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21 NOVEMBER 2008
NO 1376
Assaultive incidents
Children, young children in particular, tend to express their strongest feelings physically. In fact, one of the hallmarks of maturation is the increasing ability to inhibit impulsive and explosive expression of strong feelings. While the impulsive and sometimes violent expression of emotion is considered normal for toddlers, it is viewed with alarm in older children and adolescents.
Children who develop normally, showing an increase in impulse control with each passing year, are rarely placed out of the home into residential child care. The children who have not adequately developed their ability to control impulses come to require professional care and supervision. Since the children who are referred to residential child care tend to have poor impulse control, it is not unusual for these children to fight with each other and the direct care staff when strong emotions surface.
Professional child care workers call these fights assaultive incidents. Assault connotes the threat of immediate physical injury. The work "fight" may include things like yelling and screaming which do not necessarily present a threat of physical injury. Assault is also beginning to replace the less descriptive term "aggression" which also includes a number of meanings that do not indicate an immediate threat of injury.
The term "assault" is not only more descriptive, but speaks directly to a need for emergency response. If the behavior of the child is "assaultive" then a threat of immediate physical injury exists, and emergency action to minimize the risk of injury is required. The emergency nature of assaultive incidents requires child care workers to focus their attention on immediate issues such as safety, security, protection and risk reduction.
One of the most prominent challenges for professional child care workers is how to develop a competent emergency response to assaultive incidents. The competent emergency response to assaultive incidents must not only provide for adequate safety and risk reduction but must also be compatible with the childrens' treatment plans. The competent child care worker must not only control dangerous behavior but must model appropriate and mature behavior while providing that control.
Describing competence in these broad idealistic terms, however, is not particularly helpful to child care workers. They want to know how a competent response looks, sounds, and feels. To provide this description we have divided performance before, during, and after an assaultive incident into eight areas. These areas were identified and tested with traditional social science research methods. They have been the basis of hundreds of successful workshops conducted in California, the western United States and western Canada over the span of several years.
We have described competent performance as a set of guidelines for a range of possible performances, from a minimum acceptable performance to an ideal or preferred performance. Minimum acceptable performance if further defined by contrasting it with clearly unacceptable performance. We have rejected the notion that competent performance among child care workers can be evaluated with discrete, measurable criteria, such as those used for industrial production workers. A wide variety of individual styles is an essential element in residential child care, and discretely measurable performance criteria would have the effect of suppressing that essential variety.
Minimum acceptable performance should not be confused, however, with competent performance. It is what the name implies; the bare minimum that can be accepted. Competent child care workers engage in what has been termed in the introduction to the "Whole days, whole lives" conference for child care workers as a neverending search for the "better way." The competent child care worker consistently attempts to achieve the ideal of preferred performance and rarely, if ever, slips below the minimum acceptable performance.
We have been able to identify three ways in which competent emergency response to assaultive incidents can be developed using these performance guidelines. The three methods are interdependent, and emphasizing one at the expense of the others has not been successful in our experience. The first method is to write (and enforce) policies emphasizing the agency's insistence on nothing less than minimum acceptable performance during assaultive incidents. The second is to provide close and careful supervision of child care workers who are subjected to the stresses associated with responding to assaultive incidents. We recommend the coaching approach to this supervision. Supervisors should coach child care workers as they attempt to achieve the ideal or preferred performance. The third method is periodic training and certification of competence. Like first aid, or cardiopulmonary resuscitation skills, the mastery of professional assault response skills must be practiced and demonstrated at regular intervals Also like first aid and cardiopulmonary resuscitation, training sessions should be conducted by certified instructors who periodically demonstrate their skills to obtain recertification.
PAUL A. SMITH AND LUISA
BARAJAS
Smith. P.A. and Barajas, L. (1988). How competent
child care workers respond to assaultive incidents. Journal of Child
Care, 3, 4. pp. 29-30.
