|
A Positive Attitude Facilitates
Deeper Social Connection
According to the SRP, the next vital
factor in facilitating the emergence of a genuine
and spontaneous interest in the social world is the
use of a positive attitude. A positive attitude is
one of acceptance of the child, appreciation and enjoyment
of the child and the animated expression of such.
The SRP stands alone in its assertion of the critical
importance of a positive attitude. There are two fundamental
reasons for this emphasis.
a) Acceptance Promotes Responsiveness
The SRP suggests that only an attitude
of acceptance and appreciation of a child will allow
parents to maintain consistently a responsive style
of interaction. Acceptance is defined as non-judgment,
i.e., not labeling the child, or his/her condition,
with any value-judgments (good/bad, right/wrong).
The SRP does not view this type of acceptance as a
passive resignation to the child’s condition
but instead as the first step to actively encouraging
the child to develop. Professionals teaching the SRP
consistently observe that when a parent lacks acceptance
(as defined here), they instead label the child as
“wrong” in some way (“needs fixing”,
“abnormal”, “defective”, etc.).
The SRP holds that a parent with that perspective
will find it very challenging to be responsive, that
is, not to be directive, not to “teach”
something to his/her child, even when the parent cognitively
understands the importance of being responsive and
giving the child control. The cognitive architecture
behind a responsive style of interaction has yet to
be addressed in the literature and points to another
avenue of research crucial for training parents to
run home-based interventions.
This importance of a positive attitude
is empirically supported by the work of Gerald Mahoney
and colleges using the Maternal Behavior Rating Scale
(MBRS; Mahoney, 1992). The MBRS has been used in a
variety of studies to assess the link between parents’
interactional styles and the development of their
children. It has 12 items assessing four dimensions
of interactive style: responsiveness, affect, achievement
orientation and directiveness. Use of the MBRS has
been instrumental in highlighting the importance of
caregiver responsiveness in children’s development.
These studies additionally show the “affect”
dimension is similarly correlated with increases in
various developmental performance outcomes.
In the MBRS, the affect dimension
is composed of five measures: Acceptance, Enjoyment,
Expressiveness, Inventiveness and Warmth. Mahoney
and Perales (2005) found both responsiveness and affect
to be significantly related to increases in children’s
levels of language development, social competence,
joint attention and self-regulation. Kim and Mahoney
(2004) again found maternal responsiveness and affect
to be significantly correlated with the child’s
level of engagement, with maternal responsiveness
accounting for 33% of the variance and affect accounting
for 30% of the variance. This research still requires
replication with larger and more diverse samples;
nonetheless, the emerging direction of this new field
of research is in line with the observations of the
SRP––a positive attitude goes hand in
hand with responsiveness in facilitating development
in children with developmental disabilities.
b) Appreciation Encourages Engagement
The other key component of a positive
attitude in the SRP is a genuine appreciation and
enjoyment of the child; this builds on the foundation
of acceptance. The SRP advocates the use of animated
expressions of appreciation, enjoyment and delight
in the child. The SRP proposes that this will encourage
a greater frequency of social orientation, extend
periods of joint attention and increase child affect
and motivation level within a social interaction.
This, it is suggested, leads to more and longer periods
of social interaction that result in the child learning
more new behaviors and skills.
Typically developing children who
naturally orient to social stimuli and engage in joint
attention with adults experience the displays of positive
affect that typically accompany these periods of joint
attention (Kasari et al., 1990). Shared affective
experience serves to motivate the typically developing
child to attend to and engage in joint attention with
adults (Dawson et al., 2004; Trevarthan and Aitken,
2001). These experiences then facilitate the child’s
development into a social ‘expert” as
s/he attends to more and more initiations from adults
and remains engaged in these interactions for longer
and longer. Typical development revolves around mutual
affective exchanges that both the child and adult
find rewarding (Mundy et al., 1992). This process
goes awry in children with Autism for two reasons
that interact to create a negative feedback loop.
