In October 2023, New York became the fourth US state to outlaw corporal punishment in private schools. Corporal punishment is still allowed in public schools in 17 states, subjecting 70,000 students per year. The NY ban brought renewed attention to a practice considered to be archaic by many and troubling to mental health professionals. Studies have repeatedly shown that physical discipline does not improve behavior and can lead to emotional and academic problems over time. There are effective alternatives.

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A Simple Plan for Improving Behavior with Dr. Stuart Ablon

Dr. Stuart Ablon joins Melanie Whipple, host of the Elementary Schooled podcast, for a conversation about the three plans we choose from in trying to get a child (or anyone) to do something we'd like them to do? Plan B is the WINNER for improving behavior. Dr. Ablon shares this Plan B "recipe" with simple ingredients that can be used in any classroom or home. It works! "Kids lack SKILL, not WILL" "Kids do well if they can."

Understanding Thinking Skills

Have you wondered why a child or an adult you know struggles to meet certain expectations or manage their behavior?

This 1-hour, self-paced, free course teaches the five Thinking Skills we all use to manage our behavior and meet expectations.

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Asking why students behave as they do can help teachers and students find solutions together.

Anxiety, one of the most common underlying causes of challenging student behavior, typically goes undiscovered and unaddressed through school-based behavior supports. Jessica Minahan and Stuart Ablon combine their expertise as a behavior analyst and a psychologist to outline how best to support students whose anxiety leads to challenging behavior. They describe the role of anxiety in challenging behavior and introduce skill-building approaches that help students develop the skills they need to succeed. These approaches can help teachers analyze skill deficits in students with anxiety, identify strategies to prevent anxiety from escalating, and build skills by combining opportunities to practice problem solving with specific strategies to manage anxiety.

Read the article on kappanonline.org

Collaborative methods for handling misconduct make their way to the classroom

Wayne D'Orio of Education Next writes "you don’t need a primer on how behavior has become worse—much worse—since students returned to school post-pandemic. Chances are you’ve observed just what the data from the National Center for Education Statistics report: 84 percent of school leaders say student behavioral development has been negatively impacted. This is evident in a dramatic increase in classroom disruptions, ranging from student misconduct to acts of disrespect toward teachers and staff to the prohibited use of electronic devices."

Collaborative methods for handling misconduct make their way to the classroom

Read on to hear from Think:Kids client Matt Cretsinger, director of special services for the Marshalltown Community School District in Iowa, Dr. J. Stuart Ablon, and others on what's causing bad behavior in the classroom and how schools and districts can use collaborative approaches to manage behavior while growing student skills.

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While perhaps well-intentioned, behavior charts can cause anxiety, shame, a loss of intrinsic motivation and can increase stress behaviors. The Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint shares the thoughts of four national experts, including Dr. J. Stuart Ablon, on the use of behavior charts in schools and at home.

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Stress can derail coping abilities and contribute to emotional explosions unless you employ tools to cool down.

August 12, 2023

By , Executive Editor, Harvard Health Letter

Breathe. Count to 10. Take a walk. These strategies have long been advised to help you pause and rethink your reaction when you're seeing red and an inch away from exploding. Under normal circumstances — maybe a little stress at home or at work — those strategies can be useful. But you may find they're less effective in the pressure cooker we've been living in during recent years. What can you do to avoid reaching your boiling point?

For insight, I turned to psychologist Stuart Ablon, founder and director of Think:Kids in the department of psychiatry at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. Ablon is an expert at defusing explosive behavior among kids and teens with severe developmental delays in problem solving, flexibility, and tolerance to frustration — the skills that keep us from melting down.

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Elizabeth Buchholz, MNS

There can be a great deal of societal noise and judgment around challenging behavior in children and adolescents. If you have a child who has trouble meeting expectations or displays problematic behavior, you no doubt have felt this deeply in the grocery store, on play dates, on the sports field, and from teachers and administrators at school. Teachers are often judged by the level of obedience in the classroom or classroom management skills. It is often assumed that the teacher is inconsistent or doesn’t hold the children accountable when behavior issues arise. Many people expect that one punishment or a system of rewards will magically change how children act. When change doesn’t come quickly, the blame shifts back and forth from the parent (or teacher) to the child repeatedly until everyone feels frustrated and dissatisfied by everyone else's actions or perceived lack thereof!

Where does unwanted behavior come from? What best supports behavior change, and how long does it really take? What can we do in the meantime to best support the children in our lives? We will look at these questions and give some steps to start the behavior change process.

Where does challenging behavior come from?

Concerning or challenging behavior can take many shapes and sizes in children and adolescents. It can look like refusals, defiance, yelling, cursing, throwing things, tantrums, and even physical aggression and self-harm. These types of behavior can result from intense emotions and an inability to control or think through how one’s behavior impacts others. It can also stem from facing a problem they don’t know how to solve. Their best solutions can often cause other problems, impact others negatively, and/or negatively impact their future. When we view these culprits of challenging behavior as willful, purposeful choices, it causes adults to be frustrated and can make staying calm difficult. Science tells us that strong emotions are contagious; the more upset we become, the more upset the child becomes, and vice versa. Viewing challenging behavior as a struggle to manage emotions or a result of a lack of good problem-solving skills can change how we respond in those moments and lead to more empathy for the youth, potentially leading to better outcomes.

Understanding Thinking Skills

Have you wondered why a child or an adult you know struggles to meet certain expectations or manage their behavior?

This 1-hour, self-paced, free course teaches the five Thinking Skills we all use to manage our behavior and meet expectations.

Enroll Now

How long does behavior change take?

The time it takes to change behavior can vary widely and is dependent on a number of factors. An unwanted behavior can sometimes take days or weeks to change and sometimes months or years. It can depend on how long the behavior has been happening, how much stress the person is under, how many unwanted behaviors there are, and how often it is happening. It can also depend on caregiver responses and the environment the person is in. Unsafe and unpredictable environments can seriously limit the child’s ability to change behaviors and may lead to an increase in behaviors despite everyone’s best efforts. The other important factor that can impact the time it takes to change behavior is the strength of a person’s thinking skills. Someone with strong skills in problem-solving, frustration tolerance, and flexible thinking may be able to change behavior more quickly than someone who is still developing those skills. The strength of a person’s skills is very much dependent on their age, what skills they have had practice with, and the degree of support they have with skills practice.

Why does behavior change take so long?

When we look at the culprits of challenging behavior—inability to manage emotions and problem-solving skill development—it's no wonder it takes a lot of time to change. If you have or work with a child with concerning behavior, no doubt you have tried different ways to change that behavior. You may have received advice to use a rewards system, stricter consequences, or ignore the behavior, hoping it will disappear. Unfortunately, these strategies often fail because they focus on the behavior rather than the causes of the behavior. And even when we work on the causes of the behavior, in that, we help teach children how to manage their intense emotions and build their problem-solving skills; those things take a long time! Think about how long it took your child to learn to speak in sentences- probably from birth to around age 3 or 4. Think about how long it takes a child to learn to read- from preschool with letter recognition to around 3rd grade to read chapter books. That’s if there aren’t any other developmental or learning challenges. It takes time and dedicated interventions to build skills. Brain change happens through small repeated interactions with a child where you increase the difficulty of the task slowly and in small increments that the child can handle.

