 What kind of adult do children need in order to feel safe? And how can we be that adult? That's what we're going to be exploring in today's episode. So this concept of a safe adult it comes from sort of trauma informed practice and all that school of thought is loads of evidence loads of research out there, but for our purposes today we're essentially thinking about adults that kids know that they can rely on and trust and who enable them to feel safe. So they can do the all-important work of being a child. When children don't feel safe, then they tend to take on adult thoughts, feelings and responsibilities and they tend to do a lot less kind of laughter, play, connecting and so on. And so it's really important that there are safe adults in the lives of children so they can do the kid thing because doing the kid thing is the most important work of a kid. So what is a safe adult and how can we become that? I have come up with five C's. Things that make you a safe adult don't have to begin with C, but in this episode of my podcast they all do and they are that adults would be calm, they'd be consistent, they'd communicate well, they build connections and they're curious. We're going to go through each of those C's in turn. I'll talk to it a little bit and you might think of some of your own along the way too, but you'll get a bit of a feel for what being a safe adult might look like and feel like for the children in your care. OK, so the first C is for calm. I come back to the idea of calm a lot. Calm adults are one of the most helpful things for children, particularly those who are vulnerable, particularly those who are distressed or who are challenged more generally with their emotional regulation and feelings of safety. Adults who seem to be calm and in control are an absolute gift to our children. So we sometimes will need to use strategies in order to create that calm. And sometimes for short periods, we might need to fake that calm. But in order to get there, we can try some of our favourite techniques. And many of these, many of you will have heard before, but that doesn't make it any harm in repeating them. I will do so briefly, though. So we can try things like our slow, low, low speaking. Yep, pedaling that one out again. Slow, low, low speaking enables us to take any conversation that we're having or soliloquy, we're saying, and making it sound like we're cool, calm and in control. We do this by speaking more slowly, slow, by lowering the pitch low. So we're speaking a bit more duplu and we're going to lower the volume, speaking a bit more quietly. So slow, low, low, slow it down, lower the pitch, lower the volume. We do this because when we're angry or we're anxious, we speak fast. We speak shrill, we speak loud and we're trying to do the opposite of that. We are trying to make our voice say, hey, there's no need to panic. It's absolutely fine. I'm totally and utterly in control of this situation. Now, the great thing about slow, low, low talking is you can do that. You can convey that, even if actually internally you're screaming, run a king, run a king. That's a great new word. We should adopt that. Run a king is when you're running with panic. So if you're screaming, run a king or otherwise just not quite holding it together, you can appear to be holding it together by using your slow, low, low speaking. You could use your slow, low, low speaking whilst deploying one of the other strategies and talking a child through them. So the next one I was going to share was five, four, three, two, one grounding. This is a grounding strategy. Those are designed to keep us in the moment to take us away from the difficult thoughts, feeling experiences that might be in our head or in our surrounding environment and to take us right into the here and now and the safety of being connected to our immediate situation. With five, four, three, two, one, we look for five things that we can see and we might name those out loud. We search for four things that we can hear in our surroundings. We then look for three things that we can touch. What do they feel like stroking a cat? We think two things we can smell and then you can go for one thing you can taste, but I tend to say one deep cleansing breath. Now, the thing with five, four, three, two, one, I went through it in a certain order. You don't have to. Basically, you're taking the senses. You're taking lead from the environment around you and your naming stuff that you can touch, smell, feel, whatever. You don't even have to do five, four, three, two, one. It's just a framework. Don't get hung up on not being able to remember. Am I meant to hear first or see first or touch first? Well, I don't know. Just forget all that and just remember senses are really powerful. They're really grounding. Let's name some stuff that we can see, hear, feel, et cetera. OK. And then finally, we've got box breathing. So there are so many different breathing strategies. Box breathing is one of the simplest, easiest, quickest to share. And it's also one that's suitable across the ages and doesn't feel babyish or anything like that, which some of them do. I love them all for every age, but some people don't like being told to blow a feather from their palm if they're a barely 16 year old boy and they've just had a big kind of meltdown. So box breathing, much more socially acceptable for all types of kids and adults. So here we take control of our breathing by breathing in for the count of four. And you might count this in your slow, low, low voice for a child. You might say, we're going to breathe in two, three, four. And then we hold for the count of four, two, three, four. We breathe out for the count of four, two, three, four. And we hold for the count of four, two, three, four. And you can talk a child through that. You can do it alongside them. You can draw it. You can do it