Life coaching for very young children

My experience too Marydoll.
(There, think of your "long post" as having saved me the effort )

What an interesting post Marydoll I had no idea such units existed. And more sadly that they were needed - I've always thought - some people just shouldn't have children :-(

I often worked in the nurture unit in my school, my morning pupils were between five and six years old and the afternoon children were , between ten and twelve years old. They were in this unit because of emotional and social difficulties and a mainstream class was unsuitable for them.
Part of our morning routine was to discuss what "face" we had on today. Most of the children had either a "sad" or " angry" face when they came in to school in the morning. Much of the time this was caused to by what was happening in their lives outside school. We tried (not always successfully) to help them to understand why they felt this way and also give them strategies for coping with these feelings. Their feelings manifested themselves in a number of ways: physical violence, anger, destruction of property, withdrawing into themselves and in one case elective mutism.
Their parents couldn't or were unable to give them the guidance and support they needed to cope with these feelings, so there had to be some sort of intervention. Another aspect was that they actually didn't have the language to articulate how they felt. There was little nurturing nor interaction between parent and child. No-one actually spoke to them, apart from telling them to stop whining or to "Shut up!"
Of course, I believe that in the first instance that is the role for parents, but some of the circumstances my pupils were experiencing would shock you to the core.

My New Year resolution was to not write long posts. Failed miserably.