouth or hands with tape).

You should make clear: “Use of corporal punishment or other discipline procedures in violation of center policies is grounds for immediate dismissal in accordance with service personnel policies” (Koralek, 1993).

In the Child Abuse Identification and Reporting course, some staff members were offered a clear table of behaviors that were “OK and Not OK.” It is worth repeating those concepts now because they are critically important, and this is a clear way to communicate your expectations with new staff members.

Enforcing your Program’s Guidance and Touch Policies

All of the information contained in this lesson should be represented in your program’s Guidance and Touch Policies. Review that Guidance and Touch policy carefully and refer to your Service’s Program's policies around positive guidance. These policies should be shared with families in the family handbook and with staff members in the staff handbook. You must work together with Training and Curriculum Specialists to ensure the policies are followed. If you see a violation of policy while observing in a classroom or while watching a closed circuit television system (see the next lesson), you must take action. Otherwise, you run the risk of implicitly endorsing the staff members’ behavior. In other words, they might think their behavior is OK. The specific actions you take depend on the severity of the situation and your relationship with the staff member. In most serious situations, you should step in immediately. Think about situations like seeing a staff member hit a school-age child on the head or seeing a staff member leave an infant unsupervised. In those situations, it would be irresponsible to leave children in those staff members’ care. In other situations, you might be able to go back later and have a conversation with the staff member about more appropriate techniques. For example, the staff member who told a toddler to “stop pushing” may not have realized how their actions and behaviors might have frightened a child. You might have a conversation about that interaction and brainstorm more appropriate ways to respond when a child takes a toy from another child. Other staff members might need to work with the Training & Curriculum Specialist to develop an improvement plan with systematic monitoring and feedback. In other cases, such as a staff member repeatedly belittling a child, disciplinary action might be required. Still other cases might result in termination from employment and/or a report of child abuse or neglect: striking a child, withholding food, leaving a child unsupervised. It is not up to you to investigate or determine whether an action was child abuse or neglect. Remember, if you suspect child abuse or neglect, you must report your suspicions of child abuse or neglect.