Interview Blog

The focus of my service-learning project is to develop a parent-child music online resource to address development of parent-child bond, addressing communication, social, and emotional skills. With increased stresses due to the pandemic, I feel there is a growing need to provide ways for parents to experience healthy, positive interactions with their children. To gain more insight into this need, I conducted an interview with a special education teacher in my community, who in this blog will be referred to as Mrs. X 

Mrs. X works with what she described as students with “the most challenging behavior” in the elementary school. She is part of a program that works with students at various levels of integration up to fully self-contained classrooms, with the goal of eventually fully integrating the students into the general population classrooms. This program has been in place for four years, and they have experienced “great success.” 

I believed there to be a need in this area, but I was not fully aware of, nor prepared for, how extensive the need was. One of the needs we discussed was an increase of healthy communication between parents and children. Something observed is unclear expression of expectations and understanding of expectations. This is an important need to address as it helps communication in families be better understood, as well as individual needs. When children understand the reasons behind rules and expectations, it helps them to become more socially aware of the influence of their actions on others, and how to show caring and respect. 

Another social need I would like to address is that people, including parents, make mistakes, and that this is okay. It is common for children to expect their parents to be infallible, and when things take place to indicate otherwise, this can be difficult to process. It can also cause the false idea that if a child makes mistakes, they are a bad person and cannot change. Helping children to understand that all people will make mistakes, and what someone does past making a mistake is what can help people begin to heal is important for social and emotional health. 

A goal Mrs. X mentioned was teaching children the power of their own choices, which aligns with the Social Emotional Learning (SEL) competency of Responsible-Decision Making. Life is not always fair, and we can not control the weather, our parents, our teachers, or our peers. The only thing we have full control over is our choices. Each choice has a consequence, which could be positive or negative. Taking full responsibility for our choices and being aware that we have power to make good choices helps children to have a feeling of responsibility and ownership of their actions. It also increases their awareness of the ability they have to impact their social environment.  

There are many reasons why a child’s behavior is not according to the social norm. Often these are in relation to something in their environment which is frustrating or confusing. It is common for children to react in ways that are unhealthy to emotional stress or frustrations. Healthy options for expressing emotions, as well as learning ways to communicate with parents why they are behaving as they are, are skills all children need to learn. Finding ways to develop these SEL competencies of Self-Awareness and Relationship Skills can not only increase emotional health but provide opportunities for communication and relationship development at home. 

My initial idea for addressing these needs is music games, songs, and stories which will teach these ideas to children, and provide an opportunity to practice these with parents. For example, I have an idea for a song that will say something along the lines of “I need to do ______, because ______.”, providing a framework for the idea of providing a reason for rules and expectations. Having a way to rehearse this idea and a formula for remembering people have reasons for the things they request of you will help children to remember this.  

I’m also excited to do some work on music activities that provide opportunities to learn healthy emotional expression. I am not entirely certain how I’m going to focus in on this, because there are so many emotions that children may be expressing (or not expressing) in unhealthy ways, I am trying to decide if I want to come up with several music activities to address them individually, or something that can be customized according to the emotion. I think the second option will be best as this will simplify what needs to be learned and create a resource that is known well that can be applied to multiple situations.  

Evidence that progress has been made toward meeting these goals would be, ultimately, generalization of the music activity. If a parent and child could have a conversation using the “formula” provided in the music activity for healthy communication, without need for the music, this would be tremendous progress! An outcome I would also like to see is increased self esteem within children. A tangible measure of this would be a child being able to describe things they like about themselves, and how that makes them special.  

Something I would like to do to continue to develop depth of understanding about my target audience is to conduct a few more interviews with community resources I had listed in my proposal. I obtained a great deal of information from my first interview, and believe a stronger variety of information would provide greater understanding of community need. I think it will also help me to narrow my focus on which goals to address, and how to address them.