Page 8 - EA Handbook 2024 2025 no videos

Key Messages: Shifting Mindset

The traditional behaviourist approach relies on the child having suficient
desire for the reward and fear of the punishment. 1

2 It also needs the reward or punishment to remain at the forefront of the
child’s mind.

The behaviourist approach assumes the child has the skills to manage in
the moment; it assumes their dificulty is a matter of‘will not skill’. 3

Using‘carrots’and‘sticks’can seem efective in the short-term, but it does
4 not address unmet needs and missing skills and thus secure long-term,

sustainable improvement. Children’s dificulties can keep ‘popping back up’.

Expectations of children can still be kept high in a therapeutically and
neurodiversity-informed approach. We can be ‘insistent, persistent, 5

consistent, with a bucketful of kindness’.