Like the other Prime areas of development, Personal, Social and Emotional Development (PSED) is fundamental to a child's well-being and all later learning. What we are coming to understand is that brain development is intrinsically linked to these Prime areas and that the right kind of experiences repeated consistently in the earliest years will build the nerve networks in the brain that a child needs to ensure good development.
Educational programme
The educational programme for PSED in the revised EYFS states that: 'Personal, social and emotional development involves helping children to develop a positive sense of themselves, and others; to form positive relationships and develop respect for others; to develop social skills and learn how to manage their feelings; to understand appropriate behaviour in groups; and to have confidence in their own abilities.' (Revised Statutory Framework, paragraph 1.6)
That's a lot to pack into the first five years of life. But, by and large, the support to be able to do this is exactly what children are instinctively seeking from their caregivers. In the same way that children seek experiences to stimulate their physical development (see Prime time ... Physical Development, Nursery World, 25 June 2012), attachment theory suggests they also stick close and demand (often loudly) the attention and interactions with others that they instinctively know will help keep them safe and help them regulate their emotions - an important element of PSED.
Regulating Emotions
Babies are not born able to regulate their emotions. They need loving and attentive caregivers who recognise that distress of any kind feels intolerable and uncontrollabe to a small baby and who will quickly respond to soothe and make them feel better. Each time this happens, connections are made in the baby's brain.These create neural pathways which eventually allow the growing child to internalise a sense of security as they become confident their physical and emotional needs will usually be met. They also learn that their distress can be managed and contained. Emotional containment on the part of the caregiver reassures the child that their emotions are not so huge and dangerously uncontrollable that they can't be handled.
Eventually, the child's brain will have developed in ways that allow them to be able to regulate and handle emotions for themselves. This takes time, however, and relies on the child having consistently 'good enough' experiences for those connections and pathways to be strong.
Positive experiences
If there is one simple message about children's personal, social and emotional development, it is that they cannot develop skills and abilities in these areas without having first experienced them consistently and regularly in their own lives. It is hard for children to be 'calm' if they have not consistently experienced others responding calmly to them. It is hard for them to empathise with others if they have not consistently experienced empathy towards themselves. It is hard for them to be loving or respectful towards others if their early experiences were not consistently warm, loving and respectful.
This is not just about having the behaviour modelled for them, although this does have a part to play. Love, affection and respect are not something that babies and children should have to 'earn'. Experiencing 'unconditional positive regard' (as described in the 1950s by humanist psychologist Carl Rogers) means feeling loved and worthwhile for who you are, not for how you behave.
Margot Sunderland, in the Science of Parenting, writes that 'Self-esteem and self-confidence begin with feelings of being adored in infancy.' Neuroscience confirms that a baby's brain is activated and shaped by these kinds of positive experiences and without that stimulation in the early years, those parts of the brain may not develop sufficiently, if at all.
Brain chemistry
Brain chemistry plays its part too. Positive experiences stimulate the production of opiods - 'feel-good' hormones such as oxytocin that encourage us to want to repeat the experience. Unpleasant and threatening experiences activate the stress hormone cortisol.
Small amounts of cortisol are useful, but when babies and young children are left in distressed states for too long the cortisol can be harmful. This is why neglect is so damaging in the early years and why caregivers carry such a big responsibility. Anyone involved in the care of young children, whether parent or practitioner, is also intrinsically involved in shaping the child's brain in ways that directly impact on the development of their PSED skills.
See further reading suggestions for details of books and DVDs that explain the neuroscience behind children's early development (page 23). It might sound technical at first, but raising our awareness of developmental neurology and the impact of stress helps us to understand the processes behind the behaviours and can change the way we react and respond to the children in our care.
Feeling safe
Attachment theory is based on the premise that babies instinctively seek attachment with their caregivers in order to feel safe. The primary attachment figure is the most important and the one that the child will look for first when unhappy or anxious.
If for some reason, the primary attachment figure (often, but not always, the mother) is not available to them then the child will turn to the 'back-up team' of secondary attachment figures. These are usually family members with whom the child has built a close relationship as well as key caregivers outside the home. These attachment figures provide a 'secure base' (Bowlby 1988) from which the child is able to branch out and explore the world.
Key person approach
The key person approach plays a significant role in strengthening children's attachments and providing this crucial 'secure base', particularly when they are making transitions from home or within EYFS settings. The key person approach provides a child (and their family) with one or two key people who have special responsibility for meeting their needs during the settling process and throughout their time in the setting.
A key person is better able to do this because they build a relationship with the child and their family, which allows a deeper understanding of the child's experiences, their influences and their motivations. This strong link with the child's family is crucial as it gives them a greater awareness of the child's development - of 'where they are at' in terms of personal, social and emotional development - and enables them to initiate the kinds of interventions that can help the child move forward.
