What Kids Need Most from Adults, and How to Deliver It

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“Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her.”

That quote comes from developmental psychologist and long-time Cornell Professor Urie Bronfenbrenner. It’s the foundation for hundreds of youth interventions worldwide, including Cornell’s Residential Child Care Project (RCCP), a program that provides evidence-based support to staff at youth residential facilities across the globe.

RCCP offers training and support to help residential care staff understand the impact of trauma on children’s development. Adults learn how to respond to “pain-based behaviors” that are triggered by trauma and develop the skills to build relationships that help children feel safe.

For more than 50 years, RCCP has worked with over 7,000 youth residential care agencies in 17 countries to provide training as well as to implement and evaluate programming. The project centers around one important tenet: Children need secure relationships with the adults around them.

“We are focused on building an attachment relationship to help the child meet developmental tasks, build life skills, and ultimately be successful moving forward,” explained Martha Holden, director of RCCP and a senior extension associate at Cornell. “The essential ingredient – the active ingredient – is the relationship.”

The skills RCCP teaches residential care staff apply to any relationships between adults and children. “These skills are truly universal,” Holden said.

RCCP outlines four skills that help adults develop productive relationships with kids.

1. Regulate your own emotions first. When children are upset and beginning to lose control, adults need to stay in control of their own emotions, which helps children feel safe. “You need amazing self-awareness to maintain your own self-regulation,” Holden said. Children with trauma are much more likely to act out in an effort to push adults away, but all children act out sometimes for a variety of reasons. “You have to realize that most of the time, it’s not about you, and you have to be able to stay calm,” Holden said.
2. Put yourself in the child’s shoes. “We try to give adults the assessment skills to understand what is going on beneath the child’s behavior,” Holden said. “It’s being attuned to what the child is experiencing.” When a child is acting out, the goal is to try to understand the underlying need, instead of responding to the behavior. “This is where a lot of people get tripped up,” Holden said. When adults are able to meet the underlying need instead of reacting to the behavior, children feel understood and supported.
3. Know how and when to communicate. Good communication skills are essential in connecting with young people. That often means beginning with listening, and then offering a reflective response. “The child might say, ‘Leave me alone,’ and you might say, ‘Obviously something upset you today,’ or ‘You look really sad.’ The goal is that the child feels not just heard, but seen.” Sometimes just listening in silence is the best response. Helping young people label their emotions is also a helpful tool.
4. Anticipate frustrating moments. Helping young people avoid strong emotional responses helps build relationships because feeling out of control is scary. “A lot of it is about timing,” Holden said. “For example, being observant enough to notice a child needs help before they get overly frustrated. We call that ‘hurdle help.’” It also means anticipating when a child needs a break or a distraction. “The goal is to stop the descent into chaos,” Holden said.

The take-home message: Implementing these techniques consistently builds supportive relationships between young people and adults — an important developmental need for all children.