Ignoring

"When a child does or says something offensive I simply ignore him or her. Some of my colleagues say that is wrong, but it always works for me. Who is right?"

As with most of these things, you could both be right and you could both be wrong. It is not enough to have a blanket “ignoring" rule. Generally, there are three clear reasons for us wanting to ignore a child's behaviour, and all of these require conscious decisions on our part.

1. We ignore when we don't want to reinforce negative behaviour.
We are all familiar with the child who uses inappropriate ways of relating to others, perhaps in order to establish his dominance in the group or to divert a group from some constructive activity which he finds threatening or irrelevant to his present interests or needs. Alan may be clumsy or awkward in company and have difficulty with normal social skills. He may choose to make his presence felt by playing the clown or by passing ribald comments in order to draw others' attention. By responding, we confirm for him that this method of engaging others “works", so we choose rather not to respond – not to reward his approach.

But there are some cautions ...

We must first have decided that this behaviour is ineffective and negative, not just offensive to our personal taste. The behaviour in question might be the way in which his family members relate to each other; it might be a common behaviour within his particular culture.

We must also be consciously working on improving this negative behaviour before we target it with our ignoring response. In other words, the behaviour must first have been discussed with the child, he or she must know that we want to reduce the behaviour.

It also helps if we have tried to understand the “benefit" he has gained from the inappropriate behaviour so that we can try to meet this need in better ways. It is a common, and tragic, feature of deprived children that they will seek attention from others, even if all they get is negative attention.

We truly help when we make sure that a child receives legitimate rewards and attention without paying too high a price.

2. We ignore when the unwanted behaviour is not high on our list of treatment priorities.
We do not have to intervene in every minor negative behaviour. There is a danger that we will come across as very disapproving or rejecting if we go about like Miss Manners, picking up on everything that is less than perfect. The kids will very soon get to feel that we are “getting on their case". If a child is struggling to be able to trust a new environment with its new people and strange routines, it doesn't help for us to be nitpicking about the way she eats or sits in a chair.

We ignore these things, but ...

We must first have assessed this child, and have established a clear set of treatment priorities, knowing which problems are urgent and serious, which can wait until later, and which are really not important. Without this level of planning, we can find ourselves being irritated by things which shouldn't even be on our agenda.

We must also have on our teams a working knowledge of relevant developmental and clinical models which we can use to pace ourselves in our work with the child. We are often working with the social and psychological parallels of road accident victims: In the early stages we need to stabilise patients and get them slowly back on their feet; we don't expect good ballet or rugby skills from the time they are admitted! So, in Child and Youth Care, we set goals, and then carefully plan our route towards these goals.

3. We ignore behaviour which is not our business.
When we spend so much time with the young people in our care, we are so often tempted to over-identify with them, to incorporate them in our “family", to want to make them PLU's (people like us!) So we want to mess with their table manners, their accents, their religion and their politics. Masud Hoghughi, who developed the well-known MCAT approach in child care, was very clear about this when he reminded us that our aim in treatment is to enhance what is good, reduce what is damaging, and conserve what doesn't need changing – and which indeed contributes to a sense of continuity.

Other reasons
There are other reasons which may make us want to ignore certain behaviours or certain children, which have much to do with our own self-awareness which is always a crucial element of good child care practice.

Ignoring to protect ourselves: There is no doubt that work with troubled youngsters brings us face to face with issues of our own – issues with which, as ordinary humans, we continue to have difficulty, or which we have not completely resolved for ourselves. Kids will push some of our buttons which we would rather not have pushed – and many will say that these youngsters have an uncanny sense of what is sensitive stuff for us. We all have had to come to terms with issues around such things as authority, power, sexuality, rejection, loss, fear, failure, guilt ... and it is in the nature of child care work that these things will confront us anew in the children and families we work with. Be aware that one way of dealing with anxiety is to repress it, to ignore it. Be aware that when we choose to use ignoring as a technique in our work, we may unconsciously be refusing to deal with material which is painful for us, and therefore being unhelpful to the child.

Ignoring to punish or reject: The withdrawal of attention and affection is one of humanity's cruelest punishments, probably because it was one of the most frightening experiences we endured when we were vulnerable children. Even as adults we still use this way to punish our friends and partners when we withdraw or sulk in our hurt or exasperation. One thing you can count on in your work with troubled children is that they will hurt you and exasperate you, and when you find yourself running out of ideas, out of energy or out of resources, you may well find yourself withdrawing from the engagement, giving up, ignoring.

These two examples of other reasons why we ignore, illustrate powerfully the need for supervision in Child and Youth Care work. There may well be good reasons for you to ignore the behaviour of children, but these must be good reasons, well thought out reasons, and when they are opened up as elements of treatment planning with our colleagues (or well understood in supervision) they have a better chance of being safe and effective for the kids.

Conclusion
With children and youth at risk there may be unexpected triggers – terrors and vulnerabilities about loss, separation and rejection – and for this reason we are always extremely cautious about using ignoring as a way of managing young people. We will only use ignoring when it is part of a well thought out plan and we are sure it will be safe.