Ben Furman explains the Kids'Skills method in 20 minutes My name is Ben Furman and in this video I'm going to familiarize you with Kids'Skills It's a solution-focused method to help children overcome all kinds of psychological problems. The method was developed in Finland in the 90s and has since become popular in quite a few countries around the world. Books about Kids'Skills are currently available in some twenty different languages. Kids'Skills was originally developed for teachers to help them deal with the problems of children in kindergarten and in school. Perhaps because the method is so simple, it was soon embraced by other professionals as well: social workers, psychologists, family therapists... to help the children that they meet in their work. In fact, Kid'Skills is so easy to learn and practice that many parents have used it successfully with their own children at home. The basic idea of Kids'Skills is quite simple. We don't talk about problems. We only talk about skills to learn. Whatever the child's problem is, there is always a skill that the child can learn in order to overcome the problem. I'm reminded of an 8-year old boy who was suffering from soiling, pooping in the pants. We worked with the family many years ago, and that summer the boy overcame his problem. When we talked to the boy later on, he said, "It took me a long time but finally I learned". I think that's the way children think about problems. They don't see problems. It's adults who see problems. Children only see skills that they haven't learned yet. Kids'Skill is a method that requires a new way of thinking. We have to shift from talking about problems to talking about skills. And that is not always so easy. We really need to think about what is the skill that corresponds to this particular problem. I have created an app. It's called the Kids'Skills App, and it includes a wide variety of children's problems. You can download the app from App Store or from Google Play to your phone and when you browse the contents you find that it has articles about all kinds of children's problems and you can check suggestions; What skill the child might need to learn if the child is suffering from this problem or that problem? I'll give you a few examples. Say, the child is suffering from biting his nails. What is the skill the child needs to learn? Well, you might say "stop biting his nails". Yes, but that's not a skill to learn, so we have to think differently. What's the opposite of biting your nails? Well, taking care of your nails, growing your nails, having beautiful nails... So we shift from "stopping biting your nails" to "growing pretty nails". That would be the skill for the child to learn. It's much easier for children to learn to grow their nails than to stop biting their nails. Another example. A child is hitting other children. You would say the skill is to stop hitting other children. Yes, but that's not a skill to learn. That's still talking about the problem. So what does the child need to learn to do instead? Control his anger. OK, a smaller child, this might mean that when she starts to feel angry, enraged she goes over to an adult, maybe a teacher in the school, or a parent, and says "I'm enraged", "I'm angry" And this skill, the skill of noticing that you are getting angry and then going to an adult for help, that's already a skill that can be practiced. And we can have an agreement with the child that the child will at least try to learn that skill. One more example: a child is afraid of dogs. What skill should the child learn? There was a 7-year-old boy who was afraid of dogs and he got the question "What skill do you need to learn in order not to be afraid of dogs?" And the smart boy, he said: "I know. I need to let dogs come close to me and sniff me". So that was the skill for this boy to learn. Once you have an idea about the skill you would want the child to learn you start a conversation with the child. And you start by talking about skills that the child has already learned. "What are you good at?" "What skills have you learned?" "What are your special talents?" You establish a contact with the child by talking about the skills that the child has already acquired. This raises the child's self-esteem. He feels proud of the skills that he has already acquired and is much more willing to talk about skills that he needs to become better at. Now the child is ready to discuss what skills he might need to learn, and a good idea is to ask the child. You'll be surprised. Quite often children know exactly what skills they need to become better at and they are willing to talk about skills that they need to improve, much more so than talking about problems. Children don't like to talk about problems. They get uneasy when you try to discuss with them about problem behaviors but they are quite excited about developing skills. It's natural for children to learn skills and to want to become better at this or that. Once you have come to an agreement with the child about the skill to learn, you use the steps of Kids'Skills to motivate the child, and to create a feasible plan for the child to learn that skill. Kids'Skills consists of 15 steps. I'm not going to cover all of them in this video but I'll give you a rough idea of how the method works. So, one of the first things that you do with the child is you have a discussion about what are the benefits of learning the skill. This is of course to motivate the child. So you ask questions like "How would it be good for you to learn this skill?" "Who else will benefit from you learning that skill?" "Why is it important to learn such a skill?" "What good will it do to you?" "What things will become possible for you?" The more awareness the child has about what good it will do to the child - and his environment - of him learning a particular skill, the more motivated he will be to learn that skill. In Kids'Skills we also ask the child to give a name to the skill they are learning. "So what do you want to call this skill that you are going to learn?" When the child gives a name to the skill the whole project becomes more of his own and needless to say, it's much easier for the child to communicate about the skill to other people. So this skill could be anything like the "Robot skill" or "Breathing skill" or "Princess skill". One of the key steps in Kids'Skills is asking the child to name his supporters. So you go like "So who's going to help you learn this skill?" "You know it's very difficult to learn skill all by yourself. "You need some help from other people." The child may say "my mama, my papa, my friends, my grandmother". So the child kind of creates a social network that will help him or her learn the skill that he is going to learn. Learning skills with the support of other people can be a lot of fun for the child. And in addition to people, you can also ask the child to pick an imaginary supporter, like a cartoon character, or or an animal, or a fairy, or a superhero that will help the child learn the skill. It's always quite exciting to ask children: "So how will this - you know Tiger - how will the Tiger help you to learn your skill?" You