Children presenting with emotional and behavioural difficulties may have experienced trauma, disrupted attachments, loss, neglect, abuse, instability or multiple placement moves. These experiences can affect a child’s ability to trust adults, regulate emotions, manage relationships and respond to boundaries. At HBBA, we seek to understand what sits behind a child’s behaviour, not simply to manage it.
We help adults nurture a child even when they are hostile and rejecting, enabling them to generate trust, a sense of self worth and self acceptance within the child. Adults are available to the child, both emotionally and physically.
The process of changing the mind and behaviour of the child begins with the mind of the adult. We help staff understand their own expectations, behaviours and parenting styles, and how this impacts the children in their care.
Accepting a child as they are is key to building self esteem, and to providing creative opportunities for them to accept and like themselves, even when under stress.
Our staff provide the child with a sense of belonging to the home, and to the people in the child’s life who are important to them. They support the child to accept who they are and to manage their complex relationships.
Adults need to recognise and empathise with the child’s feelings. To do this, the adult needs to accept, process and understand their own feelings, then reflect, manage and positively respond to the child.
Our approach to children displaying behaviour that challenges is resilient, personalised, positive and non prejudiced. We build our work on positive relationships based on mutual respect, understanding and the ability to function effectively as part of a group.
Our residential support staff act as positive role models and support children to make safe and healthy choices, reduce challenging behaviours, and realise their potential through learning, fun and play. Our staffing ratios protect the time needed to build these relationships properly.
We support children to work towards individual outcomes. These may begin as very simple goals, broken down into achievable steps. As a young person masters an outcome, it is replaced with a next step, so our children always have something to strive for. At HBBA, we do not see limitations, we see opportunities for progress.
Children’s voices are heard and children are empowered to make decisions in the running of the home wherever appropriate. We look for creative, practical solutions to make sure care plans, and protection plans where needed, are carried through fully, never just written down.
Learning difficulties affect children in different ways and can vary widely in severity and impact. We support children who may experience one or more of the following, and we make sure any related training is identified and put in place before a child arrives:
Moderate to severe learning disabilities, specific language and communication difficulties, and difficulties with reading, writing, maths or information processing.
Autistic Spectrum Conditions, ADHD related difficulties, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Down Syndrome, alongside sensory integration difficulties.
Complex social and emotional needs, difficulties with emotional regulation, anxiety, low self esteem and behaviour that challenges, including self injury or transitional difficulties.
Take a look inside our home in Walsall, and the neighbourhood our children get to grow up in.
