Engaging children
Welcome to the Engaging children learning pathway. This practical and insightful pathway focuses on the core principles and practice skills that meaningfully and collaboratively engage children in your work together. If you work mostly with parents, and working with children is within the scope of your practice, then this pathway will give you a grounding in essential skills to effectively engage with children in a therapeutic setting. If you already work with children, this series will present you with the ideas, understandings, and the skills in-action of experienced peers, to support and further your practice.
Children have the right to contribute to the decisions that affect them.1 As experts in their own lives, they have unique and valuable insights, knowledge and skills to contribute. Children’s participation can enhance their self-esteem and problem-solving skills, help practitioners and organisations to make more accurate and effective decisions, and improve the availability of programs and services that meet the needs of communities.2
Yet many practitioners, particularly those working in adult-focused services, lack confidence when it comes to collaborating with children in the therapeutic space. Additionally, an organisation or service may not be set up to support children’s meaningful participation.
This pathway explores the concept of children’s engagement as a foundation for responding to child mental health concerns. It offers a range of strategies for working with children in ways that centre their strengths, skills, preferences and know-how. This pathway will develop your understandings of the importance and benefits of engaging children as partners in practice, and the key perspective shifts that can help you to centre the child in your work. They will also help to increase your confidence in collaborating with children and exploring their perspectives on the problems they are facing.
Learning outcomes
The courses in this pathway are designed to be completed in full or for you to dip in and out on a skill-by-skill basis. Learning outcomes include:
- understanding the meaning of ‘engaging children as partners in practice’ and why it is important for children, families, communities, practitioners and organisations
- how to collaborate with children throughout your work together
- how to begin conversations with children about their strengths, skills and know-how
- how to begin and utilise conversations with parents about the child’s strengths and skills and know-how
- how to respond when children say very little
- how to respond when it seems the session is not going well
- how to respond collaboratively when parents and children bring different descriptions of problems
- ensuring problems are understood in the social context of children’s lives as a way to lessen experiences of shame
- how to enable children to describe their views on how problems are impacting on their lives
- how to enable children to describe the limits of a problem’s impact on their lives, so that their strengths, skills and know-how can be explored
- intentionally creating a child-friendly, welcoming physical space
- deciding whether to meet with children and parents separately, together, or a combination of both
- talking about your role and the purpose of the consultation in ways that resonate with children
- talking with children about privacy and confidentiality; and
- exploring children’s experience of safety and engage in safety planning with children.
References
- United Nations (UN). (1990). United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. New York: UN.
- Paterson, N. & Hunter, C. (2020). An overview of child participation: Key issues for organisations and practitioners. Adelaide: Emerging Minds.