3 - 5 Years
At this age you may communicate with the child verbally, but this is likely to be aided by non-verbal communication (e.g. drawing, game playing etc). To support you in talking to children you may want to consider;
It is important that you consider your body language and talking to young children may involve you physically being on their level. It is important to show you are listening to the child and this may involve making eye contact, tilting your head, kneeing or sitting down beside the child or making iterations such as ‘uh huh’ to show you are listening. However, it is also important to remember that some children may struggle with eye contact and may prefer you to talk to them whilst playing a game for example.
By this age children can generally recall experiences from several months previously relatively freely but they need questions from an adult to be able to do this. They perform better with specific (directive WH questions) rather than open-ended questions and generally, ‘what’, ‘who’ and ‘where’ questions are understood first (by approximately three years of age). Consequently, you may choose to use such questions when you are talking to the child. However, it is important to remember that you may not get an answer from the child and the child should not feel that they are always expected to give an answer. It is also important to remember that young children may not comply with adult expectations when answering questions: they may attempt to answer questions they do not understand or answer with a single word, or answer them unintelligibly, or by showing rather than telling.
- - Using toy telephones, puppets, dolls, dolls houses etc. This can help you to gain an understanding of the child’s lived experiences including their life at home and their key relationships.
- - Using play-doh to mould shapes, build scenes etc can help set the scene for a child to talk to you
- - Free drawing can help children communicate a message to you or can give you an indication as to how they might be feeling.
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- - Using puppets to explain professional roles to children may help to identify a person the child can talk to about their worries. It may also help to dispel any myths they may have about particular roles (e.g. police will come if you do something bad)
It is important that you consider your body language and talking to young children may involve you physically being on their level. It is important to show you are listening to the child and this may involve making eye contact, tilting your head, kneeing or sitting down beside the child or making iterations such as ‘uh huh’ to show you are listening. However, it is also important to remember that some children may struggle with eye contact and may prefer you to talk to them whilst playing a game for example.
By this age children can generally recall experiences from several months previously relatively freely but they need questions from an adult to be able to do this. They perform better with specific (directive WH questions) rather than open-ended questions and generally, ‘what’, ‘who’ and ‘where’ questions are understood first (by approximately three years of age). Consequently, you may choose to use such questions when you are talking to the child. However, it is important to remember that you may not get an answer from the child and the child should not feel that they are always expected to give an answer. It is also important to remember that young children may not comply with adult expectations when answering questions: they may attempt to answer questions they do not understand or answer with a single word, or answer them unintelligibly, or by showing rather than telling.
Example
Drawing with the child
“You are using a lot of colour on your picture”
“Oh I see you have drawn some people there, you draw people really well”
“I see that person is smaller than the other people, who is that?”
“They look as though they are moving away from the bigger person, who is the big person?”
“I have noticed you seem to be quiet at the moment”
“I’ve also noticed you don’t seem to run around the playground as much as you used to”
“Can you tell me about that?”
“Does the smaller person in your picture like to run around the playground?”
As with the example above, you may want to ask some ‘Wh’ questions in the context of a conversation with the child. However, it is important to remember that whilst you have concerns that might indicate sexual abuse, they also might not.