A change of paradigm is necessary across the people and institutions surrounding the child: a change in how they understand the child and organise support. Parents, teachers, doctors, therapists, coaches, peers and their families need a fuller understanding of what the child experiences and can manage. Schools, services, professional bodies and public authorities must make that understanding part of how they work.
Professionals must reconsider their own judgements
Some of the hardest changes concern professionals who specialise in these conditions. They must be willing to recognise when their explanation or approach has been wrong or materially incomplete, even when it reflects years of established practice. A correct diagnosis or observation does not make the whole account adequate. Qualifications and experience do not remove the obligation to question one’s own judgement.
Where professional decisions, dismissals or institutional practices have caused or enabled bullying, humiliation and distress, or cost children and parents time and opportunities, those responsible must acknowledge the harm and correct the approach. That includes reconsidering harmful judgements about the child or parents, responding to concerns previously dismissed and changing what happens next.
Accepting this can challenge professional identity, authority and confidence. It can mean admitting that a family’s repeated concerns were justified and that the response they received made matters worse. The difficulty of that admission cannot justify making children and parents continue to bear the consequences.
Make listening and correction part of practice
Competent practice must include listening carefully to experiences the professional has not personally lived, examining the whole picture and checking whether help remains effective. Children and parents must be able to report pain, distress or failure without having those reports automatically recast as resistance or poor cooperation.
Services must preserve continuity when a child moves between professionals, schools or stages of care. There must be clear responsibility for integrating the history, addressing unresolved concerns and reviewing what happens next. Where a concern is dismissed or a referral declined, the reasons must be made explicit and open to challenge. These responsibilities need to become standards of practice that institutions resource and oversee.
Give these responsibilities time and resources
In Greece, this requires changes in professional education and supervision, school practice, service coordination, funding and the routes through which harmful decisions can be challenged and corrected. Continuing reassessment needs time, staff and clear responsibility for acting. When agreed support is not delivered, implementation and resources must change. When rules exclude necessary help, the rules need to change.
The purpose is for children to learn, participate and develop, and for families to sustain their lives. Achieving that requires the adults and institutions around them to change too.
Children’s Disorders provides fuller practical guidance, selected resources, evidence and proposals for legislative and institutional change in Greece:
We must change the words we reach for
A change in understanding requires deliberate practice in using a different vocabulary. Calling overload a “tantrum”, or recording a child as “manipulative” without examining the event, can make blame stand in for an explanation. Parents, teachers, doctors, therapists and institutions must question those habits in speech, reports and everyday decisions.
Use “meltdown” for the defined overload response, describe what happened and separate observation from assumed intent. Then change the response: reduce demands where needed, listen to the child, investigate the conditions and check whether support works. Replacing a label while keeping an unsuitable approach is insufficient. This applies in English, Greek and every language we use.
Our curated glossary explains what to use, what to avoid, the reasons and the evidence behind these choices.