Preschool lays the foundations for the first part of a child’s development and learning, should be enjoyable and secure, and should provide pedagogical activities for all children attending. In preschool there are also children with behavioral difficulties who, too often, risk a lack of understanding, stress, and condemnation from preschool teachers as well as peers and parents and thus risk exclusion (Johannesson, 1997). A better adapted approach and activities for these children can create a preschool that includes everyone. Developing abilities in preschool that strongly and robustly support broad control processes, enabling behavioral regulation across cognitive and emotional domains, are described in different scientific disciplines: psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and education (e.g., Collins, 2013, Elsby et al., 2011; Rosenthal & Gatt, 2010; Stier et al., 2012).

The purpose of this study, as a preschool development project, was to examine an approach and an educational platform in which children’s thoughts, ideas, and opinions play a crucial role in every situation contributing to preschool becoming more open and inclusive for all children. The approach and the educational platform were built on empathetic leadership in preschool, confirmation of all children’s feelings, interaction with children with behavioral difficulties, and solving conflict without scapegoats (Algozzine & Algozzine, 2014).

The research questions were as follows:

1. What impact do alternative responses that are engaging and empathetic rather than critical, questioning, designating, and uncomprehending have on the children?

2. How can preschool teachers act preventively and find solutions to difficult situations that arise in the child’s everyday life at preschool instead of waiting until the conflict arises and only then act?

3. Which solutions to children’s individual problems could be found through cooperation and dialogue with the actual child in need instead of through “packaged solutions”?

The theoreticalframework ofthis study was the communicative relational perspective (Ahlberg, 2013), whichis closely linked tosocio-cultural theory (Säljö, 2000).Withinthe communicative relational perspective, participation,communication, andlearning are viewed as an interlacedtriadthat is central to the study ofcommunicative contexts(linguistic and socialcontexts thatsupportand shapeinstitutional activities).How individualsinteract,create meaning, andexperience andunderstandtheir situation was also studied.The study hasthereforejoinedan individual perspective witha structuralperspective byassessingschools as social institutions,social practice,the needs of individuals,and conditions.

                     This theoretical framework provides an opportunity to study communication and relationships at different levels and contexts of the activities in preschool. School activities are studied in relation to school organization as well as the individual child. This perspective provides the opportunity to examine a child’s difficulties in relation to the whole school, as well as to the situation in which the difficulty arises. The starting point is the interactions that occur between the child and the surroundings to create knowledge of various communication processes in the school and the school’s meeting with the individual child.

Other researchers have also claimed that special educational needs are no longer focused on curing or amelioration of the child by interventions based on medicine and educational psychology. Special educational needs are instead viewed as social constructions (Ainscow, 1998; Clark et al., 1998; Skrtic, 1991) rather than as individual shortcomings. These perspectives are characterized mainly in that they move the problem from the individual and focus instead on the product of social processes (Clark et al., 1998; Nilholm, 2006). The communicative relational perspective also focuses on social processes but also relations and interactions (Ahlberg, 2013) that make it possible to view it as an antireductionist theoretical framework (Skidmore 1996).

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