“Presume competence…The observer’s obligation is thus not to assume the meaning of something another person does but rather to presume there must be a rationale and then to try and discover it, always from the other person’s perspective, listening carefully.” – Douglas Biklen
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Every Child
Every child can learn how to connect and communicate with others, and how to learn and how to advance. It’s much easier for some than for others, but every child can progress.
The typically developing infant seems to advance almost automatically. They enjoy their world, take pleasure in changes, in surprises, in imitation.
The neurotypical toddler experiments and learns during all their waking hours. But for children who are delayed, whose development has deviated from the expected path, learning how to learn can be far more difficult and can easily plateau.
Progress with children with special needs calls for more understanding, more skill, more patience and belief in the child’s growing potential to grow, and more belief in the adult nurturer’s and mediator’s potential to connect and to guide.
Increasing Neurological and Mental Organization
Learning is never static. It is an ongoing interaction between mind, body and world. With every small success, with every practical problem solved, there are corresponding changes in the architecture and functioning of the brain.
The brain is plastic. With opportunities, experience and learning there is increasing neurological and mental organization. Reciprocal changes occur in the brain’s structure and function. Increasingly adaptive patterns of thought, feeling and action emerge. To learn is not merely to acquire information, but to continually organize our minds, enhancing our skills, our understandings and our potential.
The parent, teacher, and therapist who believe in the child and believe in themselves are essential to this process of reorganization. The child’s brain does not grow in isolation but in relationship.
New neurological connections and pathways formed within the child can be reflected in the interpersonal connection between the child and another human being. As the interpersonal relationship advances, the neurological connections become stronger. And as neurological connections are enhanced, interpersonal relationships are bolstered.
Communication and relationship, two foundations of development, support cooperation, purpose and progress. When interpersonal relationships are genuine and learning is interesting, when there is increasing trust and shared understandings, life becomes more rewarding for the child and for their adult mediators.
The Whole Child
We must see the whole child. Parallel Development’s Principle of Completeness reminds us that domains of child development cannot advance if they are isolated, fragmented, parceled out – motor here, language there, cognition somewhere else. Every developmental domain penetrates and interacts with every other.
The child is not a collection of loosely integrated parts but a fluid organization of linked systems, each influencing and being influenced by the others.
The family is an essential aspect of this interpersonal development system. When the parent changes, the child changes. When the child changes, the parent also changes. This reciprocal, adaptive movement between them, this dance of mutual development, lies at the heart of all true progress.
The family’s involvement and support are necessary, but it is not sufficient. All important adults in the child’s life need to be collaborative partners on the child’s development team.
The How of Learning
Learning is not only about content, but also about the process. The “how” of learning is as vital as the “what.” And that process is both concrete and abstract. Learning must involve building prerequisites for higher learning. And learning must be meaningful, enjoyable and practically rooted in real life.
The most fruitful teaching and mediation is playful, exploratory and responsive. It grows from the child’s interests and behaviors, and expands outward with the motivation and the support of their adult mediators. When learning becomes part of everyday life, when understanding naturally leads to action and imagination, the lessons endure and multiply.
Every act of nurturing, teaching, treatment, and assessment is also an act of relationship. In what we call Parallel Development, the adult learns as much as the child.
Parents, teachers and therapists who interact closely with the child, who watch and listen and feel how communication arises, who learn how to inspire interest and curiosity in each individual child, are also reshaping themselves.
The child’s growth is mirrored by their own. They learn not only how to guide but how to listen, how to mediate rather than direct, how to engage and to promote learning and change through collaboration rather than control.
As the adult mediator becomes more empathic, the child becomes more responsive. As the child begins to engage, the adult becomes more attuned.
There is not only ongoing feedback between the mediating adult and the child, but also frequent discussion, updating and feedback between all significant adults on the child’s development team.
