Parents - trust your instincts | Integrated Learning Therapy

It’s the end of another term and with that comes the report from school. Now, as parents, you have to read what one or more other human beings think of your child. This can be a pleasure but can also cause confusion and even concern. How seriously should you take the schools’ verdict on your child’s performance, behaviour, growing personality and abilities?

Obviously teachers are trained professionals and can be very helpful in identifying areas needing help or areas of great potential. But as a parent, you are equipped with knowledge and understanding of your child that no other person can hope to equal. For this reason, my message today is that you should learn to trust in your ‘gut feelings’ concerning your child – especially if they conflict with the opinions of others.

Over many years of dealing with families whose children show one or other need, I’ve come to value the opinions of parents. Very often conversations with them are prefaced with “I’m only his/her parent so I’m probably wrong, but ……”. Then the parent goes on to present me with a description of the child that, after thorough evaluation, is found to be highly accurate and insightful, but sometimes contradicts the teacher’s findings.

I’ve known many parents who instinctively felt that their child wasn’t really ready to learn, yet felt intimidated enough by officialdom to send them into formal schooling. Sometime down the line, they are referred for help with problems caused not by any lack of intelligence but instead a slower rate of neurodevelopment. Others may instinctively know that their young child is ready for school but are told to keep them back. These children may end up being frustrated and bored at school and have to possibly take the unwise step in being accelerated into a higher grade somewhere along the line.

This doesn’t mean that parents don’t ever make mistakes. Plenty of parents are guilty of pushing their children too fast and too far before they are ready; they are over-ambitious for children to succeed; some neglect children unintentionally due to work and lifestyle pressures, some refuse to recognise a needy area in the child, and so on. That, however, is not the message intended here.

I could write screeds about the occasions when parents were spot on in their analysis of the causes of their child’s behaviour, in contrast with that of the school. I recall a parent desperately sharing her feeling that her young son’s undesirable, hyperactive, non-compliant behaviour during the Grade 0 school day was due to his disinterest in classroom events. This was not accepted by the teacher, who saw the symptoms as being signs of anti-social tendencies, mental disorders, impulsivity, disobedience and more. The mother persevered with her belief and did not seek any intervention. The following year saw a drastic change in behaviour and when challenged, the youngster offered, “School is better now. We’re learning proper stuff.”

Something else to be taken into consideration is that what you want to teach your child is not necessarily what others want to teach theirs. What your child needs to be taught depends on the society into which he is being raised and in which he will have to cope. That means that others may not understand the culture of your family and have unrealistic expectations of your child – and your way of raising him.

When you feel that something is not right with your child, with the school situation, with health issues, with friendships, you don’t need to apologise for being ‘only’ a parent. You don’t always need to rush off for professional confirmation or intervention. It is helpful to have an impartial outsider confirm your beliefs and in some cases might be wise, but this isn’t always essential. The chances are that you’ll have your child’s best interests at heart and your decisions and actions will be based on the most intimate and complete knowledge of the child possible. Added to that, you know the child’s origins – you understand the gene pool that created him or her. Trust your feelings.

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.