however you like. Make it yours. But when we do that, when we take control of our breathing, it's a superpower because it sends messages to both our body and our brain. So when we're in control, we're taking control of our breathing, then our brain kind of gets this message, OK, OK, OK. We've got this in control. No need to panic. It's all OK. And so our brain doesn't do the big red panic button thing and go kind of, ah, instead it's like, no, OK, I think they've got this situation. It's all right. No need to instigate panic attack. On the other hand, or as well, our body also gets messages that things are going OK, because as we take control of our breathing, our physiology starts to change because we're getting the balance a bit more right as we're breathing in enough oxygen and all that sort of thing. So body and brain both go, oh, yeah, here's someone who's in control. That's good. And things start to feel both physiologically and psychologically different for the person doing the breathing. And perhaps for you as the person guiding them, things begin to calm. So they get calmer, you get calmer. It's a virtual cycle of catching calmness, hurrah. So the first C was calm, being a calm adult, even in situations when you don't necessarily feel calm. Now, remembering those moments, sometimes when we have a child who's scared, who is distressed and remember scared might look many ways. Scared might look like angry, but where we've got a distressed child and they need a safe adult, they need us to be the swan. So we try and we keep it calm and we let this child know, it's OK, I'm in control of this situation. You do not need to be in control because I am in control and I am calm. And I've got this, even if you're frantically paddling like this one beneath the surface, they need to see the calm because that's what they need right now. Later, you go off, you let off steam, you decompress, you have a good cry if you need to, whatever you need. But in that moment, that is the adult that that child needs. Our next C, C number two, if you like, is for consistency. Boring is brilliant. Children need boring adults. They need adults in their life who are totally predictable, where they know exactly where they stand, where they know what's going to happen with this adult, what to expect of them and what that adult expects of them in return. This is because when we have inconsistent adults, so this might be the kind of adult who one minute is loving you and being so kind and caring and nurturing and that feels so good. And then the next moment, they're flying off the handle, shouting at you or abusing you or generally not being the adult they were just now. That's scary and unpredictable for kids and they don't quite know which adult they're going to get when they walk into the room. That leaves this kind of feeling of anxiety because just unpredictability makes us anxious because we spend a lot of time kind of second guessing what's going to happen. How am I going to manage it? Who am I going to be met with today? So what they need is predictable adults. And this isn't just about how you respond emotionally. And all of us will have little moments of inconsistency. So don't beat yourself up if you're thinking, oh, well, you know what? Ninety nine point nine percent of the time I am cool. I am calm. I am collected and predictable. And every now and then I just lose it. That's actually OK as long as a we talk about it. When these inconsistencies happen, we might actually role model how we manage those tricky moments and we forgive ourselves. We repair the rupture and we move on. But what I'm talking about here are adults who are just all over the place, one minute kind, one minute, not so kind and different rules, different things going on where just kids just don't know what to expect, basically. So boring is good. How can you do this? So things you can do and trying here to adapt them for the very wide and varied, wonderful audience that come to the podcast. So one thing I think about a lot is rules. So this applies really easily in the classroom setting, but you can think about it in school or I know some of you are working in hospitals, for example, generally where we have children in a place, there are some kind of rules, whether we call them rules or they're just sort of expectations. Children need to know what those rules are, what those expectations are. So if they're not explicit in your setting, you might think about making them explicit. But the key thing about rules is not to have too many. So review those rules, know what they are, make sure that they've been really clearly communicated and then try to just have fewer of them. So Paul Dix, who is amazing and has written brilliant, brilliant books on behaviour using a relational approach, he always recommends no more than three rules. You basically want rules that the children and the adults fully understand and can always bring to mind and remember. As soon as you've got more than people can tell you right away, including even the littlest people, then the rules aren't actually going to be helpful for your environment. Instead, they're going to be an added stress for kids who might be not remembering them and worrying that they might get them wrong. So have few simple rules that are communicated well and which are adhered to. Next thing is to add in like routines and rituals into the day that can make things feel kind of comfortable and predictable and nice. So that can make us feel kind of consistent and safe and a little bit boring in a good way. So just think about bits of the day that you might be able to repeat in a similar way each time. So if you were in a classroom, it might be about how you meet and greet the children or what happens at tidy up time or what happens when we say goodbye. At home, you might think about things like bedtime. What are the