“As a therapist or teacher, never forget that relationships are a two-way street. If you want my child to do something for you, then you must do something for him first. People do things for others because they like them or want to please them, or because they fear them. You have a choice in how you behave; you need to model proper behavior, not just demand it of my child.” – J.L.
Post #1 in this category. We recommend you read posts in numerical order.
Learning is not merely a matter of acquiring information or practicing skills. For children with developmental delays, the experience of learning can feel like stepping too close to a ledge, leaving behind what is safe, what is known, and venturing into something strange and uncertain, leaving the child confused and vulnerable.
It is easy to forget how threatening novelty and complexity can be. For a child whose body, feelings, words, reasoning and social instincts do not always respond as expected, learning something new may feel like an invitation to fail. Learning means letting go of the familiar. It means exposing the places where you feel least capable. There is the risk of error, failure, stress, of being misunderstood and judged.
Not understanding, taking a long time, making mistakes, run the risk of being excluded, removed from the mainstream classroom and placed with children seen as less competent, less valued. School too often mirrors society, a place that divides, labels and sorts.
For children with developmental delays and learning issues, lessons involving something unfamiliar, complex, difficult, and confusing may feel like walking into chaos, feeling harmed and trapped.
But these difficulties may not be unique to the child. Parents, teachers and therapists, those guiding the child, often face their own uncertainties when it comes to understanding what is necessary to relate to this particular child who has difficulties communicating and learning. Change may be as difficult for adult mediators as it is for children, maybe more difficult.
Adults, too, cling to what they know. We tend to teach the way we were taught. We assess and instruct using methods we learned from our parents, or from our experiences in school or from professional training. When adults are working with something new or difficult, a child who learns differently, who doesn’t respond to typical methods, we tend to default to familiar scripts rather than seeking a new path.
Jean Piaget described two essential processes in learning: assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation involves taking in new information and fitting it into what we already understand. It is comfortable, efficient, and often unconscious. Accommodation, by contrast, is more demanding. It involves reshaping our mental frameworks, changing our assumptions, and adjusting our ways of thinking. This may mean questioning the way we relate to a child, or the way we interpret their feelings, their thinking and learning processes, their behaviors, or the assumptions we make about what they can and cannot do.
Piaget recognized that assimilation usually comes first; it’s easier. But when assimilation no longer works, when a child’s reality, and the way we nurture and instruct and do therapy with this child, doesn’t fit into our existing models, we must accommodate. We must change. Children have to learn to make adjustments, to take chances with support and encouragement to make conscious and focused efforts so they can advance. So do the child’s adult mediators.
In my experience, both children and adults resist accommodation. Children with developmental delays may cling to routines, repeat phrases or avoid novel experiences. Their difficulties, their lack of confidence, feeling unsafe and vulnerable hold them back from testing the water, from trying, from working hard to learn something new, learning another way.
“It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning.“– Claude Bernard
Parents and experienced professionals may also cling to routines and avoid change. It may even be more difficult for adults to make changes and to learn different ways. We not only have a default toward assimilation and a tendency to avoid the novel or complex and to stay comfortable with the familiar. Our curiosity, openness and flexibility may be bogged down by pride and professional arrogance. We may self-importantly resist altering our preconceptions, prejudices, and routines, even when our intentions, designs, and methods aren’t working.
Neurodivergent children and their neurotypical, well-intentioned caregivers, teachers, and therapists may feel more comfortable doing more of the same, to cling to what’s known. It is a deeply human tendency to stick with the familiar, even when it is not working.
Real learning and real growth involve change, courage and support. No one, child or adult, should have to venture into unfamiliar and frightening territory by themselves. We all need mediation and understanding, guidance, encouragement and a framework for understanding what we’re feeling, thinking and doing with the child and with ourselves. With the right support, encouragement, and explanation, we are better able to risk uncertainty. We can better tolerate mistakes, confusion and the uncomfortable gap between what we know and what we don’t know.
We adults are not so different from the children we are helping. Their hesitations mirror our own. We hide behind authority, credentials and professional roles when we need to make changes in ourselves, when we have to learn new procedures, new mindsets. To help children learn, we must also be willing to learn. To help them change, we must be willing to change.
Parallel Development emphasizes openness and empathy. The realization and acceptance that, in helping a child move forward, we must be humble enough to re-evaluate and re-learn what we thought we already knew. The child is not the only one needing to grow.
Copyright © 2025 Shlomo Chaim
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