The Irreducible Needs of Children by T. Berry Brazelton

Author:T. Berry Brazelton [T. BERRY BRAZELTON AND STANLEY I. GREENSPAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2012-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

Individual Differences in the School System

SIG: Once the children get a little older, what should the responsibility of the educational system be, to augment the medical responsibilities?

TBB: I think we should have our most highly trained, expert assessors at work in the school systems (we learned it in Head Start). First grade ought to have plenty of trained people watching those children to see who’s functioning well and who isn’t. Then, we would need referral systems to pick up the pieces.

SIG: What sort of a team or person do we want in the schools to carry forth this philosophy?

TBB: Somebody who looks at the total child. This would be a child psychologist with developmental training. The person could tell the child’s stage of development, temperament, and individual differences, and create some picture of the home for each child in the class.

SIG: Would that person work through the health system or through the educational system?

TBB: I think it ought to be done through both: first through maternal infant care in the health system, and then as soon as you get the children at school. If you get them in Head Start, then you begin back there. We’ve proved that, doing what we could, which wasn’t very much. Head Start made a difference in children’s outcome later on.

SIG: The Touchpoints model could continue all through adolescence, so the school person would be collaborating with the Touchpoints health person.

TBB: We haven’t reached into the school system, but we’ve certainly tied into day care, and it’s worked like a charm. The day care people say to a mother, “Is your one-year-old waking up at night?” and the mother says, “Yes, how did you know?” “Because she’s working so hard on learning to walk all day long, she must be waking at night, and she must be hard to feed.” The mother says, “Wow, she knows my baby!” and she becomes involved in day care in a way she wasn’t before.

SIG: The public schools have to take a conceptual shift here. The public school system and, to some extent, the day care system really see themselves as purely educational. They have to change their scope, just as health care needs to broaden and consider relationships and interactions and emotional-social development as part of health care. Similarly, education can’t have a narrow definition of intelligence. Once you broaden the definition of intelligence, you see the importance of early relationships. Interactive relationships are the basis of how you learn to think.

We’re not talking about small numbers of children when we’re talking about children who have especially challenging individual differences. Although it’s been estimated that between 15 and 20 percent of children have clinically identifiable problems, the children who come to school trusting, capable of intimacy, capable of sharing, capable of empathy, and capable of using ideas in imaginative play and in reflective discussions (rather than acting needs out) are probably less than half of the children.

The purview of education must be broadened to consider all these individual differences we’ve been talking about.

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