Co-operation
Caregiving dimension four
Co-operation is the fourth of five dimensions of caregiving outlined in the Secure Base Model. This article highlights how it can be applied to your role as a carer and the likely developmental benefits for your foster child.
Helping your foster child to feel .effective.
How Can You Encourage Co-operation
Are you wondering how to help your foster child towards greater independence and a sense of their own validity in their thought and behaviour? Do you recognise their need to be effective, to ‘make their mark’? Do you want to encourage them in their personal goals, taking notice of their feelings and wishes?
While looking for ways to increase your foster children’s independent thought and action, you will want to encourage co-operation. This will help them to feel competent and to learn to look to others for help.
This diagram illustrates how sensitivity works within the caregiving cycle.
How Will this Help Your Foster Child?
Through co-operation between you and your foster child, a partnership will develop. There will be a sense of ‘moving forward together’ towards the achievement of goals. They will increase in confidence and gain a view of themselves as a competent and valid individual.
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A New Experience for Them
It is possible that your foster child will not have experienced a co-operative form of parenting. Co-operation may be a new concept for them. Their early caregiver may have been unable to establish a co-operative partnership. This might have been because they were very controlling and left no room for your foster child to make choices, or to feel effective in an independent way.
Your foster child’s parent, or caregiver, might have been unable or unwilling to negotiate in various situations. Because of this, their parental responses and judgements may have been rigid and inflexible, or just too weak to be effective. Also, there may have been very few opportunities for shared activities which were fun, playful and enriching.
How Will This Have Disadvantaged Them?
So, various factors might have made them feel unable to enjoy exploratory play or to see their parent as a partner to refer to when difficulties arise. This lack of a co-operative approach may have resulted in them trying to exercise unreasonable control over adults. Or, they may have reacted by becoming passive and unnaturally compliant.
The Need for Independence and Individual Competence
Along with most foster carers, you will see the need for your foster child to become an independent and competent individual. You will see that they need to feel able to have an impact on their environment and to make choices as an individual.
To identify with a child who has experienced neglect, abuse, unprovoked anger and other negative responses, can cause you real anguish. But it’s through trying to do this that you will develop the skills to understand why they might be behaving in a certain way and what their expectations of themselves and others might be. You will need to bear in mind the child’s history and how even small day to day events might evoke powerful emotions. You’ll also need to learn to pick up on little clues about why their thoughts, feelings, and reactions are what they are.
What Might Your Foster Child's Experience Have Been?
They may not have been allowed to grow towards independence in a guided and co-operative way, with room for choices. They may not have had appropriate control or freedom. Their behaviour might, therefore, provoke difficult and painful feelings in you, and make it hard for you to work together towards these goals.
Could this mean you might need help to explore your own feelings of competence and effectiveness? And should you examine your personal need for control as a step toward developing your role of co-operative caregiver?
Yes, you will find it helpful to share your thoughts about your foster child’s earlier experiences of being cared for. It might also be helpful to reflect on how control and competence were dealt with around your foster child in the past.
How Will You Achieve This?
As you develop this co-operative caregiving, you will need to find ways of helping your foster child to make choices and to take actions. It will be important for them to feel it is both safe and rewarding to do this. You will need to create opportunities for them to experience a feeling of being genuinely effective. And it’s important that you remember, always, that a balance must be struck between encouraging independent and dependent behaviour, as appropriate.
What Else Can You Do?
Another aim for you will be to establish co-operative relationships. Within these relationships, each ‘partner’ helps the other towards their goal. A sense of fun and enjoyment should be incorporated in these relationships. Working together and sharing needs to be experienced as rewarding.
Remember, though, that all this should be carried out within firm and safe boundaries. You will need to negotiate within these boundaries and help your foster child to reach acceptable compromises in some circumstances.
When Will Your Foster Child Be Ready to Progress into This Co-Operative Style of Behaviour?
It will be important for your foster child to have achieved a secure base so that they can feel safe enough to look at different ways of acting and making possible choices. Trust will be vital before they can feel able to risk variations of thought and behaviour.
The Outcome and Rewards of This Co-Operation
Once this trust is established, your foster child will come to realise that they can be effective and autonomous, but within safe limits. As they work in co-operation with you and other trusted adults, they will come to sense the rewards of compromise and co-operation.
Co-operation within the Secure Base Model, focuses on how to help your foster child feel effective. The next caregiving dimension ‘Family Membership‘ focuses on helping them to belong.
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