routines and rituals around bedtime? If you've got a child who is struggling with going to school or saying goodbye, you might create routines and rituals around what happens with saying goodbye. So you can be consistent and predictable in those times, even when your heart is breaking and you don't want to say goodbye. Actually, you know this is the pattern. These are the things we do. This is the song we sing or the thing that we say and where you go and what happens. And then we say goodbye and then we do it consistently. And the child knows what to expect, what's expected of them. And we all manage a little bit more easily. So routines and rituals are great. They're especially good for our neurodiverse children and those others who might crave routine and need that structure. But every child benefits from this. It makes you feel predictable and safe. It's good. And then finally, if we need to change things, so we might need to have different rules for some children because our standard rules, even if they're simple and few, might not work for a particular child because of their needs or where they're at right now. Or if we need to make a change to our routines and rituals, for example, then we need to just think about how to share and stick to the new way of doing things. So it's not about not being flexible. We all need to be flexible sometimes. It's about recognising that sometimes in our kindness and our care, by being flexible and changing the routine and changing the rules to meet the needs of the child and meet them where they're at, which is fantastic, sometimes we inadvertently do more harm than good because we've taken a predictable scenario and we've made it unpredictable by changing it. So how we fix that is we make it predictable again. So we say, hey, you've been struggling with X. That's not really working for us, is it? So let's do Y instead and we'll do that every day. And we agree that new rule, that new routine, that new way of doing things and we'll make it really explicit. So it's not about not being flexible. It's about making a change and sticking with the change. So what you wouldn't do is be endlessly flexible and keep changing things all the time. You change from thing X to thing Y and you carefully communicate thing Y. And we're going to think about communication next. Hurrah, seamlessly moving on. So C number three is about communication. And, you know, those of you listening here who have been to some of my talks or listened to other things or watched other videos, a lot of this is going to be feeling kind of familiar. That's intentional because what I've tried to do here is weave together a whole bunch of stuff that I talk about all the time and think about what does this look like all together in one piece? For me as an adult trying to be who my children need every day. So there might not be new stuff in here, but hopefully it's helping you think about it in the context of you and bringing it all together. So the next C is for communication. So safe adults, adults who make children feel safe will communicate in consistent, predictable ways. They will communicate in ways that children hear. Little nugget here. Listen up if you were just kind of like doing the washing up and only had half your mind on just tune in because this is very, very important. When it comes to communication, it's not about what we say. It's about what the other person hears. It's not about what we say. It's about what the other person hears. Now, what do I mean by that? What I mean is we can have the best of intentions and we can communicate the right things. We can have done the right things and we're trying to share them. But unless the person we're communicating with actually hears what we meant to say in the way that we meant to say it, then that message is actually lost. And what can go wrong here are either they literally don't hear it because perhaps we've communicated in a way that is inaccessible to them or perhaps there's some reason why they might misread the tone and what is said. So an example here of adults communicating with adults rather than adults and children. But this is a global thing. I recently had an email from the headteacher of one of my daughters and that email made me very upset. It was an angry email. I was really upset by it and the school is across the road and I have a very good relationship with his headteacher. We spend a lot of time together. And so I picked up the phone and I said, I'd really like to speak to the headteacher, please. I'm very upset by his email. He's clearly very angry with me and I'd rather have a conversation than an email, please. So then the headteacher and I did have a conversation very soon after that because he's great and he responds to these things well. And he said, not an angry email. I'm not angry at all. I don't know why you thought that. Have a look at it again. It's not angry. And I did look at it again and I said, I'm looking at it again and I'm still reading it as angry. And he said, I can tell you categorically, I'm not angry. That was helpful. We worked through it. We moved on. But the point is, even as I reread that email now, I still read it as angry. Whether or not he meant it as angry, I read it as angry. What the head and I learned that day was he shouldn't send me emails because I can't interpret his tone. It's much better if we have a face-to-face conversation where I can read his body language and how his voice is and that sort of thing, because I've got pretty skilled in those things over time. But I hope that's illustrative, that it's not about what we think we're saying. It's about what the person we're saying it to hears. And when I say what we say, we're not just talking about talking here. Communication takes many, many forms. It's what we show. It's what our body language says. It's the things we might write down. The