Building connections and confidence with LEGO®

In 2021, foster carers Debbie and Jason founded The Raft, a charity that provides help and support to care experienced families. Here, Debbie tells us about their work, and how they’ve been using Lego, to help care-experienced children develop their communication skills, confidence and social and emotional wellbeing.

My husband Jason and I have been foster carers for nearly 12 years. We mostly do long term fostering and we have two children with us – our eldest joined our family when we started fostering and our youngest nearly five years ago. We are also an adoptive family and adopted our daughter two years ago.

We founded The Raft to help support care experienced children and families involved in fostering. It’s run by volunteers who are either adopters or foster carers themselves, or have been involved in caring for children in other contexts, for example in education. We understand what it’s like to parent children who have adverse childhood experiences – we know the ups and downs, the times when you feel things are a battle, or exhausting, or when you experience that breakthrough that is such a big moment for your child, but might not be recognised by others.

Learning about Lego

We’ve seen through other activities (for example our storytelling clubs) how the creative arts can help repair brain connections and promote well-being. Last year, I went to a conference on trauma-informed practice and attended a workshop on Lego Serious Play (LSP). Julia, the facilitator, described how she uses LSP in different contexts, mostly with adults, but I wondered whether it would translate to children. We were keen to create a project that kids might like but could be used in creative ways to support brain development, emotional regulation, social skills, the formation of narratives and sequencing, and problem solving. Brain Builders was designed as a result of this idea and we ran it as a pilot between March and May this year.

LSP is a universal language that anyone can use. It involves a series of structured exercises using Lego bricks designed to develop social connection, shared understanding and new ideas and is effective because it encourages open communication, promotes listening and provides a safe environment where the focus is more on the models than the builder.

LSP activities can also help to develop self-awareness, self-confidence and empathy through the sharing of stories, thereby helping to repair damaged brain connections due to developmental trauma.

Building confidence in children

We ran an initial pilot of three sessions over three months. Each session was attended by eight to 14 children, between the ages of five to thirteen years, and had an underlying theme. Session one focused on superheroes and characters (imagination and story-telling), session two on hobbies and interests (social connection) and session three was on dream jobs (future aspirations). It was important that the adults built models as well to show the children that it was fun and safe, and to facilitate positive relationships. As the children began to feel safer in the group, we saw some really lovely moments. Children who wouldn’t normally speak in front of others shared stories about their creations. In addition to models, friendships were built, and a child who began by hiding under the table, gained the confidence to engage in the sessions and to sit and make models.

The feedback from carers highlighted the positive outcome from the sessions. One carer told us that their child had felt much safer compared to being at school and that the session had given her the opportunity to ‘be herself’ rather than be constrained and told what to do. Another carer explained that their child often lacked confidence, but through Lego, he’d been able to express himself.

Our hope for the future is to run Brain Builder sessions in a variety of settings and to produce a toolkit setting out LSP in the context of trauma-informed practice, that could be used by practitioners across the country.

Top tips

LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP) was created over 20 years ago and is used in business and education around the world. Julia, an LSP facilitator and co-creator of Brain Builders, shares her top tips on how LSP can be used at home to help improve communication and wellbeing.

Although LSP is based on a sequence of LEGO® activities, it is possible to apply the basic principles of ‘ask question, build model and share story’ at home. The most important thing to remember is that the meaning of the model is owned by the child, and that others cannot interpret it (although they can ask questions, e.g. ‘Why did you choose pink bricks?’).

Ask a question. The key is to ask an open question that all children can respond to in their own way by building a LEGO® model. For example, ‘Can you build a superhero?’ or ‘Can you build your dream job?’.
Build the model. If children are comfortable they can do this in a group, or they may prefer to build alone. It is very helpful to have adult carers building alongside children.
Share the story. This is the most important part of the process. Children can be encouraged to share the story of their LEGO® model with their carer (and vice versa). If children feel ok with talking about their model in a group (or doing this via a carer) then that can be very beneficial.

If you’ve been involved in a new programme or scheme that helps foster carers or care experienced children or young people, we’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]