Working with Very Young Children

1. HCS321
Working with very
young children

2. Agenda
Ensuring that young children are seen and heard
Ways of interacting with young children
Child-Focused Interviewing
Counselling young children
Helping young children recognise big emotions
Creative therapies with children

3. Seen and heard
 Why its Important?
 Respect for the Individual
 Congruence in purpose
 Context of knowing both the child and about the child
 What if you don’t or can’t?
 Vulnerability
 Conflicted Information (the parent view vs. the worker view)

4. Ways of interacting with young children
 Observation
 Playing
 Talking
 Interviewing or Interrogating
 Counselling

5. Child-focused interviewing
▪ Preparing the interview structure
▪ Managing the physical setting
▪ Sharing the purpose of the interview
▪ Establishing some ground rules
▪ Confidentiality and consent
▪ Encouraging the child’s free narrative
▪ Verbal and Non-verbal presence of the interviewer-
Use of ‘door openers’
(Cameron 2005)

6. Interviewing young children
‘Information not provided during free recall must be elicited by means of
prompting, and for young children, the prompting needs to be quite specific.
However, such specific cuing raises concerns about the potential for leading and
misleading the child about issues of child acquiescence’
(Peterson and Biggs 1997 p.280)

7. Counselling Young Children
Functions of the role as expressed by Geldard & Geldard (1998);
▪ Joining with the child
▪ Observation of the child
▪ Active listening
▪ Awareness raising and the resolution of issues to
facilitate change
▪ Dealing with the child’s beliefs
▪ Actively facilitating change
▪ Termination of counselling (cited in Hutchby 2005 p.306)

8. Counselling Young Children cont.
‘Counselling-based approaches [to helping children] vary widely in
emphasis.... But there are some common elements in these…
including… basic skills of active listening, empathy, problem solving
and supportiveness’
(Sharpe & Cowie 1998 cited in Hutchby 2005 p.307)

9. Helping kids to recognise emotions
Remember Siegel and Bryson from week 4? Or the Kangaroo?
‘Connect and Redirect method’
▪ Connect with the right
▪ Redirect with the left
(Siegel & Bryson 2011 p.24)

10. Art, play, and other types of therapy
▪ Contain wonderful techniques for children to ‘tell their story’
▪ Can allow for the child to feel comfortable
▪ Be aware of imposed understandings or misconceptions
▪ Drawing of conclusions