18 Unconditional Positive Regard and Our Interactions

As we consider some of the varied ways that people make sense of the world and how that impacts their decisions and priorities, we often notice that prior experiences with schools and government entities impact their interactions with us, as individual educators and clinicians. We find it helpful to remind ourselves that what might come across as aggressive, negative, or just distant often has nothing to do with our individual interactions with a particular adult, child, or family.

Instead, we consider how adults may view us as representatives of a social institution (public schools or an early childhood intervention program). If they experienced inequity, exclusion, bureaucratic barriers to services, or repeated trauma in these spaces, that could impact our attempts to build trusting and collaborative relationships. That doesn’t mean we should not try! In fact, we’ve all found that persistent, positive interactions that come from a place of empathy will, in time, improve the relationship, even with the most distrusting of people.

Let’s return to a foundational theory in psychology: unconditional positive regard. 

In our work with families and children, we find it helpful to remind ourselves of Carl Rogers’ work. When we give someone the gift of our positive regard, we give ourselves a gift as well. We don’t expend energy being angry or frustrated by behaviors beyond our control. We instead choose to see what might be possible and focus on the tools at our disposal to facilitate a child’s growth^[1].

Intentional Language Choices

Sadly, much of the language historically used in clinical and school settings focuses on something to be corrected. We understand this focus because when you have a disease, you want to be able to treat, if not cure, that disease. If a child struggles to read, we want to implement an intervention that helps them read more easily. However, this focus on the deficit sometimes creeps over into other spaces and we begin to see everything we do as an intervention or correction.

What might change if we view families from a place of strength instead? For example, the term English Language Learners (or English Learners) focuses on what they don’t know. But terms like emergent bilinguals or multilingual families focus on their strengths: their multilingual skills! This is an example where it is easy to notice an assumption we made: that they have a gap and we are here to fill that.

Where else might we make assumptions? We often see this when a family structure doesn’t look like a traditional two-partner home. A clinician or educator might assume that an unmarried or unpartnered adult struggles as a single parent. Yet, many of these adults co-parent with a former partner, live in a multi-generational household, or have other important adults with whom they share caregiving responsibilities. It is up to us to pause before assuming that we have to address a challenge that may or may not exist. In fact, we could argue that some of the historically underestimated communities we serve have some of the strongest support networks and valuable skill sets.