Tuning in to kids’ emotions

No matter what their native tongue, a child throwing a tantrum in the confectionery aisle is a child throwing a tantrum in the confectionery aisle.

Emotions pay no heed to location and as any parent trying to negotiate their way through the angst of toddler tempers will tell you, emotional outbursts can happen at the most inopportune of times.

“It’s hard work being a parent,” says Dr Sophie Havighurst from Mindful at the University of Melbourne. “It’s hard to get through the millions of things you need to do, and then to have your child upset or angry can feel like just one too many demands.”

A partnership between Mindful (a training centre jointly auspiced by the University of Melbourne and Monash University with funding from a Department of Health grant) and Parentslink at MacKillop Family Services is now helping families across Australia develop the emotional intelligence to deal with these situations more effectively, most recently in culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities.

‘Tuning in to Kids’ is an early intervention program for parents of pre-school and primary-aged children which focuses on building kids’ emotional intelligence and awareness.

Launched in 2008 and created by Dr Havighurst and her colleague Ann Harley, the program has grown steadily in popularity and is now a key training tool for child and adolescent health professionals.

“For a long time people had been saying they couldn’t wait to see how it would go in a practical setting,” Dr Havighurst says.

“Tuning in to Kids is quite a different philosophical approach to parenting. Most parenting programs focus on managing children’s behaviour, whereas our program is about not just responding to children’s behaviour but trying to understand what emotions might be behind that behaviour.

“So when a child is acting up, rather than just put them in time out or try to exert control, we acknowledge that something is going on. It’s getting parents to ask what is happening for their child.”

Such was the take up of the initial training material and the demand from a range of CALD communities, the ParentsLink team sourced funding from Portland House Foundation to re-create the program in four community languages. This suite of CALD material was awarded a University of Melbourne Excellence Award at last year’s Vice-Chancellor’s Engagement Awards.

Having worked with both ParentsLink and now as Tuning in to Kids’ training manager, Ms Harley has worked closely with Dr Havighurst on the research behind the program and provides training to facilitators across the country. She says being able to provide language-specific program content has taken the program’s value to another level.

“Emotions are universal, but how we express them and our attitudes and beliefs around emotion can be quite different,” she says.

“Traditionally a lot of people wouldn’t feel they need to go to a parenting class because they didn’t have a ‘problem’ child, but there’s a definite shift now and we recognise that emotional intelligence impacts on the development of all children.

“A lot of people in CALD groups who are coming to Australia are experiencing or have experienced trauma, separation and cultural changes, and they’re having emotional reactions that they may not have had before.

“The program is particularly valuable for these participants who quickly realise that how they were brought up will be different from the way they raise their own children in Australia.”

Throughout its development, the program has been guided and supported by a number of passionate facilitators and professionals, including the team at MacKillop, led by ParentsLink co-ordinator Judy Cain.

Ms Cain says the community languages aspect of the program is underpinned by a deep respect for each culture and the desire to equip parents with skills appropriate to their backgrounds and needs.

Initially the suite of training material was translated into Amharic, Arabic, Somali and Vietnamese, with a range of other languages available on request. The Mindful and ParentsLink teams are exploring a number of other language translations for the program including Chinese, Burmese, Thai and Turkish.

www.mdhs.unimelb.edu.au