(A Rare Innovation)
Help a child change his thinking and his behavior will change naturally.
When you really think about it, adults are usually more concerned with changing a child’s behavior than with the thinking behind that behavior. Our program teaches adults how to effectively help a child expand his thinking beyond himself so that his future choices include consideration of others. This changes everything!
How we arrest dangerous or offensive behaviors … how we correct those behaviors … how we involve the child in the correction process … how we reinforce corrections … what we expect from a child in the future … how we communicate those expectations … the eventual outcome – everything!
Our goal is to help children and the adults in their lives to interact more thoughtfully – to learn to consciously and consistently live from a core of mutual respect, caring and generosity instead of living from the more common theme of ‘… all about me’.
The point is that when a child in our care does something that we think needs to change, without DWD training, our natural reactions commonly take us down a path that looks something like this:
- First, we address or stop the behavior.
- Next we talk to the child about how wrong this or that behavior was. This phase may take the form of anything from a simple comment to an extended lecture … or series of emotionally-loaded short lectures.
- Then, if we want to emphasize the point, we issue some sort of ‘consequence’ normally some variation of a not-so-cleverly disguised punishment.
- Then, if someone else has been affected by the offending child’s actions, the child’s adult will probably ask the child to apologize, even if the child is showing no sign of regret or remorse.
- Finally, we may get around to the most important part -- the thinking part. But, even then, we tend to go about it in an unproductive sort of way. Somehow, we think that, “Why did you do that?” and, “Go think about what you did!” will help our young charges avoid in the future whatever it is that has gone wrong today.
How is DWD different?
- Of course, any behavior that is dangerous or harmful needs to be arrested.
- Following the DWD approach, the very next step goes to the thinking process. Why? Because virtually all behavior comes out what and how a child thinks. Therefore, to simply arrest a behavior without helping the child’s thinking is to plant the seeds of infinitely greater problems down the road.
- Central to this ‘thinking’ approach are the foundations of The THINK Space, which provide the framework for effectively guiding the thinking of children. Not that every intervention involves the formal use of The THINK Space. In fact, The THINK Space used too frequently diminishes its effectiveness. However, all the tools of the DWD approach draw from the same set of values that created The THINK Space in the first place. That core value?
“Help a child change his thinking and his behavior will change naturally.”