For example, if you have a child that is struggling to learn to read, an assessment would be done to figure out what was the cause of the challenge (dyslexia, sight problem, comprehension problem, etc.), then specific strategies would be identified to help those underlying issues. You wouldn’t, for example, give them a reward or consequence to try to make them read or ignore it and hope it gets better! Yet that is exactly what we are told to do with behavior. We expect it will take a while to address dyslexia to improve reading skills. Yet, with behavior, we often get frustrated when there is no quick fix.

Can I speed up my child’s skill development?

In some ways, you can! Be intentional about opportunities for problem-solving and talk to your children about the emotions they are feeling and reacting to.

  1. Provide opportunities for your child to practice problem-solving and support them. If they are faced with a problem that they are having trouble solving or are solving it in a way that causes other concerns, talk to them about the situation and work it through with them. For example, if they are having trouble with a subject in school and are avoiding it by refusing, roaming the halls, screaming, or horseplay, instead of trying to get them to stay in the classroom or stop the behavior, ask them what is hard about that subject and try and solve that problem in a way that meets your needs and the teacher’s needs too.
  2. Help them manage their emotions by guiding them through strategies that help with regulation. For example, if they are really excited about a birthday party and are bothering their siblings (or you!), drive their excited emotions into an activity that matches that energy level, like jumping rope, playing basketball, or swinging.

What can I do in the meantime while these skills are developing? How do I manage all the challenging behavior?

There are a couple of things that you can do to support your child as they are building skills. The first thing is to focus on your regulation. Try to view your child’s challenges as a lack of skills to manage emotions and problem-solve. That will help you stay calmer and think more clearly about how to support them. Try to recognize when the behavior is triggering you and implement calming strategies before responding to your child.

Second, focus on helping your child calm down and stay regulated. Engage in calming activities with them. Examples are deep breathing, blowing bubbles, swinging, coloring, or playing a game like Uno or basketball. The key here is that an adult does this with them rather than telling them to do it on their own, which could feel like a punishment rather than support.

Third, practice being curious, not furious, with your child. When there are struggles, ask lots of questions and try to understand what is going on from their perspective.

While they are building skills, they will need your support to help them. Ignore all the parenting and societal noise out there about stricter consequences. Your child will be better able to deal with life’s challenges if they can regulate their emotions better. Like anything else they are learning, they need you to help them! If there is a problem, try to understand it from your child’s point of view and help them solve it.

Finally, try not to rush behavior change. You can provide lots of practice for skills development and attempt to improve those skills. However, focusing solely on the behavior can cause harm. It can impact a child’s self-esteem and sense of confidence in their abilities. Exclusively targeting the behavior can also induce feelings of guilt and shame, which could hold back or prevent skills from developing. Behavior change takes time!

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon joined the Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint for an interview with Guy Stephens about seclusion and restraint in schools and how Collaborative Problem Solving can support schools in moving away from this trauma-insensitive practice.

Dr. Bruce Perry joined Think:Kids to share his work at the Neurosequential Network and how brief relational interactions can have a powerful effect in changing our brains and behavior. Dr. Perry illustrates how the Collaborative Problem Solving approach is well suited to the dosing needed to support behavior change.

 

Matt Crestsinger, District Administration, Director of Special Services in Marshalltown, IA, shares how the school district has implemented Collaborative Problem Solving and the results they are seeing.

Transcript:

 

How did you become interested in Collaborative Problem Solving?

I was reading some of the works by Bruce Perry, and at the end of the most recent edition of his book, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, it actually speaks a little bit to the Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) process. I love the book, you know, it made a lot of sense to me. It was highly engaging. And so when I hear this, I'm like, well, I need to learn more. I found some materials online and did just some general reading about it. And then, I found some of the YouTube videos that were published. One in particular, it's a little more than an hour long, and it's Dr. Ablon just doing a general overview about Collaborative Problem Solving.

Well, I wanted to learn even more. So, at the time, there was an online opportunity to take essentially an online course. And I brought myself and a group of principals, some of my school counselors, we have these kind of social work type positions, and we all enrolled, and we took these classes. And we got done, and I sat around the table and said, "What do you guys think?" And they absolutely said, "We love it. That's exactly what we were talking about. We need to learn more." So, then I decided I need to get a group of people who are actually through the training. I'd been reading the literature online. Let's see where we have a Tier 1 training and how many people I can send. And after that completed, they came back, and I said, "What did you hear? What did you learn? What are the things you're excited about?" And they continue to promote of, "yes, the more we hear about this, the further we get into it, the more we agree, it's a necessary fit for us."

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What makes Marshalltown, IA, a unique community and school district?

We're about 5,300 kids. We have 11 attendance centers. 71% of our kids this year are eligible for free or reduced lunch, which is the ninth highest in our state. 31% of our kids are within the continuum of the English Language Proficiency Scale, which is the third highest in Iowa, and third most saturated in the state. Culturally, about 54% of our kids identify with Hispanic/Latino. 30% of our kids identify as White or Caucasian. 7.5% of our kids identify as Asian. About three and a half percent of our kids identify as Black or African American. And then everyone else will identify in a multi-categorical way.

So, we were trying to figure out “How do we work with this unique population to Iowa?” And I went with the principals, I went with our intermediate agency, they're called AEA or Area Education Agencies, and a group of like 20 went to a summer Tier 1. And we all came back with just our minds spinning of, “This is our missing piece. What do we need to do?”

And then fate happened. About two weeks later, an EF3 tornado came through our community. And in a community like ours, that is really a very blue-collar community, it devastated things. It hit through some of our major businesses and residential area. And so, many of our families were displaced, and they were dealing with trauma. So, we decided to bring Dr. Ablon in and address all of our staff for the first day of school, as well as then ask him to do some parent groups in the evenings. We got such tremendous feedback off of it that we thought, this is something that makes sense here in Marshalltown. This is something we need to develop and grow. And since 2017/18, we've been working to do that as systematic as we can.

What has changed since implementing Collaborative Problem Solving in Marshalltown?

I would say we're still early in, and we definitely have people who have bought into it and understand it and see the result. And we still have people that we're trying to onboard because it's just such a different way of thinking about supporting kids and families. Those who have really bought into it. It has changed the focus of the discussion. It's moved from things like, "Well, they would if they wanted to," or kind of those dead-end ideas of "This family's always been this way. I've worked with other kids," or "I was a teacher for the parents, and they were this way when they were that age." To a reframing of "What's happened to this kiddo? What about this situation is so difficult for them that I've seen them do this before, but today they can't."

And it's really made our conversations in those situations more solution focused, and it also improves the relationship. Checking in with kids and letting them feel like they have a voice and they have a choice. You just can't put money in the bank quick enough that way so that when you have those days where you have to really hold to your own expectations, that relationship is in a place where you can get some buy-in from the kids as well. And they don't always feel like you're imposing your will on them. So, we're seeing in settings where people are really invested in it, good relationships, ability to have difficult conversations, and really a problem-solving philosophy.

What are some of the results you are seeing in Marshalltown?

