Post #2 in category. We recommend reading posts in numerical order.

When parenting, teaching, or treating a child with developmental delays, interpersonal relationships and feelings come first. Before child rearing, teaching, and therapy can be meaningful and lasting, the child must experience a sense of safety, trust, interest, and emotional connection. These are not optional additions to development. They are the foundation upon which development is built.

It can seem almost self-evident, yet many educational and therapeutic approaches continue to proceed in the opposite direction. They begin with diagnostic categories, predetermined curricula, behavioral objectives, or stimulus-response reward systems. The child becomes a collection of deficits to be remediated, skills to be measured, behaviors to be modified instead of first discovering “Who is the child?” And “What is our Relationship?”

The answers are not found in a diagnostic report or a checklist. It emerges gradually through an ongoing interpersonal relationship in which the adult learns to recognize the child’s feelings, interests, frustrations, fears, strengths, and intentions. It is through this gradually built-up interpersonal relationship that the child’s subjective experience becomes more understandable and easier to connect with.

Within the frameworks of Parallel Assessment, Parallel Development, and Synontogeny, the child’s feelings are not secondary considerations. They are continually monitored, interpreted and prioritized. The adult is not merely assessing skills and behaviors but also assessing the child’s emotional state, their changing motivation, confidence, engagement and sense of wellbeing. These ongoing observations help determine which goals are appropriate, which prerequisites are missing, what strategies are likely to succeed and when progress is genuinely occurring.

The Neurobiology of Connection

A nervous system experiencing discomfort, anxiety, confusion, or threat has fewer resources available for communication, learning, reasoning, problem-solving and social participation. Under such conditions, much of the brain’s activity becomes devoted to self-protection. The child may withdraw, resist, avoid, shut down or act out. These reactions are often interpreted as behavior problems when they may instead reflect a nervous system that is straining to maintain equilibrium.

Positive emotional states create conditions that support exploration, flexibility, learning and social engagement. When children feel safe and connected, they are more willing to take risks, to tolerate frustration, attempt difficult tasks and recover from mistakes. They are more likely to share their thoughts, to communicate their intentions, and more willing to participate in activities that challenge them.

Colwyn Trevarthen’s observations of early mother-infant interactions describe this process. Both partners in development continuously adjust “the timing, emotional form and energy of their expression” as they strive to achieve emotional synchrony and shared understanding. Two nervous systems become organized around a common experience and a personal bond. Each partner influences the other, creating a dynamic process of mutual regulation and connection.

Trevarthen’s observations of infant/parent interactions remain relevant throughout life. Effective parenting, teaching and therapy continue to involve two people adjusting to one another in real time. The adult pays attention not only to what the child is doing, but to how the child is feeling and thinking. In turn, the child continually evaluates whether the adult understands, values, respects, and supports them.

Safety Is Built Through Relationships

Feelings of safety, connection, interest and calm are foundational, but safety does not mean eliminating every source of discomfort or challenge. Nor does it mean constructing and controlling an environment in which the child never encounters frustration, uncertainty, or failure. This is not the real world. When we overprotect a child, the child feels even more vulnerable.

In the early stages, feelings of real safety emerge when a trusted adult remains physically present and emotionally available while the child encounters manageable difficulties. The child learns that frustration can be tolerated, that problems can be solved, and that uncomfortable sensations and feelings can be survived.

When a child becomes frightened, discouraged, or overwhelmed, the most powerful intervention is often not the removal of the challenge but the presence of an attuned adult who remains calm, confident, and connected. Over time, the child begins to internalize this experience. The confidence that “we can do this together” gradually becomes the confidence that “I can do this.”

This may mean that certain essential priorities and prerequisites need to be built, advanced or applied so that this and similar challenges can eventually be met. This process unfolds slowly. It develops over months and years of shared experiences, not through isolated lessons or brief interventions. As circumstances change, priorities and prerequisites must be continually reassessed. New contexts, new skills, feelings and understandings need to be introduced.

The foundation for these changes rests on the child’s belief that someone understands them, believes in them and is committed to helping them succeed.

The Natural Sequence of Development

Many well-intentioned interventions reverse the natural sequence of child development.

Faced with pressure to produce measurable outcomes, adults often begin by identifying problems, categorizing and labeling the child, setting cookie-cutter objectives, applying generalized, program-based strategies, and tracking behavioral targets. The human relationship is treated as a secondary concern, something to address later if difficulties arise.

But typical human development rarely unfolds this way. Long before a child responds to instruction, masters a skill, or achieves a developmental milestone, they first become connected to another person. Development begins in relationship. It grows from countless daily experiences of shared attention, trust, enjoyment, comfort, mutual understanding, and patient-mediated support tailored to each child.