can see that children are quite imaginative. They always come up with wonderful ideas of how this imaginary creature can help them learn their skill. One step in Kids'Skills is planning the celebration. Children love to plan celebrations. And what we are celebrating is learning the skill. "So when you have learned your skill, when you have grown all your nails, when you have learned to control your temper" - whatever the skill is - you ask the child: "How would you like to celebrate?" "What would you like to do together with your supporters?" "What would be something fun to do together with with them?" The child can feel proud. It's an accomplishment, and the celebration is an acknowledgement of that accomplishment. And children are quite keen at making that happen so it adds to their motivation to learn their skill. In order to learn the skill the child needs to practice. It's important that you practice a skill. Behavior is like a pattern. So if you want to learn a new pattern of behavior, you need to practice it, and repeatedly do that. So my recommendation is that you grab your mobile phone and you ask the child to perform - to demonstrate - the skill that the child is learning. So "Please show me how you are going to behave next time in that situation". So suppose the child losses her temper when anybody says anything annoying, so you can practice. Somebody says something annoying, and the child shows the new, the better pattern of behavior and you make a video of that. So the video can be like 30 seconds but now the child can see himself behaving in the desired way and this video can also be used so the child can show around to his or her supporters what it is exactly that he's wanting to learn. So they can then become better at giving positive feedback like "Hey, now you are doing that! Good. Well done!" This is important. If you want to learn something, you need to know exactly what it is that is expected from you, and the best way to ensure that the child knows what the child is supposed to learn is to make a video, which you can see with your own eyes: "This is what I'm supposed to learn to do." So we are not covering all the 15 steps but there are a few more steps I want to mention. One of them is reminding. When children have any kind of behavioral or emotional problems and we then have an idea of what skill they need to learn, we have a video that skill, and the child has supporters, and is motivated to to learn that skill, then it is obvious that there will be moments when they, so to say, go back to the old behavior, when the problem reoccurs. This is often called setbacks. But in Kids'Skills we don't use the word "setbacks" and we don't say the "problem is coming back" or "the child is displaying the problem behavior again". We say "You forget your skill." It's like a gentle way of saying the same thing. So we say: "Sometimes you may forget your skill, and if you do forget your skill, so how would you like us - your supporters, your parents, the teacher, your friends in the classroom - how would you like your supporters to remind you of your skill when you sometimes may forget it?" Now we have a collaboration with the child. The child can then participate in talking about various ways in which he or she can be reminded of her skill. So it could be like "So do you want me to say something to you, or would it be better if I used a sign or signal? If I did something, you know, with my hands, or I touched you here? What would be a good way to remind you of your skill?" When the child tells you how you should remind him or her, it works much better, and it's a collaborative way of dealing with those moments when the child goes back to the old behavior, to the problem behavior. Sometimes when people hear about Kids'Skills they become a little bit suspicious and they go like "Hmm, well what if the child has learned a skill and then you have celebrated, and everything is fine, and then after a week or two the problem is back again. How do we prevent that the child doesn't fall back to the old pattern of behavior soon after the celebration? Well there is one method that I'd like to share with you and this is allowing, or inviting, the child to teach that skill to another child, or maybe even to another adult, or of if there is nobody, maybe even to a puppet. But the idea is that when you have learned something and then you teach it to someone else you kind of internalize that skill. They say, the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else. On the surface, Kids'Skills appears almost like a behavioral method to teach, or help children learn social and psychological skills but this is not the whole story, because when we are inviting people from the child's social network to become active participants, to become supporters for the child when the child is learning a skill, we are actually creating a change in the whole network, or the whole "system" as therapists like to say. Not only the child changes. There are major changes in how the child is being viewed, how the child is being treated, what kind of feedback the child is getting from other people. So actually Kids'Skills is a so called "systemic" method where you are influencing not only the child but everybody around the child too. And it is not uncommon that when we work with Kids'Skills so a mother, or a father, or an uncle, or a grandpa, will say: "Well, maybe I need a skill too." So the idea of learning skills starts to spread in the system. And these days, more and more, Kids'Skills is used collectively. So you can do like a "family skills project" This is a way of working with Kids'Skills where each family member is participating, so mama has a skill, daddy has a skill, big brother has a skill... Everybody in the family has a skill to learn, and everybody is of course supporting each other in making this happen, and celebrating together when everybody has learned their skill. Now this idea can also be applied in schools, in the school class. We call this the "skillful class" project and there's a manuscript that describes how to do this but the basic idea is simple. The idea is, of course, that each child in the class has a skill to learn and the teacher divides the class into small teams, "support teams" or "skills teams" where the children are supporting and helping each other in learning the skills that they have chosen. Each child has chosen his own skill to learn. So in this way you can see that Kids'Skills is not only a tool for helping individual children overcome their problem. It's almost like a philosophy where people are changing their thinking, moving away from problems and starting to think in terms of skills. I hope I was able to give you a rough idea about what Kids'Skills is all about. You know there are books about Kids'Skills, there is a Kids'Skills website, There are courses and training seminars in many countries around the world. You can find a lot of information about Kids'Skills. And of course there is the app, the Kids'Skills App that is free that can be downloaded from the Internet on your phone or tablet, So welcome to join the exciting world of Kids'Skills.