Durrant – building block 2

The second building block is really has two components. And one is providing warmth, and the other is providing structure. We know from many, many years of parenting research that it really all boils down to those two things. And what that means is that children need to be learning in a climate of warmth, which involves, really, physical and emotional security and safety. They have to know that they’re safe. They won’t be hurt, that they don’t feel under threat. When we feel anxious, whether we’re children or adults, when we feel anxious, it’s very difficult to take in information, to process it, and to then make use of it in our behavior. And so what we want to do is minimize the child’s anxiety, take away the fear. So that means that children need to feel that they’re always loved and that they will not be hurt by their parents either physically or emotionally. And when they are sure of that, they’re in a much better space for taking in information and processing and learning from it. But that has to go hand-in-hand with what we call structure. And structure is not control, and it’s not coercion. It’s not forcing the child to do what you want them to do. What it is teaching. It’s giving the child the information that she needs in order to learn what it is we want her to learn. So if, for example, the child is two years old and reaching for a knife, we know that’s dangerous. We know that that can’t happen, and the child needs to not touch that knife in case they get hurt. And they need to understand why that’s important. So if in that situation, we simply respond with a slap on the hand, the child might remove her hand from the knife, and it might possibly deter her from touching a knife, but not necessarily because she doesn’t know why it matters. And she doesn’t really to her, it’s a random event, and she doesn’t really understand what the problem is, and she hasn’t learned anything from that. If we say if you go near that knife again, you’re going to go to your room, she still doesn’t understand why it matters. So we know that all of us are much more likely to cooperate with any rules or instructions if we understand the reason why. And I think as adults, we can reflect on that in realize that that is definitely the case. We’re going to be much more likely to follow a rule or an instruction if we understand why it’s important. So structure is helping the child to understand why it’s important.