The Family Footings project is all about empowering families to use person centred approaches but to ensure success we know that we have to be facilitative; we have to have Great Interactions.
Sometimes, in order for the people we support to experience really Great Interactions from a larger number of people, we may have to take a step back.By stopping and thinking we may learn more about the person, and by recording that learning, using person centred thinking tools, we enable other people involved in the person’s life to interact with them in a great way also.
I have been supporting families to write one page profiles with their children who are about to start at a new school. This is a daunting time for all parents but when your son or daughter has a track record of being bullied because of their disability, that becomes something to really worry about.
The one page profiles will not give every detail of how to have Great Interactions with each of the children, but it will provide a solid foundation to be able to learn about them and continuously improve on the quality of interactions.
In order to have Great Interactions with each individual person that we work with, we need to have a culture of really listening to their
words and behaviour, learning, and responding on a continual basis.That’s
what we do in Family Footings.
Lowri Bartrum
Family Footings Facilitator