As Julie Fisher wrote recently about interactions, 'A key person knows the child well enough to recall something that happened yesterday or that morning and to build on that shared experience; they can make links with experiences that the child had some months ago to help the child make connections in their learning; they know about and can point out that what a child likes or dislikes is the same as or different from their brother or sister, thus making the child feel known and understood.' (Practitioner role, Part 1: 'Time to talk', Nursery World, 23 January 2012)
Feelings and behaviours
Feeling known and understood helps build physical and emotional security and a sense that one's needs will be reliably met. The urge for this sense of security has a huge part to play in personal, social and emotional development. It drives many of children's behaviours, although society often attributes the behaviours to attention seeking, selfishness, greed, laziness, aggression or lack of control.
Going beyond children's behaviour, by recognising and acknowledging what drives and triggers it, helps us to provide the reassurance and soothing that they need to reduce stress levels and to empower them with the insights that will eventually enable them to manage their own stress. This involves acknowledging and naming the feelings behind the behaviour, so that children feel listened to and heard. Such an approach helps them understand that feelings are powerful and acceptable.
Children also need to learn that feelings are transitory. What feels urgently intolerable, as in 'I want the blue ball NOW!', becomes more manageable when a sensitive adult:
- helps distract them with other balls
- provides reassurance that they can have a ball soon, or
- provides a cuddle and agrees with them that it does feel really horrible when sometimes we just can't have the things we want.
Such responses avoid the feeling being confused with morality, as in the implication that 'good' children don't have tantrums when they can't have what they want. It also develops the connections in the brain that allow cognitive thought and reasoning (the upper brain) to moderate the lower brain reactions to threat.
In young children the lower brain is mostly in control, so lots of things feel threatening - even things as simple as not being able to have a blue ball when you want it. With consistent, sensitive responses by caring adults to the behaviours and emotions triggered by threat, then strong pathways can be forged between different parts of the brain, allowing the different parts to connect up and 'talk' to each other. In very simple terms it's like this:
- Survival brain - I will die if I don't have the blue ball
- Emotional brain - I am sad I can't have the blue ball
- Thinking and reasoning brain - never mind, I can play with my green ball.
We don't tend to think of all this 'brain stuff' when we are sorting out a fight over a blue ball. But it's important because in the midst of all that emotion and survival behaviour, the child is incapable of hearing an explanation of why they cannot have the blue ball, and certainly won't be able to hear (and learn from) a lecture on sharing, or waiting your turn. It's the feelings that are uppermost at that point and need to be heard, held and accepted. Learning only happens later when the child is calm and can absorb and process the experience.
Managing all this is not easy, as Penelope Leach points out in 'All about ... relationships and feelings in the nursery' (Nursery World, 6 November 2008): 'Day-to-day involvement with the children takes courage. An important part of your job as key person is to help a baby or toddler come to terms with her feelings and eventually learn to manage them. To do that, you have to be willing and able to take in and absorb distress, to serve as the target of anger or frustration and to bolster a child's fragile self-control with the loan of yours.'
Supporting a child's PSED demands sensitivity to our own fragilities as well as those of the child. It's important that practitioners support each other in this and ideally, receive the kind of supervision that supports and acknowledges the particular tensions and stresses of working with young children and particularly in the role of key person.
Vulnerable children
For some children, the path to self-control and emotional health is particularly difficult and they may not be getting enough of the support they need to feel emotionally (and physically) safe. This is particularly likely if the significant adults around them have not themselves had 'good enough' experiences or were not fully available in the child's early years.
These children (and their families) will need particular and sensitive help from practitioners who know and understand them. Their personal, social and emotional development may be significantly delayed although there may be no apparent visible disability. Some children may even appear to be superficially 'performing' well in specific areas, such as literacy or numeracy.
If, as we now know, experiences in the Prime areas can have a significant impact on brain development, then we have to bear in mind that it is as if these children have experienced trauma to their brains, even though there has been no physical injury. Developmental trauma challenges may present in a wide variety of symptoms, many of them overlapping with various other diagnoses, for example, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) and Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD). Nurturing, therapeutic approaches that allow them to revisit early stages of development and strengthen attachments can support these children to develop and make progress in PSED, which will have a positive impact on all other learning.
Early learning goals and characteristics of effective learning
With the personal care aspects of the previous PSED goals moving to Physical Development (PD) and other elements now being addressed by the Characteristics of Effective Learning, the remaining learning goals focus very much on what Ann Langston describes as the 'cornerstones for self-actualisation':
- Self-confidence and self-awareness
- Managing feelings and behaviour
- Making relationships
(Prime area: PSED, part of Nursery World EYFS special issue, 30 April 2012; see More information).
Self-actualisation isn't actually a goal, it is more a process of realising potential - of working towards being the best you can be. It is believed that people who are self-actualisers as adults are more likely to have experienced unconditional positive regard as children (Rogers 1959). Similarly, children who make friendships easily are likely to have had positive early experiences with adults (Sunderland 2006).
