“Nobody can develop freely in this world and find a full life without feeling understood by at least one person.” – Paul Tournier
Post #1 in category. We suggest you read posts in numerical order.
To Understand and To Be Understood
To understand and to be understood are needs shared by all human beings. They are not peculiar to any one diagnostic category or developmental trajectory. They are not exclusively cognitive or purely emotional. Not entirely rational or empirical. They are personal and subjective, and interpersonal and foundational. The need to understand and to be understood is not limited to children. These needs run deep in all of us.
Children, particularly those with developmental differences, may have difficulties with mutual understanding. For many, the behaviors of adults, of siblings, of other children may seem random, impulsive, or disconnected from the context.
And unusual behaviors by children with neurodivergences, such as repeated hand flapping or fixating on certain objects, standing too close, or continually asking the same question, may seem to have no intention or meaning to others. But they may be attempts toward self-regulation or gestures of communication or signals regarding internal feelings or connection to the person, the place, or the experience, or to memories or to imagination. When we know the child well, we begin to better understand their thoughts and feelings, their intentions, and their language.
Through close interpersonal mediated learning relationships, we begin to decipher these signals and help the child to decipher ours. This is the essence of Parallel Assessment, an approach that seeks to know and understand the child deeply and to understand the reciprocal relationship between the child and ourselves, and to enhance connections between the child and all of their adult mediators: parents, siblings, caregivers, teachers, and therapists. Each contributes to a shared learning and developmental process.
Too often in traditional approaches, the child’s actions are observed in isolated bits. Selected behaviors are observed, measured, compared, and judged. Idiosyncratic behaviors are assumed to be meaningless or mistakes or incompetencies, signs of a limited capacity and a restricted future. The child and their behaviors are labeled, supervised, and managed, but not understood.
If a child continually touches what they see or repeats the same vocalization, it may be labeled as failure of inhibition or a lack of discipline, or failures of higher reasoning by the personally distant, classically trained “objective observers.” Maybe the child’s behaviors are the way this child explores what is interesting to them? Maybe these repeated actions help the child to test their predictions or to regulate their emotions?
For children with developmental delays, their sensory integration, language, speech, reasoning, and hypothesis testing may be slower to develop than their chronologically aged peers. Purposeful, extended, goal-directed action emerges when the child has learned to search for and to identify patterns, to detect regularities in experience, to recognize that their actions have consequences, and that these consequences can be predicted and controlled. Judging and blaming the child does nothing to help the child to advance.
Learning to understand is not just the province of the child. Their adult mediators must also be engaged in an active process of learning. Learning to read the child, to enter their perceptual world, to recognize when a behavior is a sign of distress, when it is an attempt to connect and when it is an invitation to share and to learn together. The adult must also learn to respond, not just with management strategies or behavioral prompts, but with empathy, attunement, genuine connection and understanding.
Spontaneous, meaningful, reciprocal imitation may be impaired for children with developmental delays. Confidence, curiosity and discovery may be impaired when the space, or the experience, or the task is novel or complex, and the assessors and adults are unfamiliar, aloof and uninteresting.
Taking the perspective of the other may also be complex and difficult for the child and for their adult mediators. Children may struggle to imagine how they are perceived, to know what others know or feel. Yet even when these abilities are limited, the desire to be accepted, to be seen as competent and valued is always present.
We must resist the tendency to reduce the child to a collection of behaviors or deficits. Instead, we must recognize that each child is a living system, responding to the sensory and emotional forces triggered by the world around them.
Meaningful, purposeful and intentional seeing, hearing, touching, playing and problem-solving are not automatic events. They require feelings of safety, interest, attention, thoughtful understanding and skillful integration.
Understanding requires prerequisites, the gradual building up of familiar experiences, prerequisite skills, relevant memories and associations of content and process. The child may need encouragement and support, but encouragement and support have a far greater chance of acceptance when they come from someone who is authentic and who likes and understands the child.
Learning is not simply the acquisition of facts or skills. It is the co-creation of shared meanings. It is an interpersonal achievement. Learning how to learn is nurtured through close human relationships, from a felt sense of safety, playfulness, and mutual engagement. These qualities cannot be programmed or trained in a mechanical sense. They are cultivated through regular, high-quality interactions, learned two-way communications and shared and supported exploration and problem-solving.
Much of modern behavioral intervention has moved in the opposite direction. It reduces human behavior into discrete units, strips them of context, and seeks to reinforce desired responses through blind memorization, meaningless repetition, authority, commands and control. While such methods may produce compliance, they often do so at the expense of spontaneity, curiosity, understanding, generalization, and authentic interpersonal connection. The child becomes an automaton, reacting rather than acting, responding but not relating.
Dedicated, enlightened adult mediators must assume that children are first and foremost children and human beings. They are not puzzles to be solved. They are people to be understood and respected. Children don’t just need programs, they need partners. Reinforcement is not enough; they need a relationship.
To truly help a child think more clearly, to communicate more effectively, and to act more purposefully, we must learn who the child is so we can enter their world. Do not just assume that others are more capable than yourself; direct them and correct their mistakes. We must be prepared to learn from the child (as we teach, as we treat, as we parent), how to adjust our own attitudes and behaviors as we help them to change theirs. We learn to recognize that every small breakthrough, a smile, a shared glance, a sign of interest and initiative, is a shared human victory.
To understand and to be understood are not simply desirable goals. They are necessary for development itself. When they are present for the child, and for all of the child’s mediators, learning and development can flourish. When it is absent, we must work to restore it, not through reinforced correction but through authentic human connection.
Copyright © 2025 Shlomo Chaim
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