AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT: THE ROLE OF THE RELATIONSHIPS AT THE HEART OF EFFECTIVE PRACTICE Tim Moore Enhanced MCH Workforce Professional Development Day Melbourne, 4 th April 2019
WHY ENGAGE WITH PARENTS Professionals may seek to engage parents for many reasons: • to help individual parents with personal or parenting problems, • to help parents support their children’s learning, • to help groups of parents manage shared issues, • to help communities of parents in addressing common concerns regarding services and environments, or • to collaborate with parents in co-designing, co-managing and co- evaluating services. To be successful, all of these different forms of engagement depend upon the nature of the relationships that are established between the professionals and the parents.
OUTLINE • The importance of relationships • The neurobiology of interpersonal relationships • Evidence regarding the role and nature of relationships • Key features of effective relationships • Challenges in authentic engagement • Ensuring ‘take - up’ • Caveats and conclusions
THE IMPORTANCE OF RELATIONSHIPS
THE IMPORTANCE OF RELATIONSHIPS
THE SOCIAL BRAIN • In primates (including humans), the percentage of the brain made up by the neocortex varies according to the size of the social group • Humans live in the largest average group sizes among primates, and therefore have the largest neocortex as a proportion of brain size • The main explanation for this relationships is that social interaction is very demanding – we have to navigate a complex social environment, identifying the social status of others and whether they are friends or enemies, and constantly reading other people’s minds, facial expressions and body language • Thus, the human brain is a social organ – its growth and development has been driven by the requirements of social life
• Our brains are designed to respond to and be influenced by others: we are wired to be social • Social bonding stimulates the pleasure circuits of the brain, whilst social rejection and isolation leads to pain that is neurologically identical to physical pain • Social support and social connections can buffer us against the stress of the most difficult moments in our lives • Increasing the social connections in our lives is probably the single easiest way to enhance our well-being Matthew Lieberman (2013). Social: • Social connections determine wellbeing directly, but also Why Our Brains are Wired to bolster health, providing a second indirect route to wellbeing Connect. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
• If we don’t interact regularly with people face -to- face, the odds are we won’t live as long, remember information as well, or be as happy as we could have been. • Physiological immunity, enhanced learning, and the restorative power of mutual trust derive from face-to- face contact with the people in your intimate circle – the ‘village effect’ not only helps you live longer, it makes you want to. • Our relationships with the people we know and care about are just as critical to our survival as food, Susan Pinker (2015). The shelter and money – but not just any social contact, Village Effect: Why Face- but only the kind that takes place in real time, face- to-Face Contact Matters. London, UK: Atlantic to-face. Books.
• Human being do not just live in groups: they live in social networks, which affect everything from emotions to health to politics • Our connections affect every aspect of our lives: how we feel, what we know, whom we marry, whether we fall ill, how much money we make, and whether we vote all depend upon the ties that bind us. • Our connections do not end with the people we know: beyond our own social horizons, friends of friends of Christakis, N.A. & friends can start chain reactions that eventually reach Fowler, J.H. (2009). us Connected: The Surprising Power of • While we are connected to others by six degrees of Our Social Networks and How They Shape separation, our influence on each other in social Our Lives. NY: Little, networks obeys three degrees of influence Brown and Company.
• Each of us has a unique collection of consequential strangers - people outside our circle of family and close friends. • They range from long standing acquaintances to people we encounter on occasion or only in certain places. • They are as vital to our well-being, growth, and day to day existence as family and close friends. • Although loved ones are universally important, all relationships influence our physiology and psychology - we don’t necessarily need a lot of relationship; its variety that affects our well being. Blau, M. & Fingerman, K.L. (2009). • Where we live, work, shop and mingle has everything to Consequential do with the relationships we cultivate, and therefore our Strangers: The Power of People Who Don't quality of life: we simply can’t separate our relationships Seem to Matter. . . But from the places we inhabit. Really Do. New York: W.W. Norton.
SOCIAL SUPPORT AND FAMILY WELL-BEING • Social support is linked to a number of child and family outcomes, including low birthweight, child abuse and neglect, maternal adjustment, mental health and physical health Family isolation can be the result of various factors: • geography (living in rural and remote areas), • physical (cut off from the local neighbourhood by a main highway), • poor health, disability or special ne eds, • cultural isolation (not being able to speak the language), • social isolation (being new to an area and not knowing anyone), • lack of money to reciprocate hospitality, • lack of education , and • lack of transport .
THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS
NEUROBIOLOGY OF INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS
TWO MODES OF THINKING AND CONNECTING • Our brains have two parallel pathways for processing conscious and unconscious information • The first is a set of early-evolving fast systems for our senses, motor movements, and bodily processes that we share with other animals and are non-verbal and inaccessible to conscious reflection • The second is a set of later-evolving slower systems involved in conscious awareness that eventually gave rise to narratives, imagination, and abstract thought • The brain regions associated with the second pathway tend to be on the outer (or lateral ) surface of the brain, whereas the first pathway uses mostly medial (or midline ) regions of the brain. • The two pathways affect both our thinking and our social connections
TWO MODES OF THINKING: System 1 and System 2 (Kahneman, 2012) • System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control, and generates the impressions and feelings that are the main source of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2 • System 2 operates deliberately and slowly, is only used when the situation demands it, and generates the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration
NEUROBIOLOGY OF INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS • The subconscious pathway also enables our brains to read the body and facial signals of others, and detect their intentions and emotional states • The cues we use include facial expressions, pupil dilation, posture, tone of voice, odour, and mirror systems • In effect, our (right) brains are able to communicate directly with other people’s (right) brains independently of conscious communication processes or awareness. • The right brain limbic areas that enable this to occur grow rapidly in the first two years of life and the nature of their development can have long-term implications.
NEUROBIOLOGY OF INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS (cont) • The difference in processing speed between the fast and slow systems is approximately one half second: our brains process sensory, motor, and emotional information in 10-50 milliseconds, while it takes 500 – 600 milliseconds for brain activity to register in conscious awareness • During this vital half second, our brains work like search engines, unconsciously scanning our memories, bodies, and emotions for relevant information, constructing our present experience based on a template from the past that our minds view as objective reality. • By the time we become consciously aware of an experience, it has already been processed many times, activated memories, and initiated complex patterns of behaviour • 90 per cent of the input to the cortex comes from internal neural processing, not the outside world
NEUROBIOLOGY OF INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS (cont) • Like neurons, we send and receive messages from one another across a synapse – the social synapse • The social synapse is the space between us. It is also the medium through which we are linked together into larger organisms such as families, tribes, societies, and the human species as a whole • Because so much of this communication is automatic and below conscious awareness, most of what goes on is invisible to us and taken for granted Cozolino, L. (2014). The • Neuroscience of We cannot turn off this subconscious communication Human Relationships: system, so are always sending and receiving messages Attachment and the Developing Social one to another Brain (2 nd . Ed.). New York: W.W. Norton.
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