images we might create and so on and so forth. So how do we become a safe communicator? One that makes children feel safe and communicates in a consistent way that is hard in the way that we need it to. So some things we can try. Simplify stuff. Simplify your instructions. We've spoken in other media and I think on the podcast too recently about the need to simplify instructions for autistic and other neurodiverse learners. You can use that for all learners. Just simplifying instructions. Making what you need a child to do as simple as possible, whether that is through the spoken word or we are going to write it down or we're going to show pictures or a video, whatever we're sharing. Just keeping what we want from the child as simple as possible so there's far less room for misinterpretation is super helpful and keeping it clear and concrete too. Using the words that we actually mean rather than kind of idioms and stuff like that. As my daughter Lyra so eloquently puts it, what she as an autistic 13 year old now, she is an autistic 13 year old needs from the adults around her is for them to say what they'll do and do what they'll say. Honestly, if you get that right, you're pretty much there to be honest, particularly with Lyra. So we're going to simplify our instructions. We might use a few different forms of communication in order to get across what it is that we're trying to say. So some kids are great with being spoken to. Some prefer to have things written down. Some will like to have pictures. Some will like to be shown. There's all sorts of different ways that we might communicate and actually using more than one at a time is often the key to success if we are able to do that, particularly if we're working with a group of children who might have different preferences, but you might have a child who appears to be taking it all on board as you're saying it, who has got the nod and the smile right down there. And then as soon as you're done, they realize they have no idea and that list of instructions might have really helped. They might have read through it as you were talking and they might have made their own notes. They might need it to refer back to. They might have understood what you said, but not retained it. There's all sorts of stuff going on there. Basically, multiple media where you can can be superbly helpful. And then we can also just check for understanding. So if there's any possibility and there's always a possibility the child might not have understood what we've asked of them, what we've told them, what we've said to them, just check back, ask them, have you understood what I've said and make it okay for them to say, I haven't got a clue. I'm really sorry. I really don't know what you actually want me to do. We need to create that culture. And again, not just with children, we need to create this culture with adults as well. We, in an ideal world, particularly if you have any kind of coaching, mentoring, supporting type position, perhaps you are a more senior member of staff within a team. It's really crucial that other members of your team, particularly those who you might be senior to in kind of rank, which can make it harder for them to ask again. But it's really crucial that we create an environment where they can say, I'm sorry, I didn't understand that. Would you mind telling me again? Would you mind repeating? Would you mind rephrasing? Could you explain it a bit more? Creating that culture where people can actually ask us to clarify is relatively easily done if we try, but almost never done if we don't. Okay, so of our five Cs so far, we've thought about being calm. We've thought about being consistent. We've thought about our communication. And next, we're going to think about connections. So children need to feel like they belong. They need to feel like they matter to somebody. And if we're an adult who makes them feel safe, if we're a safe adult, we can enable this feeling of connection by actively seeking connections with the children in our care. So what can we do to do this? The number one thing, smile. Actually just catching a child's eye if they're comfortable with that or kind of gazing in the general direction and giving them a big smile and a nod can be super helpful. We should particularly look to do this with the quieter children. The children who tend to go unnoticed by us tend to go unnoticed by many. And there are some children who float around day-to-day life having no meaningful connections with any adults. And that makes me deeply sad and it's not nice for them. So we should notice them. My little hack here is if you are someone who cares for or works with a group of children, just now take a moment just to list them. List them out, don't use any cheats, don't use a seating plan that you're going through in your head or anything, just list them as they come to your mind. And then the child that comes to mind last, they'll be a few that come to mind right away because they are brilliant or boisterous. There will be the next lot who come to mind who are kind of somewhere in the middle there who you get some engagement and interaction from but they don't tend to cause particular trouble or have those moments where you're like, oh wow. And then there are the children that I'm worried about. Two or three at the end there who glide through life like wallpaper and they're not causing any trouble. And they're just kind of quietly there, not connecting. And it can be days. Sometimes I speak to these children in schools and it can be days between them having a meaningful interaction with either an adult or a child. We can change that with a smile and a nod and showing a child, I've noticed you're in the world, I care. Pick a kid and notice them for a few weeks. You will see them grow, you will see them change, you will see them begin to shine with a little bit of