So, the first I'll talk about is one of our elementary schools. Its name is Woodbury Elementary, and it's a preschool through fourth-grade school. Before we began our work in Collaborative Problem Solving, we tracked many of the things most schools do: How many kids go to the office? How many kids are so aggressive that they require physical restraint? How many kids are in a situation where safety is such a big issue that we have to use exclusionary timeout? What are the factors that make the learning environment safe? Which our state of Iowa has a universal survey they do. At Woodbury, which has really internalized this work, we've seen a decrease since 2018/19 to last year: office referrals are down over 36%. The number of students who have two or more office referrals are down 49%. The need to use seclusion and or restraint is down by 28%.

And most importantly, so our state of Iowa has what they call the Conditions for Learning Survey. Then it's a survey that goes out to our staff members, our kids, and our families that asks about the well-being and the learning environments, really around SEL. Before this, that survey showed that Woodbury Elementary was 7% below the state average on emotional safety, how safe did kids feel in that school. Last year they were 7% above the state average. So, we've seen this significant swing in kids are feeling connected, regulated, and that it's a safe learning environment. I guess the other unique thing about Woodbury Elementary is that it is a dual-language school. So, our families who go there they learn in Spanish for half a day, and then they learn in English for half a day. And the general population of that school is really those families who are moving into Iowa that are completely Spanish speaking, coming from Mexico and other countries.

The last, and probably my favorite story a few years ago, we identified that there are, there are kids in schools that have serious underlying mental health conditions. And those create the behaviors that we see that are unsafe and that we really worry about. In Iowa, there's not a lot of facilities to work with kids who are beyond what most schools can work with. So we tried to create our own, and we call it the therapeutic classrooms. And in there, we have integrated CPS as our primary model into a trauma-informed approach. And we work with kids that usually would be placed in residential treatment or day school programs, or out-of-state kind of psychiatric facilities. And we are seeing success with 96% of the kids in there. And they range from kindergarten through ninth grade.

And I mean by success is if they were in their comprehensive schools, on average, they may have four, five, six behavioral incidents a day. They may have two to three behavioral incidents a month now. They're not running out of school; they're not destroying property. They're engaged in their learning. In fact, on our most recent state-required literacy academic assessment, every one of our 18 students made growth in literacy. And they're excited to come to school. Their attendance is way up. Their families who we had a really difficult relationship with for a variety of reasons. We don't have that kind of difficult situation anymore. They love our teachers; they love our little program. They love that there's a place that their kids can grow and learn and get their needs met. So those are the places I would talk about as a system. We're doing it and doing it well and seeing those great outcomes.

How does Collaborative Problem Solving support students with disabilities?

I want to share a couple things thinking through the special education lens. So federal law around special education really does dictate a variety of things that seem very prescriptive on how you have to think and approach supporting kids who may have behavioral challenges. Collaborative Problem Solving has been a game changer in a lot of our situations with kids with disabilities who have those behavioral struggles because not only does it address some of those underlying conditions that we never thought about, but it helps us then create a pretty clear way to do checks and balances along the way. A Plan B conversation is a great way to see how are things going in this element of the instructional skill-building that you're trying to do.

How does Collaborative Problem Solving integrate with SEL and PBIS in your schools?

So, our district is really committed to providing a full continuum of services to our families on social-emotional learning. And as part of that, then, my job as the director who oversees it was to gain as much knowledge and skills as possible. So first, I've been through the inaugural cohort of CASLE, the Collaborative for Academic Social-Emotional Learning, and have completed their fellows program. I've also completed two cohorts with the National Superintendents Associations, both mental health work as well as their SEL cohort. So, working with these folks has provided me with a really strong foundation about what is evidence-based, research-based, social-emotional learning across the continuum. What happens at school-wide, what happens within the classrooms, what happens within the teacher's mindsets. And having that together, we have created an infrastructure to support our needs of our kids.

Foundationally, we had to get on the same page about what are our common beliefs about kids. Many school districts will talk about Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS). And what we've learned about PBIS is that first, it's very regulating to kids to know what's expected of them across settings. Many times their life is a little bit out of control at home, and there's a lot of chaos. But knowing that when I walk into this school, if I'm in the cafeteria, here's what's expected of me. If I'm in the classroom, here's what's expected. That brings down some of the anxiety, to begin with. Our next piece, though, is ensuring that everything we do is based on our thinking with Collaborative Problem Solving, is relational. So, we've moved away in many of our locations from that, that token economy system, that reward system when kids are meeting expectations, to those relational interactions.

How does Collaborative Problem Solving fit with other approaches?

I would also ask people to look carefully at the components of the other approaches that they're using. Within our district, we think about a multi-step process. And so I talked a little bit about PBIS as a regulating system for all kids across all settings. We also use classroom approaches. Responsive Classroom is something we use at the elementary, and we have found that CPS has such a great companion component to that Responsive Classroom model that they go hand in hand. It's not, "Are we doing this? Are we doing that?" We're supporting all kids under a common framework, and the language compliments each other. With our older kids, Capturing Kids' Hearts has been an approach that we've found really beneficial. And again, as the language of CKH and the language of Collaborative Problem Solving, they support each other and the framework and the thinking behind it. So, I would say within an integrated system, there are going to be a number of components. You know, you're, you're making a stew here, and you've got a bunch of ingredients in this stew. And I've found that CPS is integrated very well into our stew that also has evidence-based and research-based behind every piece of it.

How does Collaborative Problem Solving build future-ready skills?

When I went to high school, and I'm not going to say how old I am, but when I went to high school, the idea was, Matt, if you go to high school, you need to go to college. And if you can complete college, you will get a good job, and your job skills will be taught to you on-site. Many of the things that I thought were skills back then, now I can learn from YouTube, or there's a video somewhere to teach this. The things that weren't taught to me that now we're hearing kids need to have are conflict resolution skills, problem-solving skills, critical thinking skills, and an internal drive to be successful in something with a level of independence. And so, as we think about now, those are our umbrellas or goals for those soft skills; Collaborative Problem Solving lends itself perfectly to it. You know, it's teaching kids how to deal with difficult situations in not getting upset, essentially, staying regulated. Something has happened that I wasn't predicting, and so I'm going to get upset about it. Let's pause; let's keep ourselves regulated and start problem-solving. How do we address this issue, whether it's with a task, a situation, or another person? It's a very generalizable set of skills, I would say, across all those soft skills for employability.

How are you engaging families in this work?

So, we have been working on engaging parents in learning about Collaborative Problem Solving through what we call either watch parties or community wellness nights that we're doing once a quarter. And families can come into our schools and see and learn more about it. I think the most engaging part about all of this is not only are we continuing to try to teach them about it, but now when we have school board meetings, we have families showing up saying, "I absolutely love that my child that I was getting phone calls on all the time for whatever reason. The phone calls I get now are positive phone calls, and that I'm seeing that my child, when I'm having difficulty with him or her at home, I can kind of engage in that process and generally work through it. And even sometimes my kids are coaching me, even elementary kids so that we can try to work through this conversation in a regulated way for a mutually agreed upon solution."

What has been a challenge in implementing Collaborative Problem Solving?

