PACE Isn't a Toolkit: It's a Way of Being With a Child

When PACE training arrives in a residential home, it often arrives as content. There are slides. There are definitions. There is a handout. Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity, Empathy: four words, each explained, each with examples, the acronym easy to remember. Workers walk away knowing what PACE stands for and, in many cases, assuming that is what training is for. The model was developed by psychologist Dan Hughes as the attitudinal foundation of Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy — a way of being with a traumatised child that creates the conditions in which healing can happen. It is not a script or a set of responses to deploy in difficult moments. It is an orientation toward the whole person of the young person, expressed across everything: the morning routine, the meal at the table, the question asked in the car, the silence in the room after an argument. Reducing it to a technique is one of the more common ways of ensuring it does not work.

The element that most often generates confusion is Acceptance. It is almost universally misread on first encounter as an instruction not to challenge behaviour — a kind of therapeutic permissiveness that would make a home unmanageable within days. This is not what it means. Acceptance in Hughes' model is directed at the inner life of the child: their feelings, their history, their needs, their underlying experience. It means communicating to a young person, through how you respond to them, that their inner world is not dangerous to you, not too much for you, not something that needs to be managed away. The behaviour may still need addressing. The limits remain. But the young person receives the message that what they feel — the rage, the fear, the grief, the shame — is understandable, is acceptable, is not a reason for them to be rejected. For young people who have learned that their emotional life drives adults away, this distinction between accepting the child and declining the behaviour is not a semantic nicety. It is the ground on which trust begins to be possible.

Curiosity, as PACE describes it, is the investigative stance — the practitioner who stays genuinely interested in what is happening for a young person rather than primarily interested in what to do about it. This is harder than it sounds, particularly in residential care, where the operational pressure to manage and resolve is constant. Curiosity requires holding a question open when the organisational instinct is to close it. It requires treating a young person's history not as an explanation that has already been written but as something being understood in real time. What distinguishes genuine curiosity from its performance is that genuine curiosity is willing to be surprised — to revise its understanding, to discover that the convenient narrative was wrong, to sit with the complexity of a person who does not conform to any formulation written about them. A young person who is approached with this quality of attention learns, eventually, that they do not need to defend themselves against being known. That they can, with a particular adult, begin to think aloud about what is happening for them, because the adult is more interested in the thinking than in where it leads.

Playfulness is the element that appears to have the least clinical weight and turns out to have a great deal. It is not about being funny, not about arranging activities, not about keeping the atmosphere light to avoid difficult conversations. It is about the quality of lightness that a practitioner carries into ordinary interactions — the willingness to catch a young person's eye across a room and share something, to use gentle humour when a situation has gotten too serious too fast, to be interested and animated in the moments of everyday life that are not fraught. What playfulness communicates is something specific: that this adult is not only present in the difficult moments, that they are capable of joy and not always managing risk, that the relationship is not only serious. For young people whose experience of adult attention has been predominantly corrective — whose interactions with the adults around them have mostly been about what they did wrong — a genuinely playful adult interaction can feel disorienting and then, slowly, like something to be sought out. Playfulness is one of the ways that residential care becomes a place in which a young person would sometimes actually choose to be.

Empathy in the PACE model is both an interpersonal stance and, increasingly, understood in neurological terms. The capacity of a regulated adult to help co-regulate a dysregulated young person — to bring their own nervous system alongside the young person's, without being overtaken by it — is not a metaphor. Research on attachment, on the polyvagal system and its social engagement pathways, all points to the same mechanism: safety is physiological before it is cognitive, and a calm, present adult body communicates safety to a frightened child's nervous system in ways that no amount of skilled language can replicate on its own. Empathy that is genuine — felt, not performed — travels. Young people with significant trauma histories are, as a rule, highly sensitive to whether an adult's expressed empathy is real. This is not a clinical observation. It is something residential workers know from experience: that the young person who has heard a hundred times that their feelings make sense will often not believe it until they see someone sitting with them in the feeling without flinching. The practitioner who has done their own work — who has enough self-awareness to recognise what a young person's distress is activating in them — is a different kind of presence from the practitioner who is performing equanimity. PACE asks for the real thing.

PACE cannot be sustained by individual practitioners working in isolation. A residential culture that is high-pressure, under-resourced, or primarily organised around compliance will erode the attitudinal conditions that PACE requires faster than any training can build them. Playfulness does not survive well in a team that is exhausted and feeling unsupported. Curiosity is difficult to maintain when the paperwork load prevents staff from spending time simply being with young people. Acceptance requires a degree of emotional containment in the practitioner that is hard to sustain without good supervision and real rest. This is not an argument against the model — it is an argument about what implementing it honestly requires. It requires managers who understand PACE as a culture rather than a curriculum, who model the attitudinal stance themselves, who create conditions in which workers can do the relational work properly. A home that trains staff in PACE and then runs them into the ground has not implemented PACE. It has purchased a set of slides.