Not such great expectations

Sadly it isn't always that expectations are pitched too high. If so then at least the more able children would be fully extended. In our experience this is not so.

A third child we look after is a boy now seven. When he first came to visit us three years ago, his behaviour was at times that of a feral child. Every boundary that was set for him he would simply charge down. Always he was running away; escaping, through doors, over walls and fences, out of bed, down the stairs. Gradually, as we grew in confidence in our handling of him, he came to trust us sufficiently to accept the boundaries we set for him. As a consequence, his time with us now (one sleep-over a week from school, and one weekend a month) is eagerly looked forward to both by him and us, and passes much too quickly. In fact we have lately begun to invite another boy to come for tea and play for a while. It's amusing to see the first child giving the other one the benefit of his experience when it comes to "the way we do things here".

The pity is that throughout the past two years of his considerable progress here, the boy's mum has continued to report the same unruly behaviour when he is at home. We have tried to pass on such simple wisdom as we possess, around matters like bedtime routine, but what this boy needs is consistency. Above all he needs to know that attrition will not always get him what he wants. For too long his mum, even with professional support, has not felt able to deliver this, although at last we are beginning to see more hopeful signs.

The greater disappointment we feel is with his school. He goes to the same special school as the nine-year-old girl but is far more advanced in his ability to socialise and communicate. We have sought to give him structure for his speech and to encourage the use of sentences. We have read with him and taught him rhymes and songs. Yet, presumably because this is not being sufficiently reinforced at school, he quickly lapses into single-word, baby language. At times he regresses so much that he is barely able to achieve the level of sentence-making and pronunciation he had reached two years ago.

A great deal of time and money is being expended through social and educational services, on each of the children I've described. But how can we optimize the advances they make?