The other thing, and I'm excited and also a little bit embarrassed to say this, the kids take to it well and quickly. The implementation delays are really about the adults and dealing with our own internal conflicts of how we were raised, what we believe should and shouldn't be behavioral strategies, classroom management, or just innate skills that any adult or child should have at some age. But for the kids, when we do this and do this well as an approach, they pick it up like that. As I work with kids or talk with some of the buildings that work with kids regularly in this approach, three or four conversations in the kids can start to tell you what that next component is. What's that next step that you're going to talk to them about? And they actually engage in it as long as they see it's successful for them being heard and feeling like they have some choice; they will take you there if you let them. So that was another real surprise, of it's the kids that this is, you know, going super easy with. It's the adults that we're going to have to work through a variety of different things to try to get their neurocognitive skills, skills aligned with what we're doing here.

What has been most powerful about Collaborative Problem Solving?

I'd begin with just a philosophy. Not only do I love that they have a philosophy, but when you hear, you know, Kids Do Well if They Can, if kids could do well, they would do well. And so, our job is to figure out what are the things getting in the way of them doing well, like just that general umbrella of thinking to every situation. It was an a-ha moment for so many of us who went through either the online training or went in person to Tier 1. Because, like so many, it wasn't our thinking was what happened to this child or what is getting in the way for this child? It was, oh, they're just being lazy or, what is the bigger carrot or stick I can wave at them to get them motivated to do this? What do I need to do to compel them to move forward? Instead of, "What do I need to do to lift them up and support them so they can move forward?" So that first part was just amazing a-ha for so many of us. And it's so simple. Yes, it is skill problems. You're right. If I look at them, they are trying harder than most other kids that these skills are already there for, and it happens easy.

As kids and adults, at home, school, or in the workplace, we all rely on certain skills to meet expectations and manage our behavior. These thinking skills help us do things like tolerate frustration, be flexible, and problem-solve. Research has shown that there are five main areas of these thinking skills: Attention & Working Memory, Emotion & Self-Regulation, Language & Communication, Social Thinking, and Cognitive Flexibility. When we examine our skills in these areas, we often recognize that some are stronger than others. Our strengths help us navigate situations successfully, and the skills we sometimes struggle with explain why there are times we don't navigate situations as well.

Identifying strengths and areas of difficulty might help explain why you or someone you know excels in certain areas and struggles in others. The good news is that skills can be built! Identifying skills where we struggle is the first step towards working on developing them. Our Collaborative Problem Solving approach is one way to help build thinking skills.

Take the anonymous, 22-question assessment below to better understand your own or someone else's thinking skills. You will be asked to reflect on how easy or hard a particular skill is for you or someone you know. Once you finish, you'll get your results and more information about each thinking skill.

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Thinking Skills

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Attention skills include our ability to ignore distractions and focus on a specific task or activity. Working memory relates to our ability to hold many pieces of information in our heads at one time. Skills like these are crucial for all forms of planning and organization, not to mention problem-solving.

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon, founder and director of Think:Kids, explains Attention and Working Memory Thinking Skills, and shares examples of how when kids struggle with these skills it can lead to challenging behavior.

Thinking Skills

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Transcript

Many people still believe that the key to managing our behavior is making sure that we're just trying hard enough to behave well. But the reality is that our behavior, whether we are a child, an adolescent, or an adult, our behavior is determined by our skill, not our will. There is half a century of research that has shown us, in fact, what types of skills we humans need to be able to effectively manage our behavior. One of those areas is what we refer to as attention and working memory skills. These are skills that are critical when it comes to managing our behavior. When I talk about attention skills, what I'm talking about is things like staying focused on things that may not be particularly thrilling or interesting to us and filtering out or ignoring distractions to be able to maintain that focus. And in fact, shifting our focus from one task activity or topic to another when we're asked to do so.

Now, when I describe it this way, you can see why attentional skills are so crucial, particularly for school-aged kids, because school-aged kids spend a lot of their life being told by parents and teachers and things like this, what to do when and what to focus on when. And let's be honest. Oftentimes, we're asking them to focus on things that aren't particularly thrilling for them. And, you know, it's a fallacy that kids, for instance, diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), can't focus their attention on anything. That's actually not true. In fact, many of them can exquisitely focus on things that are really interesting to them. They can sort of hyper-focus. But the big challenge for all of us adults is making ourselves focus on something that we might not particularly want to at that moment in time. I mean, I know there are things that you can put in front of me at any time of day or night, and I'll be particularly engaged and interested, and other things are going to be much harder for me because I'm not so interested.

That's when we really have to employ our attentional skills. Now, when I'm talking about working memory, what do I mean by that? , what I mean is what neuropsychologists often call the cognitive shelf in our brain. In other words, the place that we can take a piece of information and sort of put it up on the shelf. It, it's not tucked away somewhere where we can't access it. It's right there where we can grab it and use it if we need to while we think about other stuff at the same time. Now the reality is that holding a bunch of pieces of information in your head at one time, which is a good definition of what working memory involves, is absolutely crucial to good problem-solving, which is, of course, one of the primary ways that we manage our behavior. Why is it crucial to good problem-solving?

Because good problem-solving involves holding a bunch of pieces of information in your head at one time and manipulating those pieces of information, working with them, without losing them, without forgetting them. You can think of it almost like keeping multiple files or folders or programs open on your computer at one time. Because when problem-solving, you've got to at least keep the file that says, "what's the problem?" open at the same time that you keep open a hindsight file so that you can say to yourself, "okay, how have I handled a problem like this in the past?" Then you want to open up a forethought folder as well by saying, "okay, how do I think I might handle this problem now? And how do I think that's going to work out before I do it again?" So, in other words, all good problem-solving requires toggling back and forth between a bunch of information in your brain at one time.

What's the problem? How have I handled that in the past, and how's it worked out? Or have I seen anybody else handle a problem like this in the past? How have they handled it? How has that worked out? How do I think I might handle it now? And how do I think that's going to work out? And if you can't hold all that information in your head at one time, you're gonna be in trouble because, for instance, one of those files will close on you, like hindsight, and then you won't benefit from hindsight. You'll repeat the same solution to a problem that didn't work before, or forethought will close on you, and you won't be able to sort of test out, will that be a good idea or not? Or I see this a lot with kids that I work with who have some real limitations with their working memory.

The problem, what's the problem? File closes. And all of a sudden, they look at you and be like, "what are we talking about?" And, of course, most adults respond by saying something like, "you know very well what we're talking about." But actually, they've forgotten what we're talking about because their working memory has, become overwhelmed. Now, attention and working memory skills like this, they serve as the basis for all organization and planning skills as well. When it comes to doing things in a logical sequence or an order or things like that, these are all interrelated. They are examples of what we often call executive functioning skills. And the reality is that if somebody struggles with a particular executive functioning skill, like attentional skills or working memory skills, they often struggle with many executive functioning skills. In fact, one of my early mentors used to say that when it comes to executive functioning skills, you need to apply the cockroach principle. I remember asking for the first time what the cockroach principal was, and he said to me, where there is one, there are many.

Now, a quick story to bring this to life. My youngest when she was in preschool, which is quite a while ago now. I had the great pleasure of spending a day in her preschool, and I loved what the preschool did because they'd invite parents to join. But not all at once for sort of an orchestrated parent day, but in fact, one parent at a time. And you just tagged along for the day. I had a blast. It was amazing.