Although the learning goals are described as three discrete aspects, in real life they very much overlap and interlink. The Characteristics of Effective Learning are also now heavily linked with Personal, Social and Emotional Development. They include aspects of what are often described as positive dispositions for learning, that are also linked to self-actualisation, for example, to 'have a go' and to 'keep on trying'.
The work of Lilian Katz, Margaret Carr and Marion Dowling, for example, has provided us with valuable information on the impact of positive dispositions for learning and the best ways to foster their development. It is the early years that are most crucial to the development of these positive dispositions for learning. It is much harder to stimulate them in later years or undo any damage caused by negative experiences.
Resources such as the guidance document 'Development Matters in Early Years Foundation Stage' and 'The Leuven Scales of Well-being and Involvement' highlight the kinds of positive experiences and interactions that young children need. They are also useful tools for supporting practitioners with observations and learning stories, which are the most effective way of providing information on a child's growing strengths in PSED and their dispositions for learning.
Realising potential
Children with enough positive experiences in the early years will have brains that are well developed in the areas that support personal, social and emotional skills. There will be strong connections between the different parts of their brain so that they are able to moderate and manage their feelings and adjust their behaviours in different situations.
As they continue to grow and develop they are likely to:
- have a sense of emotional as well as physical safety
- know they are loved and are loveable
- know there is enough love to go round so they don't feel they have to fight for their share of love or attention or diminish someone else in order to feel better about themselves
- be able to put themselves in another's shoes, which means they are less likely to want to cause others harm, because they can empathise with how it might feel
- feel safe enough to make mistakes and resilient enough to handle shame and embarrassment, to show remorse when appropriate and use it to increase their self-knowledge and awareness
- be resilient in the face of setbacks because they have a sense of self-worth that allows them to keep going but are also realistic in their expectations of themselves and others
- have the confidence to branch out, to explore and to handle change, knowing they have enough significant people to provide them with 'a secure base' to where they can return for comfort and emotional containment when things go wrong or feel threatening
- have experience of relationships that are largely positive so they are comfortable with new ones and have well-developed dispositions for friendship, socialisation and co-operation
- be secure in the knowledge that their own thoughts and opinions are considered valid and don't feel threatened by the opinions of others. This allows them to be able to empathise and to collaborate, without the need to dominate in order to feel heard.
If positive experiences in the early years are the key to raising children with these capabilities, then it is the environments we provide, the relationships we create and the interactions we sustain that are crucial. It is the goals we set for our own practice that really matter, as much as any goals we set for our children.
Other references and further reading:
- Young Children's Personal, Social and Emotional Development by Marion Dowling (Sage, third edition, 2009)
- Development Matters in the Early Years Foundation Stage (Early Education, 2012)
- Understanding the Revised Early Years Foundation Stage by Helen Moylett and Nancy Stewart (Early Education, 2012)
- Assessment in Early Childhood Settings: Learning stories by Margaret Carr (Sage, 2001)
- A Secure Base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development by John Bowlby (1988)
- Developing Attachment in Early Years Settings: Nurturing secure relationships from birth to five years by Veronica Read (Routledge, 2009)
- Key Persons in the Early Years: Building relationships for quality provision in early years settings and primary schools by Peter Elfer, Elinor Goldschmeid and Dorothy Selleck (Routledge 2nd ed, 2011)
- Child Development series by Maria Robinson, www.nurseryworld.co.uk/go/childdevelopment/
- Leuven Scales of Well-being and Involvement, www.kindengezin.be/img/sics-ziko-manual.pdf
- Understanding the Revised Early Years Foundation Stage by Helen Moylett and Nancy Stewart (Early Education, 2012, £15.00 including p&p, www.early-education.org.uk)
MORE INFORMATION
Brain development information:
- From Birth to One - The year of opportunity by Maria Robinson (OUP, 2003)
- Understanding Behaviour and Development in Early Childhood: A guide to theory and practice by Maria Robinson (Routledge, 2010)
- Why Love Matters: How affection shapes a baby's brain by Sue Gerhardt (Routledge, 2004)
- The Selfish Society: How we all forgot to love one another and made money instead by Sue Gerhardt (Simon & Schuster, 2011)
- The Science of Parenting: Practical guidance on sleep, crying, play and building emotional well-being for life by Margot Sunderland (Dorling Kindersley, 2006).
AREAS OF LEARNING & DEVELOPMENT
'There are seven areas of learning and development that must shape educational programmes in early years settings. All areas of learning and development are important and inter-connected. Three areas are particularly crucial for igniting children's curiosity and enthusiasm for learning, and for building their capacity to learn, form relationships and thrive. These three areas, the Prime areas, are:
- communication and language;
- physical development; and
- personal, social and emotional development. (Revised Statutory Framework for the EYFS, paragraph 1.4)
Photographs by Guzelian at Netherton Park children's centre.