Parallel Assessment
Ongoing Parallel Assessment must be re-imagined as an integral and continually present aspect of the development process. The focus of assessment is to know the child personally, deeply and sincerely; to notice large and small changes in the child and in the interpersonal relationship; and to learn how to plan and respond appropriately.
The child is not measured against a statistical norm. The goal of assessment is to know the child personally, deeply and sincerely so you can connect and communicate with them, so the child feels heard and becomes available and interested in sharing activities, in learning and advancing.
Parallel Assessment asks, Who is this child? How do they express their feelings and thoughts? How do they learn best? What brings them joy? What frustrates them? What are the conditions under which they thrive?
Collaboration, understanding and instruction improve because assessment and treatment are not separate acts, but two sides of one process of discovery and growth done by each adult mediator.
Parallel Assessment is formative, respectful, evidence-based and intuitive, always guided by the sensibilities, the motivations, the words, the actions and the progress of the child and of their adult mediators.
The intensity of mediation and learning does not involve coercion. It involves the closeness of the interpersonal relationship. It involves often repeated, knowledgeably supported, playful and enjoyable shared activities, frequent opportunities and learning experiences, interesting, practical and meaningful mediated problem-solving opportunities, and practice incorporated into ordinary daily routines.
Encouragement and Feedback
Learning opportunities involve personalized encouragement and feedback that transform effort into success. Errors, when understood and scaffolded properly, are not failures but invitations to improve, to try again, to grow.
The goal is not meaningless repetition and memorization but understanding, planning, doing, evaluation and generalization. There is a deepening of insight, an integration of new experiences into more successful functioning of the whole child, and importantly, the growth of the adult partner in the development process.
Every Child
For the nurturing and instruction of children with developmental delays, the best guide is often the natural course of human growth itself for every child. We look to the processes that govern typical development.
The warm, responsive relationship between infant and parent, the playful exploration of a young child’s world. We adapt these routine objectives for children who need more understanding, guidance, time, structure and personalized mediation.
We are guided by the Principle of Second Nature. By studying what is usual, by what is common and natural we learn how to move forward with children who have delays in their development, children who do not yet have the necessary prerequisites.
Connection and Relationship
The essence of Parallel Development and Parallel Assessment is connection. Connections within the child’s brain and mind, growth and integration between the developmental domains, between the child and their parents and family, connections between the child, the family, each of the child’s mediators, and connections with society and the larger world. Connection and learning move the child toward a more interesting, more participatory and more rewarding lifetime of human development.
Relationships are the bridges that transport understanding and growth. Family members, caregivers, teachers and therapists learn to build trust, to enter the child’s world before trying to lead them into ours. They learn to read the child’s idiosyncratic gestures, to hear the meaning beneath the words, even in the absence of verbal speech.
We need to presume competence and higher potential in every child and in ourselves. Assume that behind every act, however obscure, there is a feeling, a reason, an intention, a complex whole person trying to succeed and needing to communicate and to connect with us.
More Similarities than Differences
Each child is a unique set of changing qualities, temperaments, skills and capacities. Labels can pigeonhole the child into overly simplistic categories, but they can never capture the full richness of a person.
Children with special needs are in many ways more like their typically developing peers than they are different. But differences stand out and are easier to notice.
Like ourselves, children with special needs long for connection, mastery, and joy. The intention of Parallel Development and Parallel Assessment is not to separate children into diagnostic classes but to find better ways to promote their connection, their understanding, success and fulfillment.
The process of development for the child, the parent, the teacher and the therapist is at its deepest level an act of connection and of relationship. It is an interactive process of building trust, of discovering meaning, of becoming more complete together.
Learning and development are not merely the accumulation of skills and knowledge. Meaningful relationships and learning enable adaptive connections between neural, sensory, motor, cognitive, emotional and interpersonal domains that make us more capable of higher thought and judgment, safer, more understanding, more intentional, more patient, purposeful and resilient.
Improved learning and development build scaffolds supporting ever higher and more rewarding opportunities for connection and growth for every child and for every adult.
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