First, the child with Autism engages in joint attention
less frequently and for shorter periods than the typically
developing child (Dawson et al., 2004), so has less
opportunity to experience the positive affect associated
with this social engagement. Dawson and Lewy (1989)
suggest that this is because the affect-laden social
interaction may be too over-stimulating for the autistic
child due to the unpredictable and complex nature
of these stimuli. Second, it appears that children
with Autism are less likely to display positive affect
when engaged in joint attention (e.g. smile while
making eye contact) (Kasari et al., 1999) and are
much less likely to smile in response to their mother’s
smile than typical children (Dawson et al., 1990).
The result is that mothers of autistic children are
less likely to respond to their children’s smiles
than mothers of typical children (Dawson et al, 2004),
probably because the children’s smiles were
not viewed as communicative as they were not accompanied
by eye contact. Thus, from an early age, children
with Autism seem not to experience the delight and
joy typical children are bathed in from birth that
motivates them to keep moving towards deeper and deeper
connections with other people. When this process is
disrupted in otherwise typically developing children,
for example when the mother suffers post-natal depression
and does not engage as much in these affective exchanges,
there can be serious effects for that child’s
development (Goldsmith and Rogoff, 1997).
The implication for treatment from
this research again is clear: to redress this imbalance––to
link joint attention to positive affect and motivate
children to move towards more frequent and longer
periods of joint attention in the way a typical child
does. This is what the SRP claims to do. Whenever
a child in an SRP playroom makes social contact (eye
contact, language attempts or physical communication),
he is greeted with a celebration: a visual and auditory
display of positive affect and an expression of joy
and delight from the adult to the child’s initiation
of joint attention. This is fine-tuned to the individual
child’s particular sensory requirement to maintain
its function as a motivator and not allow it to become
over-stimulating for the child.
The affect dimension of the MBRS
(Mahoney, 1992) has five items, four of which––acceptance,
enjoyment, expressiveness and warmth––involve
directly, animatedly expressing positive affect and
attitude to the child. It is this dimension (along
with responsiveness) that has been closely linked
to promoting child engagement and cognitive and language
development. The fifth item on the MBRS affect dimension
is inventiveness––the number of different
approaches the adult uses, his/her ability to find
different games and activities to interest the child,
different ways of using toys and inventing games with
and without toys. This is also an important part of
the SRP. Once a child is engaged in a social interaction,
the adult’s intention is then to maintain that
interaction for as long as the child will allow. Expressing
positive affect is one way that those trained in the
SRP maintain interactions; the second is through inventiveness
or creativity. Decades of training people to use the
SRP leads their trainers to assert that a positive
attitude underlies the ability to be creative in the
ways described on the MBRS. The logic is that when
one is truly enjoying an interaction, one is more
inclined to think of ways to add to the interaction
to maintain it, whereas when one is not enjoying an
interaction, one tends to be thinking of ways to end
it. Again, the cognitive architecture underlying “inventiveness”
warrants empirical investigation as an avenue for
increasing the efficacy of professional and parental
training.
The SRP suggests that the principles
of taking a child-centered approach and having a positive
attitude, when used in an optimally designed physical
environment, have the effect of encouraging children
with Autism and other developmental delays to engage
more in social interaction. This has the effect of
helping these children be more motivated to initiate
and engage in social interaction and grow stronger
in pivotal developmental behaviors which pave the
way for learning new skills and information. Longitudinal
studies involving children actively engaged in home-based
SRPs are needed to investigate these observations
more fully.
The SRP asserts (as do other proponents
of home-based programs, e.g. Lovaas, 1973) that this
approach must be applied intensively and consistently
over time for maximum efficacy. A 30-minute session
twice a week will not retrain a brain that for years
has skewed itself away from the social world. Children
in the SRP typically spend from 15 to 50 hours a week
in the playroom being responded to in this way. Facilitators
and parents are trained to be exceptionally observant
and attentive to the child to maximize the number
of spontaneous social orienting events that are responded
to in this way.
|
Back to top