I remember at the end of the day, they have a ritual that they do, And they all sit around. And, of course, I was sitting around, too, on little rug squares in a circle. And this is part of their get-ready-to-leave and goodbye ritual. And it's really a ritual that is intended to help build skills like working memory, planning, organization, et cetera. So the teacher is strumming away in front of these two-year-olds, almost three-year-olds, and me, sitting on our rug squares. And he says to the group of kids, he says, okay, let's remind our guest what we do. Now. I'm going to play the Willaby Wallaby song, and let's remind our guest what we do when we hear our name in the Willaby Wallaby song. So when you hear your name, you stand up, you bring your rug square over to the corner, you go to your cubby, pack your backpack, put on your winter clothes, and then go line up at the door to be excused for the day.

Now, as we're listening to these, I'm beginning to get very nervous because I've already forgotten most of them. I look over at my daughter, and she says, don't worry, dad, I gotcha. Thank goodness. But let me tell you, this was hysterical because even at two and three years of age, you could see the natural diversity in terms of executive functioning skills that we're developing or not developing. So, what happens? Well, a couple of girls, when they hear their name in the Willoughby Wallaby song, what do they do? They immediately get up, they march to the corner, they put their rug squares down, they head off to their cubby to pack up, get their clothes on, line up nicely at the door, standing ready to go. Now one particular young boy, when he hears his name called, what does he do? He stands up, he takes his rug square, rug square, he throws it like a Frisbee, aimed at the corner of the room, and bolts for the door to try to get in line next. Then there was this one poor kid who I remember who he actually got through the Rug square piece and got to his cubby, but I didn't see until I got called. What happened next? And the poor kid was lying in a heap of clothes outside of his cubby, crying. So, you know, this is a point in time in development where attention to working memory skills are rapidly developing. You see a fair amount of diversity. I will tell you, as an adult, though, these skills are every bit as important, and we can struggle with them too. I, I know the older I get, the harder it is to remember things. I find myself, walking around my house, walking upstairs to get something, for instance, and getting up there and saying to myself, what am I doing up here? I've forgotten what I came up here for in the first place. Now the good news is there's usually always something to do up there, so they can do something else. But of course, it's not until you get back downstairs that you invariably remember what it is that you were intending to do when you went upstairs in the first place.

So, in summary, attention and working memory skills are absolutely crucial when it comes to managing frustration, problem-solving, responding adaptively to expectations, demands, and requests that people have for us or just things we are trying to accomplish ourselves.

 

Language and Communication skills include sending a message to another person and receiving and understanding a message back. These abilities help us understand what someone is saying and to be able to follow a conversation. Language and Communication Thinking Skills help us find the words to share our thoughts, feelings, needs, and ideas. They are necessary when having a back-and-forth conversation to solve problems with others.

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon, founder and director of Think:Kids, explains Language and Communication Thinking Skills, and shares examples of how when kids struggle with these skills it can lead to challenging behavior.

Thinking Skills

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Transcript

Contrary to conventional wisdom, our behavior is determined by skill, not will. And one of the most important categories of skills that help us to manage our behavior is Language and Communication skills. I remember when I was fresh out of college and in my first job as a research assistant here at Massachusetts General Hospital in the Department of Psychiatry. And, I was involved in this large study looking at kids with attention deficit disorder, who were also diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder. So they displayed frequent oppositional defiant behavior in response to requests, demands, from adults in their lives. And one of the shocking findings was when we looked at what we call comorbid conditions or coexisting conditions. We found concerningly high rates of language and communication difficulties in these kids who are struggling to manage their behavior. And, you know, it's actually not a big surprise in retrospect because language and communication skills are absolutely crucial to solving problems, handling demands, tolerating frustration, and, more globally, just problem-solving.

In fact, when you look through a developmental lens, and you think about when kids are very young, say two years of age, they don't manage their behavior particularly well. And that, in fact, that's why we refer to that time in life as the terrible twos. One of the reasons, anyway. And the reason we don't call it the terrible threes or fours or fives or sixes is if development is going according to plan by the time kids are three, four, five, or six, one of the things that they start to acquire are better language and communication skills, which are absolutely crucial, both expressive and receptive language skills. If you think about expressive language, it is absolutely crucial that we have the skill, whether it's as a child or as an adult, to let somebody know what's bothering us, to be able to articulate our concern, our perspective, our point of view, if we are going to engage in any problem-solving.

And what's really interesting is before we can let somebody else know what's bothering us, we have to put our finger on what's bothering us in the first place. In other words, we have to tell ourselves—we have to figure it out. And for most of us, the way we figure out what's bothering us is by talking to ourselves. In other words, we use words. We use language to talk ourselves through things and understand what our experiences are. Now, if you actually can put your finger on what's bothering you and have the linguistic skills to be able to communicate that to someone else, you're, of course, not out of the woods because then that person is going to respond to you. And now, you must use your receptive language skills to follow what they're saying. Keep up in the conversation. And then, if you're going to do good problem-solving, it involves a pretty rapid fire back and forth exchange of thoughts and ideas that are largely delivered through language or at least other forms of communication.

Now, if somebody struggles with language and communication skills, this can look like all kinds of different things. This can look like somebody who just says, "I don't know" a lot. This can look like somebody who has long pauses before responding. I've seen many times with adolescents that I work with; this can look like a lot of four-letter words. And you really want to try to embrace the notion of being curious, not furious, when you're struggling to understand somebody else's behavior. Because if this is about skill, not will, what we want to be thinking is, what is this person having a hard time doing that if they were able to do more effectively, they'd be able to manage their behavior better? Because the reality is, kids, adults, all of us, of course, we'd prefer to be managing our behavior better in the first place.

Nobody likes to be behaving badly, which is why, as we always say, kids do well if they can, or adults do well if they can as well. So try to embrace this mindset of be curious, not furious. And one of the things with curiosity you want to be thinking about is how are this person's language and communication skills? Is this an area where they might struggle? And be careful not to act too quickly, because you know, I see many of us adults, we issue demands, requests, commands to kids, and if they don't immediately respond, we reissue the command often with a threat of a potential consequence or something like that. And having worked with a lot of kids with language and communication difficulties, maybe as simple as a slower processing speed, you realize that these kids just oftentimes need a bit more time.

So, for instance, we say something to them like, "turn off the TV and come to dinner." And if they don't turn off the TV and come to dinner in a few seconds, we then re-up the demand. "Did you hear what I said? I asked you to turn off the TV and come to dinner." Maybe with a little bit more aggravation. And the reality is that what might be going on in that kid's head is as simple as this. You say, turn off the TV and come to dinner. And they, this is what's going on in their head. They say to themselves, "okay, turn off the TV and come to dinner. Um, okay, so you want me to turn off the TV and come to dinner now? Uh, the thing is that I'm sort of in the middle of my show, and I kind of want to see how it works out." And as they're still thinking this through, using language in their head, but not particularly rapidly, we jump right in and interrupt the process.