When a child experiences an adult as someone who truly sees them, values them, enjoys being with them and believes in their potential, the child becomes more available for interaction, communication, exploration and learning. Communication is not limited to a one-sided exchange of directions and compliance and becomes a genuine exchange in which both participants understand and influence one another.

Within this relational foundation, goals, priorities, prerequisites, strategies and evaluations acquire personal and interpersonal meaning and purpose. They are no longer imposed upon the child from the outside but emerge within a relationship that supports growth. The relationship creates the emotional safety, motivation and trust that allow learning to be effective.

Genuine interpersonal relationships are not separate from learning, intervention and development. They are the foundation upon which development grows, the magic which makes meaningful learning possible.

Play is the Chemistry of Motivation

Play is often misunderstood as the opposite of work. Adults may view it as a break from learning rather than a vehicle for learning itself. Yet from a developmental perspective, play may be one of the most efficient learning systems nature has ever produced.

When children play, they enjoy themselves as they practice motor skills, communication, social understanding, emotional regulation, imagination, planning, problem-solving, and creativity. The child engages voluntarily. The participation, the interactions, the activities, the learning become rewarding.

Play reflects an underlying neurobiology. Play activates a highly complex, interconnected matrix of brain chemicals that “drive motivation, physical joy, social bonding and cognitive growth.”

Play enhances neurochemical systems involved in attention, motivation, memory, social engagement, acceptance of novelty, curiosity, exploration and social connection and learning by stimulating patterns of brain activity.

“Dopamine (heightens focus and sharpens attention), serotonin (stabilizes mood and supports emotional regulation), endorphins (mediate pleasure, fun, joy), oxytocin (promotes social bonding, trust, and empathy, and helps the person to read social cues), noradrenaline (heightens physiological arousal, alertness, and vigilance), acetylcholine (promotes neuroplasticity and learning), Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor triggers synaptic growth and neurogenesis, GABA (calms the nervous system, mitigating fear responses), and the reduction of cortisol levels (reducing stress and fight-flight-freeze reactions.” AI

Of course, the child wants to continue playing.

One of the most important questions adults can ask is not, “How do I get this child to learn?” but rather, “How do I make learning feel worthwhile, interesting, enjoyable and successful, like play?”

When learning takes on the quality of purposeful play, the child’s attention no longer needs to be continually redirected. Their curiosity awakens, their motivation strengthens. They are more willing to try again. Enjoyable, mediated learning activities increase skills and understanding and deepen the human relationship. 

Children engaged in such experiences rarely feel that they are being taught in the conventional sense. Rather, they experience learning as an absorbing form of play. They become active participants in a meaningful exchange, exploring, experimenting, and contributing their own ideas. Time seems to pass with unusual speed. The child becomes so immersed in the activity and in the relationship that supports it that they do not want to stop.

The same feelings are experienced by the adult mediators. When interactions are enjoyable, meaningful, and collaborative, adults become more creative, patient, observant, and invested. The activity and the relationship become energizing.

This reciprocal process is at the heart of Synontogeny. Development is not occurring only within the child. The adult is also learning, adapting, and growing. Both partners in development influence one another. Both contribute to the success of the interaction. Both experience the rewards of shared discovery.

The Child and the Mediator as Partners in Development

Playful, imaginative joint activities are not distractions from learning. When successful, they are the atmosphere and the vehicles that make learning possible.

The child who lacks the prerequisites for play because of difficulties in communication, motor coordination, cognitive gaps, social understanding, emotional regulation, or flexible thinking is deprived of joy and of one of development’s most powerful processes. The child may appear frightened, withdrawn, repetitive, unconcerned, and unmotivated when what is missing are the foundational interactive relationships and learned prerequisites that allow playful engagement to emerge.

The task of mediation is not simply to teach isolated skills. It is to help construct the social, interpersonal conditions under which meaningful participation, enjoyment, curiosity, and connection can increase.

Relationships and Feelings Come First

Development unfolds most naturally within relationships that provide a sense of safety, understanding, and genuine connection. A child who feels secure is freer to explore the world, to take risks and to engage beyond what is already familiar. When a child’s feelings, intentions and experiences are recognized and understood by others, relationships deepen, and communication becomes more spontaneous and meaningful.

The desire to persist through challenges is also rooted in emotional experience. Children are far more likely to remain engaged when activities bring pleasure, curiosity and a sense of competence. Success is not merely a matter of acquiring skills. It importantly involves feeling capable, valued and supported while acquiring those skills and understandings.

Growth does not emerge because of pressure or instruction alone, but as the result of the child feeling connected to the people who guide them and to the activities that give meaning and purpose to their daily lives.

The most effective interventions and mediation do not begin with techniques, programs, external rewards or corrections. They begin with a relationship. Then the deeper aims of Parallel Assessment, Parallel Development, and Synontogeny become possible: two people connected through trust, understanding, and fun, helping each other to grow.

Copyright © 2025 Shlomo Chaim

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