Posted on 03/03/2007 7:02:14 PM PST by gcruse
Pupils up to the age of 11 are being bottle-fed and mothered in school as part of a radical new move to address poor discipline.
A state primary school has become the first in the country to take part in the approach, which was developed in the US to give problem children the love and attention they may have missed out on at a younger age.
Instead of being given a sharp telling off or a few minutes on the naughty chair, they have one on one sessions with a trained school therapist.
The children - aged between six and 11 - are bottle-fed like young babies, nursed and encouraged to play games promoting patience and teamwork.
Parents who feel they no longer have control over their child can sign up to the Theraplay programme, which lasts up to three years and emphasises the importance of a strong and loving bond with a mother figure.
The controversial approach - developed during the late 1960s - has now been adopted by Rockingham Primary School in Northamptonshire.
The technique is based on the assumption that children with behavioural problems have often failed to bond with their parents in infancy.
It aims to redress this by making them feel loved and secure once more.
Last night, the school's headteacher Juliet Hart defended the programme amid opposition from critics who claim it prevents children from growing up.
"I'm sure there will be some people who won't agree with what we are doing but this form of therapy is recognised around the world for changing behavioural patterns.
"We are still like any other school. In each classroom children agree appropriate types of behaviour and know the consequences if they are not adhered to, including time-out or missing play-time.
"They also know that if they work hard they will be rewarded with approval. However, there are some children who need help to develop relationships with their parents.
"For whatever reason the bond has gone and there is no mutual respect. Through theraplay we encourage that bond to grow so the child feels more secure, calm and happy.
"It's not about discipline. This is about changing a child's behaviour over time. Admittedly, it will have an impact on discipline but only in the long term."
She added: "For years, teachers have laboured with resistant children and wondered: 'How can I unlock this person'. Once you have emotional literacy, then the learning can begin."
At Rockingham Primary School, which has 180 pupils, they have installed a dedicated Theraplay unit, complete with one-way mirror, run by trained therapist Jo Williams.
She works with a handful of children at the school and uses a variety of therapeutic methods to help children who are experiencing problems at home and at school, including calming music and lights.
In a typical session she might comb a child's hair, spoon feed them, put cream on their cuts and bruises or wash dirty hands.
"It's all about making them feel they're worth looking after," she said. "I had one child who was having trouble bonding with her child. There was little touching and eye contact.
"By the end, she was bottle-feeding him, he was stroking her hair. She said it was one of the best things that had ever happened to her."
The children who visit her are often from poor and fractured families. Often they come in groups while others come alone whilst a parent watches from a booth.
But campaigners claim Theraplay, by bottle-feeding youngsters as old as 11, holds them back and prevents them from growing up into adults.
Dr Dennis Hayes, leader of the education forum at the Institute of Ideas think tank, said: "This is part of the infantilisation of adult life.
"It's about keeping people permanently as children, not helping them to grow up."
It is not the first time that schools have looked to other non-conventional methods to discipline unruly children. Last year, it emerged children at Liberton and Gracemount high schools in Edinburgh were given lessons in anger management.
Youth workers visited the schools in a bid to reduce classroom violence and cut the number of exclusions. Teachers there reported a noticeable improvement in the children's behaviour during the pilot project.
The theraplay technique was devised in 1967 in Chicago in a bid to build strong families and emotionally healthy children and is now recognised worldwide.
They argue that warm and loving relationships are essential to a child's self-worth and as a result help them to gain mutual respect for others around them.
The Theraplay Institute, which has 60 therapists in the US and Canada, said it had seen a growing interest from the UK where it has a handful of therapists.
I don't care who you are, that's funny!
"must be a new one"
I have both. The one I posted cracks me up. (ps. did you check out the thread I pinged you to a few minutes ago?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1794584/posts )
A whole lot less than 50 years, considering the way things are going now here.
Making an 11 year old drink from a bottle would be like having him sit in the corner with a dunce cap on his head. Nothing like embarrassing a kid into submission.
Exactly!! Just wait! There will soon be some stupid liberal twit offering to breast feed these kids in the near future.
I can see the value of regression therapy for troubled children. What the article doesn't say is whether they work the child back up to "normal" age emotion expression.
"Spare the rod, spoil the child"
"The technique is quite popular among certain fundamentalist foster parents here in the US."
Foster parenting is a religion?
Barf
Oh good lord.........
No, but for some reason foster parents who practice "Reactive Attachment Therapy" tend to be fundamentalist Christians.
I don't know the reason for it.
As a kid I used to drink from a bottle all the time. Usually root beer. Sometimes orange crush. What's the problem?
It used to be that good teachers were challenged to teach all of the children. Now they say that the children are defective and must be changed to suit incompetent teachers.
I need to be nursed by a 24 year old to make up for my bad childhood.
Ping
Not all, but certainly many. Probably because fundamentalist versions of Christianity are often big on absolute obedience -- of wives to husbands, children to parents, everybody to their narrow ideas of what God's orders are.
The reactive attachment disorder therapy is a cult in its own right, though. They've killed a number of kids, including at least two by "forced water drinking therapy" and Candace Newmaker by "rebirthing therapy". Candace had been adopted by a single woman who was a nurse practitioner (who you'd think would have known that suffocating a child wasn't a good idea!), so presumably not a fundamentalist Christian.
However, from what I've read, a lot of "therapists" who promote this crap are more New Agey, psychobabble types, than fundamentalist religious types. Most are outright scammers too, charging huge fees, and setting up cultish "support groups" for parents, in which they're prodded to reinforce each others belief in the "therapies". They're often essentially brainwashed into thinking the whole thing makes sense, and into continuing to fork over the huge fees.
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