I find it's really helpful when being curious, not furious, to inquire what's going on in a kid's head. I once worked with an adolescent who had developed a particular compensatory strategy for some delays in language processing, which is to say, as soon as somebody inquired about something that required some complex thinking and linguistic skill to express what was going on for him, he would sort of head it off at the pass immediately by saying something like, "I don't care," or worse, "I don't give a," you know what. And I remember I was working with him one time, and I was asking him about something that happened for him in his day. And before I even can finish my sentence, he says, I don't care. And I finally said to him. I said, "you know what? I just noticed that you say, 'I don't care' even before I finished. You can't possibly have had enough time to think about it. Now, if you think about it and really decide you don't care and want to let me know, you don't care, that's cool. But, I can't even tell if you really don't care or that's just something you're saying. So just let's be quiet for a little bit. I just want to ask you a question and just think about it and tell me afterward what your response is." And I bit my tongue and waited for 45 seconds to give him time to think, which may not seem that long, but trust me, in practice, it's like an eternity. And after 45 seconds, I asked him what his thoughts were, and he actually had some thoughts. So it wasn't just that he didn't care. And when I asked him then why he says, "I don't care," he said to me, "well, because most people aren't going to gimme time to think about this. So you know what, I might as well get the whole thing over to begin with."

So moral of the story when somebody is struggling to manage their behavior, it's about skill, not will. We have 50 years of research in the neurosciences that have shown us that those skills tend to fall into several different domains of what we call neurocognitive or thinking skills. And one major domain is language and communication skills. And I'm not just talking about kids, I'm talking about us adults as well. So when somebody is struggling to manage their behavior, be curious, not furious. This may be a struggle with language and communication skills.

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon

We are in the midst of a youth mental health crisis, the likes of which we have not seen in the last half-century or more, and the ripple effects may be felt for generations. The lasting impact of the chronic stress and trauma of the pandemic has exacerbated what were already dangerously high levels of mental health challenges in kids.

As we know, necessity often breeds innovation. During the pandemic, our reliance on videoconference technology to connect with each other facilitated easier access to remote treatment. This helped lower the barriers to accessing mental health care for many youth and families. However, sadly, no matter how many more psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers we train and how easy we make it to see them, it is clear that there is no way that we can possibly meet the overwhelming needs of our youth using traditional models of mental health care delivery. We have to think outside the box.
It is clear there is no way that we can possibly meet the overwhelming needs of our youth using traditional models of #MentalHealth care delivery. We have to think outside the box.… Click To Tweet

Is there good news? Yes. As neuroscientists help the mental health community continue learning more about the brain, we realize that the traditional way mental health care was delivered left a lot to be desired anyway. Primarily because it often violated some basic principles of how we change the brain, a.k.a. “neuroplasticity.” First, we know that new connections in the brain are made by repeating many small doses of what neuro-biologists call “good stress.” To change someone’s brain successfully, those small doses of stress would ideally occur many times throughout the day rather than, for example, once a week from 4:00 – 4:50 pm in the therapist’s office! For example, whether you are trying to learn to play tennis or the violin, your skills would advance more by practicing for 20 minutes a day rather than one hour once a week.

Secondly, skills learned in one situation, like a therapist’s office, often don’t transfer or generalize to other situations. These skills often don’t transfer because of the “specificity principle” of neuroplasticity. The specificity principle suggests that to create a new connection in the brain, you need to activate that specific connection or pathway. Artificially created situations do not trigger the same connections or pathways. This is the reason so many of us look great practicing things when no one is watching but then struggle to have that same success when the pressure is on. If you want to get better at hitting a golf ball under pressure, you can’t just practice hitting golf balls. You have to practice hitting golf balls under pressure!

Now that the mental health community has recognized the extensive demands on and limitations of traditional mental health care delivery, many attempts are being made to think outside the box with innovative uses of digital tools to reach youth struggling with their mental health. While digital tools can be helpful for milder symptoms and in short-term ways, many of these digital tools still fly in the face of perhaps the most important principle of neuroplasticity: our brains develop best in rich relationship-based situations, which is hard to recreate in the digital world.

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So, what does this all mean? Youth mental health care needs to be delivered by people who already spend lots of time with them in their everyday lives. We need caring people who can provide enough small doses of “good stress” through existing relationships in the real-life situations facing our youth. Who are these people who can help address this youth mental health crisis? Parents and teachers!

Our work at Think:Kids is focused on helping youth with social, emotional, and behavioral challenges by teaching the adults in their lives an evidence-based approach called Collaborative Problem Solving. Behavior challenges rarely occur in isolation. Instead, problematic behaviors like defiance and aggression often happen alongside other issues. They are often the first sign that something is wrong. Behavioral challenges reflect underlying skills deficits across various diagnoses, including mood, anxiety, and autism spectrum disorders, not just disruptive behavior disorders like ADHD.

Through our work, we have shown that parents, teachers, and other adult caretakers can learn and practice an evidence-based approach to mental health care that can be used in everyday life. Our research has proven that when adults practice Collaborative Problem Solving with kids across a wide range of diagnoses, their specific symptoms lessen. In fact, how they are doing overall improves—not just behavioral difficulties. How does it work? The Collaborative Problem Solving approach builds and strengthens relationships, decreases conflict and stress, and builds neurocognitive skills, which improves mental health functioning broadly.

There is no one or simple solution to the current youth mental health crisis. But the answer cannot be simply training more clinicians or solely relying on digital tools. We must rethink the very methods by which we deliver mental health care. Teaching evidence-based approaches to parents and teachers is a powerful way to help address our kids’ mental health needs.

 


Pollastri, AR, Wang L Eddy, CJ, Ablon, JS. An Open trial of Collaborative Problem Solving in a naturalistic outpatient settingClinical Child Psychology & Psychiatry, 00, 2022, 1-13.

A version of this article originally appeared on Psychology Today.

When California passed a measure a few years ago banning suspensions for acts of willful defiance in elementary and middle schools, the reaction was mixed. People feared what might happen if we took away one of the most frequently used tools in our schools’ toolboxes when managing severe behavior.

I argued that mandating administrators to stop suspending students would not, on its own, solve the problem. We cannot simply take something that has not been working away. We must replace it with something more effective. Thankfully, proven alternatives exist that do not rely on power and control and combat rather than reinforce racially biased practices.

So, it was incredibly gratifying to see a new law passed in our home state of Massachusetts this past week requiring decision-makers to utilize evidence-based alternatives to suspension in our public schools. The approach we teach at Think:Kids, called Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS), was named as one of the recommended alternatives alongside other models, like restorative practices, which pair very well with each other.

Traditional school disciplinary procedures, like suspensions, have been shown to be ineffective for the students to whom they are most applied—students of color, students with disabilities, and students with trauma histories. Because punitive responses to behavioral challenges only exacerbate chronic stress for students and educators alike, they perpetuate a vicious cycle for the most at-risk, misunderstood, and marginalized students. Research has clearly shown that punitive discipline increases the likelihood of further discipline and is related to higher dropout rates, lower academic achievement, and involvement in the juvenile justice system.

We know why suspensions don’t work and make things worse. Disciplinary strategies like this are targeted at motivating students to behave better. But focusing on motivation is barking up the wrong therapeutic tree. Students who struggle to control their behavior at school don’t lack the will to behave well, they lack the skills to behave well. Focusing on a specific student’s struggles with certain skills as the root of their misbehavior has the potential to reduce the harmful effects of racial or socioeconomic disparities in school disciplinary practices.