extra attention. Pick a child, notice them for a few weeks. Once they're a bit more, they're making themselves more noticeable the time, move on, pick another child. It sounds really strange thing to do but it makes huge, huge differences. Just pick that child, just notice them. You don't need to tell them you're doing anything different, just have conversations with them, notice them, smile at them, let them know that in someone's world, they matter, connect with them. And then another thing we can do in terms of connection is just thinking about our questioning and our talking and our conversations with children so that we can prompt slightly deeper conversations. We don't have to have great long hour-long conversations with children unless we want to and those can be amazing but we might just have small pockets of time and we might find that a child begins to talk to us about something of interest or we prompt a conversation of something of interest and what we sometimes want to do is enable that conversation to go a little deeper, maybe because they're exploring something tricky and challenging and we need to learn more or maybe because they're telling us about the thing they love, they're telling us about Pokemon and we don't know much about that but we'd love to connect with them and allow them to talk about their passion, their expertise so we can use various prompts to help with this. I'll link out to a little graphic on this scene after. Remember them all and you can make your own. These are not challenging but things like, why? And we're asking why in a curious, not an accusative way so never why but why? Great question. Tell me more. Just prompting them to continue talking. Tell me more. I use that one all the time. I love people. I'm really curious about people and I do spend a lot of my time going, tell me more. What happened next? How did that feel? The therapist's question but there's a reason why there's this trope about therapists saying, how did that feel? Because actually it works. It works. Understanding how something felt for someone is a great thing. What were you expecting? And then you can explore little things there around was this as you expected? But yeah, what were you expecting to happen? Not in again, you've got to get the tone right. It's not like, and what were you expecting to happen? But rather, what were you expecting to happen? Like, you're going on a journey with them. You're curious, what was going to happen next? I'm dying to know. What did you find surprising? This can be great when we were reviewing if a child has tried something new or something like that. They've been somewhere they've not been before. They've tried a new strategy or they learn about a new topic. What surprised you? What did you find surprising? Would you do it that way again? Again, going with the curious, not the accusative but would you do it that way again? We're basically exploring, did this work for you? Was it helpful? Is there something you'd do differently? What went well? What could have been better? And then keep going. So sometimes, again, this is like tell me more right back at the top of the list there. Keep going is just an invitation when a child has started to talk about something say, oh, I want to know more about this. When I'm delivering training, I will often invite people within the audience to share their ideas and experiences. And often someone will say something brilliant and really interesting in about 10 words. And I'll be like, oh my goodness, I need to know more about this. You know, I'll have just opened this genie from a bottle about something really wonderful that's happening in their setting. And I just generally go say more. And that's my kind of go-to phrase. And it's a really odd thing to say, but it works. It's just like, I just must know more about this. Just basically me saying, I want to hear the full version. You've given me the TLDR version. Too long didn't read version. I actually want to know all the gory details. Please tell me everything about this. I want to know more. We all want to know more, keep going. So those kinds of phrases tell me more, keep going. In my instance, say more. Things that invite someone who has just said something just to go a little bit deeper, letting them know I am engaged, I am interested. Yes, please do expand on this topic of conversation. And then finally, finally, finally, finally, our last C is about curiosity. So children need adults who try to retain that childlike sense of curiosity in order to explore their worlds with them, to try and make their worlds feel safer. So sometimes we're going to be supporting a child for whom everything isn't entirely perfect or just where they're trying to learn about new things and stuff. And having an adult alongside them who is curious with them, about them looking at the world through their eyes and in their shoes can make them feel much safer. And can help us find how to do things differently. So in order to be that curious adult that a child might need and retain that childlike sense of curiosity, things we can do. We can wonder what need is being met here. And this is a question I have at the back of my mind always whenever I'm seeing any kind of behavior from a child that is happening repeatedly and I'm not sure why. And I will think, why is this happening? What's in it for the child? What need is this behavior meeting? So we get curious about that and we explore. Is this a behavior that's happening because this child needs attention? Maybe their basic physiological needs haven't been met. They need the food or they need the toilet or they need to drink. Maybe it's that they need to escape this situation for some reason. Maybe it's overwhelming or there's a trigger in here. Maybe this behavior is meeting a need for sensory regulation. Perhaps they are stimming or self-harming