Writing in his 2002 article for The Journal of Child and Youth Care, Volume 2 Number 2, Michael Burns eloquently describes the key technique for establishing rapport with a supported person.

Reflecting
Reflecting is a form of “pacing" (Bandler, Grinder, 1975) or “mirroring" and is literally imitating or miming the child's behaviour. The phrase “walking in someone else's shoes" fits comfortably here. This technique is probably the most effective way of establishing quick rapport and is the one, used either consciously or unconsciously, by most care givers and therapists.

A typical strategy for reflecting would proceed as follows:

a. The care giver observes the child being aware of the child's posture and facial expression.

b. The care giver recreates or imitates the child's posture and expression.

c. As the child moves changing posture and expression so the care giver follows mirroring the child. As this mirroring is taking place the care giver is aware of any emotions or physical sensations (e.g., feeling of anger, muscle tension) that he experiences while reflecting the child.

d. Having successfully mirrored the child's posture and expression the care giver begins to use similar word phrases as the child. He or she matches the child's predicates by responding with visual words when the child uses visual predicates, auditory words when the child uses auditory language and similarly with kinesthetic olfactory and questatory language.

e. When the care giver has successfully mirrored and feels comfortable with mirroring the child's language he or she observes some of the child's more subtle behaviours, e.g., breathing depth and rate, gestures and mannerisms, eye and head movements, etc).

f. The care giver then mirrors one or more of these more subtle behaviours.

g. As the child changes these behaviours so the care giver follows by matching them with his or her own behaviours. As in step c. the care giver becomes aware of emotions and physical sensations taking place in his or her body as he or she mirrors the child.

h. Having successfully mirrored the more subtle non-verbal behaviours the care giver now mirrors the more subtle verbal behaviours, e.g., voice tone and tempo, inflections, pronunciations, etc.

i. The care giver's next step is to respond verbally at an emotional level by feeding back verbally the child's feelings both those stated by the child and by questioning those implied by his or her verbal and non-verbal communication.

These steps may be repeated several times during an interaction with a child. It's important not to mimic the child in an obvious way which might make the child feel conscious or agitated. It is a more subtle and unintrusive style that is most effective here.