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Requiring the use of proven, relational forms of discipline, like Collaborative Problem Solving and restorative practices, that focus on building skills is critical if we are to make progress toward more compassionate, effective, and equitable school discipline. I am hopeful that this law will help to decrease the disproportionality of school discipline and, in the most severe cases, help interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline.

 


A version of this article originally appeared on PsychologyToday.com.

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon, Founder and Director of Think:Kids, and Dr. Tia Lites, Principal of the Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy, presented at SXSW EDU 2022 on the School-to-Prison Pipeline and discussed ways we can end it.

Traditional school discipline flows from bias, not science. Kids of color suffer double jeopardy behavior bias—explicit bias that has their behavior misunderstood and implicit bias borne of racism, delivering more punitive responses. Neuroscience proves students with challenging behavior lack the skill, not the will, to behave. Let’s listen to science to interrupt bias, build school culture, and promote Black leadership to end the school-to-prison pipeline. In this recorded presentation Dr. Ablon and Dr. Lites share how behavior is determined by skill, not will; how school culture and leadership set the tone for how discipline is addressed; effective and equitable solutions to support our most challenging students, and those labeled “at-risk,” succeed.

Social Thinking skills involve knowing how to start a conversation or join a group. They also include more complicated skills like understanding how we come across to others, empathy, taking the perspective of others, and reading subtle non-verbal communication.

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon, founder and director of Think:Kids, shares insights into Social Thinking Skills and how those who struggle with this skill might find some situations more difficult.

Thinking Skills

Learn about the Thinking Skills we all use in our free, online, 1-hour course. The course includes an assessment to help you understand which skills are a strength for you, and which ones may be more difficult.
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Transcript

Here at Think Kids, we realize that kids, or anybody else, for that matter, who struggles to manage their behavior on a regular basis is really struggling with the SKILL, not the WILL to behave better. And we follow the research, in the last half a century, which really has made it very clear the types of skills that folks struggle with when managing behavior is a challenge. And those skills include things like language and communication skills, attention and working memory skills, emotion and self-regulation skills, and flexible thinking skills. They also include a whole area of what we refer to as social thinking skills, which is what I want to focus on today.

Social thinking skills are the skills that are required to behave adaptively in social situations, but specifically, they're the skills that have to do with our thinking about social interactions. And here I'm talking about everything from the basics that aren't so basic for some people. Like how to start a conversation. How to go up to a group that's doing something you want to do and let the group know you want to join them without disrupting the group, what we call "right of entry skills." To skills like reciprocity in an interaction, being able to gauge somebody else's interest in something you're doing together, something you're talking about, et cetera. To much more complicated skills like knowing how you're coming across or impacting other people. I refer to those kinds of skills as utilizing our feedback loop.

You know, we all hopefully have some kind of a feedback loop where when we do things and say things, we sort of scan the environment for feedback to see how what we were doing, what we're saying is being received. And ideally, we interpret that feedback accurately, and we then use that to guide how we want to respond. Whether that feedback tells you—keep it going, it's appreciated; better dial it back some; you think you might have just offended somebody. Whatever the feedback might be.

Now, unfortunately, there are a lot of kids who have what I refer to as a sort of broken feedback loop or no feedback loop at all. These are often the kinds of kids who people say “they never know when enough is enough.” They just don't know when to stop because, of course, how would you know when enough is enough? Well, because you are taking feedback in scanning the environment, seeing that people are sending you messages that say, "whoa, that's too much." And then you dial it back. The problem is, if you're not getting any feedback at all, you won't know to stop. Or if you're getting feedback but misinterpreting that feedback, you might not know to stop, either.

This reminds me of a young man I worked with who you would see this issue cropping up at school, both in the classroom and on the playground. In the classroom, this is a kid who's very impulsive, verbally, and really witty too. So he would blurt out really funny stuff during class. And the teacher admitted, you know, it's so funny that she would laugh momentarily, and so would the rest of the class. And he would get that feedback. He would look around and say, people are laughing, and they must love me. And he'd get out of his seat and start delivering a monologue. And very quickly, people would start sending him a lot of signals that they weren't so interested anymore, the teacher and his peers. But if you talked to him about it, he would say, "Oh man, they love me. I mean, even a teacher thinks it's funny. You know, I'm great comic relief. Everybody loves it." Which is true; they loved it for about three to five seconds. His problem was he kept his feedback loop open for three to five seconds and accurately interpreted the information. But then, he stopped gathering feedback. So, he never knew when enough was enough.

Interestingly, this was the same kid who would go onto the basketball court at recess, and they would play that game called Knockout. And when he missed a shot, and he'd go to get the rebound, somebody else would have a rebound. He would get a kid in a headlock trying to get the ball from him. And when you asked him about that, he would say, "Oh, we're just messing around. You know, guys, being guys, just having a good time." And when you ask the other kids on the playground, they would say that the kid was turning blue. And you asked the kid who was in the headlock, and he was like, “I thought I was gonna die.” Now how could there be this disconnect? Because he didn't know when enough was enough because, again, he only kept his feedback loop open for about two seconds, not long enough to see that this kid was turning blue, for instance.

And that's just one example of a lagging social thinking skill that is leading to challenging behavior. And in fact, you know, one of the saddest things I see is that many of the kids that I work with are described as cold and unempathetic because they appear not to care about a kid's feelings in this kind of situation. When actually, you can only have the opportunity to care about somebody's feelings if you're able to gather the information about how they're feeling and then make a decision about whether you care about that. This is a kid who only gathered information for a split second and then closed his feedback loop.

Now, the nice thing about identifying the specific social thinking skills that a kid struggles with that lead to their challenging behavior is that then tells you what you need to work on. Because no end of rewards and punishments, or things like that, are going to help a kid to keep their feedback loop open a little longer and gather more information.

 

A chance to build skills, relationships, and healing

Challenging behavior is extremely common in sports, from little league and town soccer fields to professional arenas. When it comes to kids and sports, it can be especially hard to balance fear, disappointment, pressure, and other strong feelings with a sense of fair play, healthy developmental experiences, internal motivation, and participation.

Think:Kids hosted a webinar with experts in youth sports and behavior for a conversation featuring practical strategies on how to handle challenging behavior in youth athletics that can help young people cope with adversity and even heal from trauma.

Our panel discussed ways to not only effectively manage challenging behavior in youth but to do it in a way that does not leverage power, which can be damaging. We discussed ways to use sports as the perfect natural opportunity to promote healing, build relationships, and provide opportunities for kids to develop skills and character.

