Meeting Children's Basic Needs

For a child to be able to learn, their basic needs have to be met first. Maslow (1943) proposed a theory that put these needs into a hierarchy with the most basic and essential at the bottom and the most complex at the top.The idea being that each level of needs needs to be satisfied before the child can move up to considering the needs in the next level. At the very bottom of the hierarchy are the physiological needs. Now, for most people, satisfying these needs is a matter of having enough money and for children a caring adult is essential to provide them.

However, for some of the children I have worked with, having money and a caring adult is not in and of itself enough to provide for these basic needs. When working with children with learning difficulties or disabilities there are going to be things that might make some of these basic needs harder to provide for. Some examples:

• Food - for some children with sensory difficulties they may find eating food very difficult. Or they may find that they can only eat a very small selection of foods easily. It may be that they will eat food and enough calories to grow but that they find eating foods which provide certain vitamins and minerals difficult which could lead to malnutrition or vitamin deficiencies. 
• Water - for some children they may need medical support to eat or drink any substances. Perhaps they have swallowing difficulties and need to have their drinks thickened.
• Breathing - most people will breathe without considering this but for some children they need medical support to breathe. Another time that breathing might be an issue is actually when a person has had an incident of challenging behaviour and other people have physically intervened to restrain the person in such a way that has obstructed their breathing. People have actually died from this (yes, this is shocking!) and so it is extremely important that anyone working with children or adults who may have challenging behaviours has good training in how to use de-escalation techniques and how to safely physically intervene if it is absolutely necessary.  
• Clothing - for some children their sensory needs can make clothing irritating and also they may not feel the differences in temperature and so not be able to decide on appropriate clothing for the weather independently. For example, some children may take off their coat, jumpers, shoes and socks despite it being bitterly cold outside and other children may refuse to take off their jumper despite it being extremely hot. Usually this is down to sensory difficulties or difficulties with change where the weather may have changed suddenly. Children need support to know what is appropriate clothing otherwise they can overheat or suffer from the effects of the cold. 
• Sleep - for so many of the children I have worked with over the years sleep has been a difficulty. Parents explain that their children do not sleep well, take a long time to get to sleep and get up several times through the night and often extremely early. This means they are not getting the sleep that their peers are getting and it will have an effect on them throughout the day. 

And this is just the very bottom rung of the hierarchy. As you move up through the hierarchy more difficulties arise with fulfilling our children's needs. For example, safety, many of our children have limited awareness of danger and as they become bigger and outgrow the safety items we might have used with toddlers but their understanding of danger does not increase it becomes harder to keep the child safe. As we come towards the top of the hierarchy things like self esteem and confidence can be difficult as our children navigate a world where there is still a lot of prejudice and discrimination towards people with disabilities which may damage their self esteem and confidence.

All of these things mean that our children need more support with these things than we might give to their peers. It means that as an educator I need to pay more attention to those basic needs than I would when working with their peers. So what things might I do to try and support children to have these needs fulfilled?

1. Food - when it comes to food I need to work hard with children on widening the range of foods they are able to tolerate eating. I can use different strategies to help them but I have to be careful not to put too much pressure on them as that can cause anxiety and the child to reject even more foods. What I might do is have lots of lesson time dedicated to using foods such as cooking lessons. No expectation that the child will eat the foods but lots of experience with the foods and playing with the foods, handling them and getting more familiar with the smell and textures. I can model eating the foods, maybe put the foods onto a big serving plate alongside foods they already like to eat. Modelling eating those different foods helps the child to repeatedly see that it is okay to eat them. And I can introduce foods that are almost the same but just a tiny bit different to what they already like to eat. So for instance if they like to eat crackers which are a crunchy food, maybe I will introduce a dry biscuit which is also crunchy but a bit more crumbly. Then gradually introduce more and more foods that are just that tiny bit different to widen their palate. 
2. Water - it's important I ensure that the children I am supporting are drinking enough. This might take the form of frequent reminders and drink breaks. Or for some children it might mean that I need to either be shown or have someone else able to tube feed a child their water or a child might have a thickened drink if they have swallowing difficulties. Whatever it is, I need to ensure I know and follow the medical advice for individual children to make sure that they are having their water needs fulfilled. 
3. Breathing - like with the water, if this is a medical need, then I need to follow any medical advice to ensure that a child has any breathing equipment or medication that they may need. It may be something complex that I would need to be trained to deliver, or it may be something less complex such as an inhaler for a child who has asthma. As I said above, there is also the possible situation where adults may need to physically intervene with a child that could cause problems with breathing. It is SO important to make sure that if this is a possibility that you are well trained in how to avoid having to physically restrain by using as many other techniques as possible to support a child to calm and not hurt themselves or others. But if it is absolutely necessary to physically intervene then it is essential that you are trained and know how to avoid any obstruction of a child's breathing. 
4. Clothing - with clothing this is about supporting a child to firstly wear appropriate clothing in different weather but also helping them to learn about how clothing changes with the season. This can take the form of using teddies or dolls and dressing them up for different weather. Or using symbols each morning talk about the weather and then use items of clothing to match the type of weather occurring. 
5. Sleep - this is really difficult for educators to support children with because the difficulty is often happening at home. However, we can point parents in the direction of advice on how to create a bedtime routine that promotes sleep and in the direction of medical advice if that is necessary. 

Once we have looked at how to support meeting the basic needs of the children we work with, then we can start looking at the needs further up the hierarchy. We can start thinking about their safety, helping them to be safe and to understand more and more about how to avoid danger and keep themselves safe. We can support them with their confidence and self esteem. But most importantly, we can ensure that the children we work with know that we care for them, they need to feel that they are valued, loved and belong. This has to be a central part of what we do as educators when working with children with additional needs.