How can creative activities be used to help children with EBSNA? (Emotionally Based School Non -Attendance)

More Return to School Emotional Support Tools - 7 minute read.

Picture by Will Scammell Photography

Our recent Signpost suggested practical strategies for harnessing self-regulation as a parent carer, and visualisation for your child at home to help them prepare for a safe return to school at the start of a new term.

Based on my own observations over the first couple of weeks into the academic year, I thought it may be helpful to suggest some ideas on how creative activities can continue to help a child who is showing the early signs of EBSNA, or might not be able to attend school at all as a result of it.

These exercises prioritise listening, with your eyes and your heart, for feeling and meaning. Steven Covey’s ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ dedicates a chapter to Empathic Listening (Habit #5) and is a wonderful insight if you’d like to learn more. Covey writes that ‘empathic listening is not listening until you understand.  It’s listening until the other person feels understood.

How can we use creative activities to help children with EBSNA?

Let Them Feel Understood.

Talking is a thing we all understand can help us to express feelings, great or scary, so that we can gain acceptance, praise, help, reassurance, advice or get something off our chest. It’s worth noting that talking is also the most direct route to knowing and understanding a problem for the listener. When we’re short on time or resources, a child being able to explain an issue is actually a pretty easy start point to begin helping from. But explaining the issue of anxiety is not easy for anyone and that’s how we reached this point of EBSNA.

For most children with EBSNA, by the time they’ve stopped being able to go to school, they’ve also stopped being able to talk about it. At all. This is where the task requires greater time and attention from us, if we’re to begin to understand the barrier, before we go wading in to fix it.

This is where creative activities become a highly valuable resource - your child can communicate without the need for words. No pressure - they’ve experienced enough of that already. It's time to take the heat off the voice box for a bit. 

“Talk is cheap. Listen with your eyes. Actions do speak louder than words.” Robert Kiyosaki. 

There are loads of fantastically useful (albeit pricey) resources out there. From cards to prompt a child in pointing to their push-pull factors at school, to complex questionnaires identifying strengths and difficulties with beautiful graphics… These are ace tools if you have time, training, tech and… bucks, and if the child at the centre of your efforts is in a position to know what factors are and then put a name to them. (I could go on about the child's voice and what that really means, but will stand down from that soapbox for today.) 

Do get in touch if you could do with some resource recommendations. But I want to assure you that there are activities you can do together to enable a meaningful connection and encourage expression of thoughts, to get started on the ‘talking without words’ journey. As always, they don’t cost much more than some time, care and attention and can have an enormous impact on foundations for building (and rebuilding) relationships. 

‘As much as 93% of meaning in any interaction is attributable to nonverbal communication.’ (Mehrabian 1997) 

Whilst we’re helping young people who really don't want to use or just don't know the words, you could say that this is an advantageous position to be in. As in, nobody has to use or know the words.  Let me give some examples which would demonstrate the power of unspoken communication with an anxious or verbally uncommunicative young person. Activities are practical, creative, connective and most importantly, they set a tone of grown ups just being here, observing, not judging and not going anywhere. A strong tone for any anxious child to hear/see:  

How can we use creative activities to help children with EBSNA?

Through Music:

Listening and observing are key factors in communication, and music is an indirect way to get better at both. By practising, you set the tone and open the door to a setting where paying close attention to each other is a priority. In music lessons we refer to this as ‘call and response’ and it can start with a simple rhythm of your making - You can clap a simple pattern, then the young person claps it back to you. The rhythm can be changed, made more challenging, simpler, adapted a little more each time, developed at each turn to introduce a sense of fun, collaboration and even competition in some situations. Take turns trying out sounds and even if your child doesn’t talk about it, you can narrate what you’re hearing back to them which will evolve trust and confidence as well as a much needed sense of fun.

If clapping is too loud and attention grabbing for a self-conscious child, clicking fingers, tapping surfaces around you or even standing on either side of a wall together to call and respond by tapping the wall in turns can be very effective - the listening skills remain but the pressure on the child to be watched directly is removed. 

If you’re stuck for getting started I’d recommend learning a slow version of the rhythm for The Cup Song - It’s irresistible joining-in fodder for a teen. Just grab a plastic cup and you’ll be well away.

Through Movement:

Mirroring actions/gestures is an accessible way to build trust and assure a child that they are worth your attention - that you see them and that they’re actions are something you notice. Stand or sit facing each other and take turns at being ‘the leader’. Move your arms and hands in simple, fairly predictable directions, shapes and gestures, so that the child can follow and mirror your actions. Keep movements slow, fluid and gliding so that it's difficult to get ‘wrong’ or feeling clunky. The key is enabling success by ensuring you can both follow each other more or less accurately, so that as a team you can follow a sequence in time, together. Being together is the thing. 

Think about body positioning if your child is struggling with eye contact when you stand opposite each other. By angling your body away from each other slightly you take some pressure off. You could also use an object as the thing to move and mirror instead of watching each other's hands, if the attention is better moved a little further away from the child. Holding a stick or soft toy each can prompt writing shapes in the air or even puppeteering.

Through Shape and Space:

Sculpting can be done with people in the same way it’s done with clay. Stand stationary in a neutral position. Explain to the young person that you are the clay and they are the sculptor and you’re going to give them words to sculpt you into. This exercise promotes contact and focus on another and is very helpful for making a thoughtful connection without speech. You say a familiar word, for example, ‘future’, and the sculptor shapes your arms, legs, head, shoulders into a still image which they decide reflects that word. It's very important to clarify that there is no right or wrong response to the word - my ‘future’ sculpture might be asking you to sit on the floor holding your hands cupped in front of you, as though looking into a crystal ball. Your ‘future’ sculpture might be standing tall looking straight ahead, with one arm pointing forwards and the other held over your forehead as though seeking into the distance. Either is a perfect sculpture for the word ‘future’ and deserves appreciative feedback or a supportive observation. Starting with shapes and objects as the word to sculpt can be helpful, if a more gentle and less emotive introduction would be better. 

You can then introduce words related to how you understand the child is feeling at school, for example, if they could be anxious. You could say ‘cold’, ‘lost’ or ‘hide’. The sculpture which follows can then begin a conversation, even if one sided commentary for now. Your feedback isn’t for correcting or minimising those feelings, they are a true reflection after all - it’s for consolidating that you understand and clarifying those feelings are heard by the grown up.

End this exercise with sculpting assuring words which describe how the young person might aspire to feel - ‘hope’, ‘strong’, ‘belong’. This one’s a valuable springboard not only for conversations with the child but also for sharing useful information and insights with your SENDCO at school, to contribute to their SEN (Special Educational Needs) planning.

BCE can provide one to one sessions for parents and carers or educators, teaching you how to lead these practices with a child and model examples. Go to our bookings page to find out more .

What next for EBSNA at school?

There are a tonne of ways for schools to identify and support EBSNA children when the characteristics are emerging and well before children reach a point where they can’t be reached any more from the school site. However, resources, training and capacity can make that really tricky in a mainstream education setting at the moment. 

When children are supported early on, they can be helped back to learning before they’ve withdrawn from it fully. Creative activities promote belonging and are an invaluable tool for this. At minimal cost, they could be harnessed during the school day with a bit of courage and out-of-box thinking.

If you’d like to build on your emotional support toolkit or ask me about this one specifically for your child or a young person/ the young people you work with, do get in touch. Our email address is office@beyondcreativeeducation.org and you can subscribe to updates like this by filling out the form at the bottom of the blog page.