Social and emotional learning

What we do not use, and why

No behaviour chart, no traffic-light system, no cloud-and-sunshine board, and no moving a child's name down a list in front of the room. A three-year-old whose name sits under a sad face all morning has not learned about behaviour, they have learned something about themselves, and it is the children who most need help who spend the most time at the bottom.

No naughty step and no time-out in isolation. A dysregulated three-year-old sent away alone is a child asked to do the hardest thing they cannot yet do without the person who could help.

And no public praise as a control mechanism — I like the way Amina is sitting nicely — which works by making every other child briefly the wrong one. It is effective and it is corrosive.

What we do instead

Stay with the child. An adult sits alongside, says what happened and names what everybody felt, and waits. Co-regulation is not a technique, it is an adult lending a nervous system, and it is the whole of the job at this age.

There is a calm corner in each room — a cushion, a canopy, a basket of soft things — and it is a place a child chooses, never a place a child is sent. The moment it becomes a punishment it stops working, permanently, and children can tell the difference immediately.

Change the situation before correcting the child. Most conflict at two and three is a design problem — one of a thing, two children, no words — and altering the setup is both kinder and more effective than teaching a lesson to somebody who cannot yet hold it.

Repair, which is the part that matters

After a conflict, both children stay involved. Not a forced apology, which teaches a child that saying a word ends an obligation, but something concrete: fetching the cloth, helping rebuild the tower, checking whether the other child is alright.

A forced sorry is the single most common thing adults ask for and the least useful thing children learn. What we want is a four-year-old who notices they have upset somebody and does something about it, and that is built by practising the doing.

Both families hear about anything significant on the day, in the same words, without either child being named to the other. That is the same rule as for biting and for the same reason.

Why this is on the page about photographs

Because a child's social life is precisely the thing a daily photo stream cannot show you. Nobody photographs the fortnight your child has been shadowing one other child who does not want to play, or the twenty minutes after a nap when they could not be comforted.

Those are the things that would actually change what you do this evening. So they go in the written note and into a conversation at the door, in the week they are happening, rather than into a termly review where they arrive too late to be useful.