Next Steps: Understanding & Identifying Feelings & Needs

How do you feel regarding your child’s challenging behavior?

Starting with this question first helps providers enter the parents’s world. Providers should never assume they know how the child’s behavioral issue is feeling for the parent. Starting with this question also helps providers empathize with the parent. For the parent, simply being listened to carefully can contain their distress. This containment allows the parent to see the issues more clearly and identify solutions they had not thought of before. As the parent feels the provider’s empathy, often this felt empathy can serve as a foundation upon which they can rebuild their empathy for their child, if that has been diminished by the child’s difficult behavior.

How do you think your child feels at this time?

Understanding how the child is feeling can help the parent empathize with their child. It also reframes “misbehavior” as a sign of unmet social or emotional needs. This can be a very useful paradigm shift for parents, to go from thinking that their child is doing something wrong to thinking that their child has an unmet need. Parents can then be given the opportunity to reflect about and use their knowledge of their child to alleviate their child’s distress.

What do you think you need during this time?

By empathizing with the parent and truly trying to understand the parent’s needs, the “joining” process is continued. This question can also help to contain the parent’s distress and set the stage for the parent to make an empathetic shift to being able to identify the child’s needs.

What do you think your child needs at this time?

Finally, this question allows the parent to think with the provider about what they can do to better meet their child’s needs. Often the process of empathizing and thinking together recalibrates the parent’s intentions, helping them become more attuned to their child in their everyday interactions. This alone can help improve their child’s behavior, by restoring some of the back and forth or reciprocity in their relationship, which contributes to the child feeling contained and better able to regulate his emotions.

Providers may find that periodically reviewing Handout #16 Social-Emotional Needs of Children and Handout #17 Meeting the Social and Emotional Needs of Infants and Toddlers especially before a challenging behavior consult visit, can help keep in mind the important social-emotional needs that the caregivers and child both have. This can help providers see where there might be an unmet need for either the parent or the child or both. Also, offering these handouts to parents can be helpful at times to help parents reflect about what their child might be needing.

In the next section, written and video case studies show how this approach of joining with families to consider the unmet needs beneath the challenging behavior are provided.