Building and Strengthening Parent-Child Bonds Through Pairing

Sometimes, finding ways to connect with your child may seem difficult or even impossible, especially when your child may not play or engage with the world in ways children typically do. Your child may have a limited number of interests, may avoid interaction, or may spend most of their time engaged in repetitive or solo activities. How can you enter their world and build true connection in ways that speak to your child? In ABA, therapists utilize a tool called pairing to help engage learners, build trust, and form meaningful relationships.

What is Pairing?

Pairing is an ABA concept that targets building connections between your learner’s team of caregivers and the things in your child’s world that spark joy! This creates positive associations for learners regarding interactions with adults or caretakers in their lives and facilitates mutual trust and understanding. Pairing is useful to all the individuals that make up your child’s care team – most important of all being you, the parent. Others such as siblings, extended family, therapists, teachers, and medical providers use this skill to help appropriately support your child. You, as the parent, guardian, or another primary big person, function as your child’s “home base” for safety and connection.

Why is Pairing Beneficial?

At R&R, therapists utilize pairing to build positive associations between our learners’ interests and ourselves while focusing on forming a relationship rooted in genuine interest and care. Pairing is a useful tool, not only for strengthening relationships but also for increasing your child’s willingness to follow instructions and participate in skill building activities. ABA providers, like R&R, rely on this tool for promoting learning and engagement with your child and can be great guides for creative ways to build this relationship and increase your instructional control in the home.

So, What Does Pairing Look Like?

When you play and engage with your child, it can be easy to start asking questions and placing demands to foster learning and growth. However, when you are pairing with your child, you want to focus on building a firm foundation of trust and understanding before trying to place any demands. To do this, you may try some of the following ways to engage.

• Observe how your child likes to spend their free time: What snacks, toys, or objects do they seem to gravitate towards? Where do they prefer to spend their free time? When they are calm and engaged, what are they doing and what is going on around them? What is the environment like when they are happily playing? Is it loud, quiet, dark, sunny, busy, or slow paced? Who else is present?

• Become a part of their world: Spending time in their space as they play can create positive associations between time spent with you and their happy place. Your calm presence then becomes a part of their preferred environment! If your kiddos favorite place to spend time is the empty bath tub, try simply hanging out on the bathroom floor alongside them with an activity you enjoy or bring some of their favorite toys into the bathroom with you to offer and engage with.

• Show interest without placing demands: Play and engage with the items your child prefers alongside them. Avoid asking questions such as “What color is this?” or “How many dinosaurs do you have?.” This lowers the demand placed on your child during this time and helps you, the parent, to become associated with play, leisure, and most of all, fun! This does not mean that learning cannot or will not occur during this time – only that it is not the focal point of time spent intentionally pairing with your child.

• Pause, breathe, observe, and continue: It can be anxiety inducing for you, as the parent, to move into your child’s world of play. Children often have high preferences for how they play and engage or may have become upset in the past during play. Remind yourself during these moments to remain calm, take a deep breath, and simply observe how your child is reacting to your engagement. Was that a little smile? Did they shift their body towards you or away from you? This can help you to find those pathways to connect while keeping play time low stress.

• Do not be afraid to get a little silly: Say your child has a hankering for cookies but likes to hide behind the couch to eat them. You could try grabbing one for yourself, hunkering down, and try sneaky eating behind the armchair next to them. “Shh… don’t tell anyone I’m hiding too!” Humor is a wonderful way to create closeness and connection! Engaging with your child in pretend play, tickles, chase/tag games, singing songs, and dancing can be wonderful, low stress ways to build trust, burn energy, and promote regulation for your child. This can also be a way for you as the parent to relieve stress while building physical trust with your child.

Pairing can look vastly different for each family, as each child has their own set of personal interests, preferred activities, and ways to engage. If you feel as though you or your family may be struggling to build positive relationships with your child, R&R can offer you support and direction, as well as work alongside you to build meaningful connections between you, your family, and your child.

How Can We Still Promote Learning and Skill Development Through Pairing?

While you want to focus on the relationship-building aspect of pairing, this does not mean that you cannot use this time to build skills and encourage learning with your child. This can assist with your child’s ability to identify and understand different concepts across varying environments or generalize. Here are a few tips you can use for encouraging learning during this time.

• Model descriptive language: “This dinosaur is big and red!”, “I love how crunchy these chips are.”, “Woah, that car went so fast!”, “You have the squishy ball but mine is too hard to squish!”, etc. Think of yourself as the “sportscaster” for your child’s play!

  
  

•  Use common phrases and labels: Try incorporating phrases such as “3, 2, 1, blast off!” and “ Ready, set, go!”. Developing understanding for language concepts like this can benefit your child’s future by building meaning behind everyday language your child may be frequently exposed to.

Setting aside intentional time with your child for relationship building through pairing can help you better understand your child and establish a lasting connection that will empower your child to listen and engage with you as a trusted figure in their life. R&R values this connection between you and your child greatly. If pairing with your child poses a challenge at times, please do not hesitate to reach out for support from your child’s therapist. Strong family relationships provide a strong base for learning and growth and R&R wants to support you and child every step of the way.