All My Children

When setting targets it is important that they are as specific as possible. Playing ‘nicely’ is far too vague to be measurable. Sharing a toy for a set period of time (anything from one minute at a time up to, say, ten minutes) will be far more useful as evidence of a child’s progress. Simple notes will need to be kept of progress and will provide evidence of what parts of the programme have been least and most successful. Every child is an individual but following a core set of activities during the programme will make it easier to deliver similar interventions to others in the future.

Once the parent interview, staff briefing and target setting have been done the programme itself can be started. All early years settings are different but a sample plan is outlined below. Continue Reading »

The majority of children settle happily into the early years setting — some take a bit longer than others and may go through a shy or tearful phase while others bounce into the room with confidence from day one. A lot depends on their experiences prior to joining your nursery or playschool. If they have already experienced playing with other children, have visited other people’s houses, been to the park and discovered the excitement and pitfalls of

Swings and slides and have learnt how to cope with sharing toys and games with brothers and sisters they will probably cope with most early years situations. Continue Reading »

Lastly, God wants our children to wait until marriage for sex to protect them from relational problems. The first of these is a breakdown in communication. One young person said, “Like many others, I have learned that if there is too much touching in a relationship, it can cause uneasy feelings which lead to lack of communication.”

Wrote another, “Spending this time on sex takes away from time which could be spent getting to know each other more. Just at the time when the two need to talk most about their deepening feelings, problems they have, and so on, the verbal communication is stopped.” Continue Reading »

How important such play is in establishing selfhood was demonstrated to me by an eight-year-old autistic girl. As often happens, the severe pathology of her case permitted observing a phenomenon also seen in normal behavior but as if it were under microscopic enlargement, or thrown into bold relief by a bright light. This girl had been virtually mute all her life. She completely rejected all efforts to reach her physically or verbally, and was unresponsive to all aspects of her environment. She resented all efforts to make contact with her; if one reached out to her actively, she responded with angry, terrified withdrawal. Continue Reading »

Since the child often cannot really know what will be done to him, many events not actually painful will nevertheless make him fearful. After such an event, a child will typically play out the experience in fantasy. Following a visit to the dentist, for example, the child might play at fixing another child’s teeth, telling him to keep his mouth wide open, as he himself was instructed, and inserting little pieces of cardboard to take X rays. If no other “patient” is available, a toy animal will do. The many hours a child may spend in such play is a clear indication of how much actual time he would have needed in the dentist’s chair in order to truly understand what was done to him and why, and to deal appropriately with all the emotions the experience aroused. Just as we can understand and analyze events that move too fast for our comprehension by watching them in slow-motion replays, so the child learns to understand and analyze, through long hours of repetitious playback, events previously beyond his comprehension. Continue Reading »

Transition homes in the community

This is an area where it is extremely difficult to succeed. Because of the stigma attached to the street children, people in the community generally fear to accommodate them in their own homes. There is a tremendous need to educate the community in this regard; already the project held its first seminar in the township to make people aware of the street children’s plight and of its difficulties in finding transition homes, before the children can return to their own families. The project has also approached the churches for transition homes, but failed to obtain a positive response! As a result, it applied to the local township council and was given a piece of land to erect a transition home but funds are needed to build such a home to accommodate the children. Continue Reading »

• Parentless children: Again, following a divorce, children may find themselves in a catch-22 situation where they feel unwanted by both their new stepfather and their new stepmother. This seems to affect the boys especially who tend to be far more rebellious than girls. For a time, boys may move between the two new ’sets of parents‘ without ever settling down, until the day comes when they feel unwanted by both ’sets’ and decide to make it on their own on the street by leaving their families.

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Girls are as subject as boys to all kinds of frustrations, very much including sibling rivalry and anger at their parents, and so it would serve them equally well to be able to discharge their anger through symbolic play, as with toy guns. Furthermore it would prevent their feeling frustrated because an important type of symbolic play available to boys is not available to them. By playing with guns they too would get things out of their system. They would realize that boys are not advantaged in comparison to girls in this respect. Continue Reading »

On the other hand, such parallel investment in play can work well for a time and then backfire through adult motives. The following story is an illustration of the point, and it involves a partly happy but much more unhappy memory that haunted a highly successful man all his life. The man’s father was very much involved in stamp collecting, so the youngster needed little urging to become an avid stamp collector too. Continue Reading »

All this changes the instant the game gets started. Then the friends and cooperators become competitors who feel they have to show themselves superior to those who only a moment before were their equals. This makes them feel insecure and tense, where before they had been secure and relaxed. Now not only do they wish to defeat those who were so recently their comrades and friends, but even the members of one’s own team tend to be critical when a player does not live up to expectations (which are often unreasonably high because of the wish that their team should be victorious). Continue Reading »