because in some way that's meeting that need for sensory regulation. Maybe they are seeking care and connection and this is the only way that they have found so they're kind of attachment needing. Maybe this behavior is the only way that they have found of being heard. And just a little caveat on that. For some children, particularly those who don't have yet great communication skills, either because they are young or there's some kind of barrier to communication, often their behavior is the very most effective way for them to talk to us. And so we might need to work on enabling them to communicate with us in other ways. But you can be heard very loud and very clearly by refusing to go to certain places, by refusing to eat in certain places, by not speaking at all, by using our behavior to send a loud message. And that does not mean, and it's important to note this, that does not mean that the child has sat there like a little professor on gone. Okay, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna stop speaking when I go into this class because actually I'm deeply uncomfortable with that class and I would rather that I were removed from it. If I stop speaking, then I think what will happen is the adults will hear me ironically and they'll remove me. That's not what's going on. What's going on here is a cycle of positive reinforcement. So perhaps on an occasion the child becomes overwhelmed and find that they can't find their words and they get a bit more adult input that time, the situation changes or they're removed. And so that reinforces the not speaking and then perhaps similar things happen again over time and it reinforces that process. And so it happens subconsciously, generally, not that the child is being calculated about this. So yes, it's a very, very good way of being heard, but it's usually quite deeply driven rather than a manipulative or calculated thing on the part of the child. And then we can also dig into our curiosity at times of calm. So at times of calm with the child, explore what's working, what's not, what might we try next, try to consider yourselves to be like little professors, having just said the child's not like a little professor. Together we can be scientists and we can create little experiments for ourselves. I wonder what would happen if next time we're in that situation, we tried X and we can try that and then at the next time of calm, we reflect on it. And we go, did that work? Should we be doing it again or did it not? And we lose it. We need to create this really open, honest, two-way communication where the child can be honest about what's working for them, what they need from us and their other supporting adults, what we can do differently and where we can be honest with them too. So there's no blame, no shame, no accusations, no judgment here, just genuine curiosity about what we need to be doing more of and what we can do differently in order for things to feel a little bit different next time. Okay, so there's your five C's of how to be a safe adult, how to be an adult that enables children to feel safe and these five C's actually work across all ages. So in fact, you might just look to adopt some of these more generally in your life. So we are looking for people who are calm. We are looking to be consistent. We are looking to communicate in ways that enable the child to hear what we're saying. We are looking to create connections and to keep always a childlike sense of curiosity. I hope that there were some ideas in here that resonated with you. I am absolutely sure that there were several ideas in here that you are already doing, already familiar with, in which case well done, do more of them and tell other people in your life working with the same children or supporting them how you do those things and what works for you. Show them, share them, help them to do that and maybe learn a little bit from them about how they might do one of the C's that you find a little bit more tricky. We all find that different things come naturally to us or we practice them more and that there are other bits that are a bit harder. Don't feel like you have to be the perfect adult right away or all the time but just try to take some tiny steps forward if you think there are some things in your kind of everyday practice that might change a little bit. If you like these ideas and you have got a team or colleagues that you want to share them with, I have put together a bite-sized CPD session that runs through them with beautiful slides so that if you would like to, you could run this as a mini training session. Having listened to the podcast will give you a really good insight into what goes behind it but actually there are slides and there is also a video walkthrough of actually using those specific slides if you want to. You'll find there's loads of overlap between that and between this but if you want to be able to teach this, essentially I've put everything together for you to be able to do that. Do do so and if you do, I'd love to hear how it went. So one of the funny things in my life, I spend a lot of time creating things and not a lot of time hearing back about how they're used. So sometimes I'm not quite sure what to make more of, how to do things better and that sort of thing. So if you're using what I'm creating, I would love it if you would tell me how. I love hearing how people use my things and share them. It makes me feel good for one thing. So I'm often just sat here on my own making stuff in the little tower of joy with my coloured books but it's quite nice to hear from you but also if you've got suggestions for other content or how I can make it better would be amazing. Okay, thank you for your time today. Thank you for everything that you are doing for the children in your care and remember to be kind to yourselves as well. Okay, until next time, over and out.