Our speakers:

  • Megan Bartlett
    Founder, The Center for Healing and Justice Through Sport
  • Christopher Barfield
    School Leader, Urban Dove Team Charter School
  • Natasha Tatartcheff-Quesnel, MSW
    Certified Trainer and Consultant, Think:Kids at Massachusetts General Hospital
  • Rudy Vejar
    President & Head Coach, East Fullerton Little League Baseball
    Education Program Trainer & Supervisor, Olive Crest
  • Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.
    Principal of the Neurosequential Network
  • J. Stuart Ablon, Ph.D.
    Founder and Director of Think:Kids at Massachusetts General Hospital

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The Value of Implementation Frameworks: Using Active Implementation Frameworks to Guide System‐wide Implementation of Collaborative Problem Solving

Alisha R. Pollastri Ph.D., Lu Wang Ph.D., Soo Jeong Youn, J. Stuart Ablon Ph.D., Luana Marques

Abstract

In the last decade, many implementation frameworks have emerged that consolidate the research on implementation science, guiding purveyors and service agencies in improving implementation of evidence‐based practices (EBPs). In this paper, we describe how Think:Kids utilized the active implementation frameworks (AIFs) to define and standardize strategies for site‐wide implementation of Collaborative Problem Solving. We illustrate what implementation looked like before and after using AIFs to understand implementation, as well as some ways in which using the AIFs helped the purveyor identify, and then overcome, barriers to implementation. This paper provides a model for others who seek to use AIFs to guide their implementation practices, or more broadly, an illustration of how to use any implementation framework to ensure best practices in implementation.

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The Think:Kids team often joins podcasts focused on child behavior, school discipline, and moving to a trauma-informed evidence-based practice. Below is a curated podcast playlist featuring talks by the Think:Kids team about the Collaborative Problem Solving approach. You can subscribe to the feed by clicking the subscribe button below and connecting to your favorite podcast player.

 

Dr. Stuart Ablon, Director of Think:Kids, joins the North Dakota Governor's Summit on Innovative Education. He highlights the importance of addressing the mental health needs in our communities. With a compassionate and collaborative approach, Dr. Ablon provides practical, evidence-based strategies that can transform our schools.

A Flawless Foundation #FlawlessTalk

In this presentation at the Churchill School, sponsored by The Flawless Foundation, Dr. J. Stuart Ablon describes what causes challenging behavior and the Collaborative Problem Solving® approach.

Highlights include:

  • What consequences do, and don't do
  • Collaborative Problem Solving is trauma-informed
  • What is discipline
  • Research on skills deficits
  • Planning an intervention using Collaborative Problem Solving

Collaborative Problem Solving, presented by The Flawless Foundation

J. Stuart Ablon | TEDxBeaconStreet | October 2014

Dr. Stuart Ablon is a child psychologist who specializes in working with challenging children and their families, teachers, and helpers. He serves as the Director of Think:Kids at Massachusetts General Hospital Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School Challenging behavior exhibited by children and adolescents is a common concern and frustration for parents, teachers, and other helpers.

In this TEDx talk, Dr. Ablon challenges the conventional wisdom about what causes challenging behavior and as a result what we should do to help. Drawing from research in the neurosciences, Dr. Ablon suggests a revolutionary way of thinking about challenging behavior and a corresponding process, Collaborative Problem Solving®, by which kids of all kinds can be taught skills of flexibility, frustration tolerance and problem solving.

Rethinking Challenging Kids: Where There’s a Skill There’s a Way

 

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon and co-author Dr. Alisha Pollastri have been working with schools throughout the world to refine the Collaborative Problem-Solving (CPS) approach, creating a step-by-step program for educators based on the recognition—from research in neuroscience—that challenging classroom behaviors are due to a deficit of skill, not will. This book provides everything needed to implement the program, including reproducible assessment tools to pinpoint skill deficits in areas like frustration tolerance and flexibility that are at the root of students’ challenging behaviors.

The authors host a three-part interactive book club for The School Discipline Fix: Changing Behavior Using the Collaborative Problem Solving® Approach.

  • Session 1: Chapters 1-5, Rethinking Challenging Behaviors
  • Session 2: Chapters 6-11, Using Collaborative Problem Solving in Schools
  • Session 3: Chapters 12-15, Scaling & Sustaining the Shift in Discipline School-wide

The School Discipline Fix

A complete guide to a paradigm-shifting model of school discipline.

Traditional school discipline is ineffective and often damaging, relying heavily on punishments and motivational procedures aimed at giving students the incentive to behave better. There is a better way.

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Schools ordering 10+ copies are eligible bulk pricing. Call: (800) 233-4830 Email: orders@wwnorton.com

Free Discussion Guide

School Discipline Fix Discussion GuideThis discussion guide for The School Discipline Fix: Changing Behavior Using the Collaborative Problem Solving Approach is designed as a professional learning resource and can be used to facilitate a professional book study or to create a roadmap for schoolwide change.

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Quick Reference Guide: Collaborative Problem Solving with Students

Norton-Guide-for-Students-Blog-CropThe easy-to-follow guide is an essential tool for tackling challenging student behavior effectively, collaboratively, and compassionately. This 8.5" x 11" multi-panel guide is laminated for extra durability and 3-hole-punched for binder storage.

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Think:Kids convened educators and administrators to discuss the growing concern around and potential solutions to children's post-pandemic challenging behaviors and lagging skills in school.

As challenging as the last year and a half of school was during the height of the pandemic, in some ways, things seem to be worse now as we confront a new challenge. We hear daily reports of escalating behavior from children, classrooms out of control, exhausted educators, and school leaders at their wits' end. Parents are concerned for the safety of their children as kids with no history of behavioral difficulties are arrested for violent fights at school.

Flexible Thinking Skills, or Cognitive Flexibility, refers to our ability to change from one activity or task to another. These skills also influence how we handle change or unfamiliar situations. Flexible Thinking helps us see the big picture and come up with creative solutions to problems.

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon, founder and director of Think:Kids shares how those who struggle with flexible thinking might struggle with their behavior in certain situations.

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Dr. J. Stuart Ablon

Transcription:

The basis of pretty much all of our work here at Think:Kids is recognizing that kids who struggle to manage their behavior, they don't lack the will to behave well. What they lack are the skills to behave well. And we've done a lot of research, but many other people around the world have done a lot of research over decades now, basically a half a century, to help identify the types of skills that kids who struggle with their behavior have a hard time with. And in essence, it comes down to five core domains of skill. And today, I want to talk a little bit more about one of those. And I have to say that it might be one of my favorite areas, and that is cognitive flexibility. And there are a whole bunch of kids out there who struggle with cognitive flexibility. That is with being flexible in their thinking.

They are what we often refer to as the black and white thinkers of the world, stuck in what is, unfortunately for them, a pretty gray world. You know, as you navigate your way throughout the course of the day, things rarely go exactly according to plan. We are asked to be flexible a lot during the day. Kids who struggle with flexibility, well, if everything goes magically according to plan, according to the routine, the template they had in their head, well, life is good. But if there's any change in the routine, if things don't go quite according to plan, if something crops up that requires a change, a shift, they really struggle. These kids also struggle with any new or ambiguous situation where they aren't able to create a template in their head ahead of time.

Now, the flip side of this is that these are kids who, you know, create templates in their heads, so if they do something one way, one time, it's often burned into their brain that way. They have incredible memories like that. The problem is just flexing with that information if it needs to be shifted at any time in the future.

Now, to make this come to life a little bit, I thought I would share a story of a girl who came into the office with her mom for a consultation. And the reason I like this story is it demonstrates that when you're looking through the lens of skill, not will, and paying attention; it's pretty easy to spot the skills that a given kid struggles with. You know, for instance, a full neuropsychological evaluation is very, very helpful if you can get it. But if you can't get it, looking in the right places will tell you a lot. And as I mentioned at the outset here, one of the five areas you want to pay attention to is flexibility in thinking. Now, what are the others that will cover some other times? They are things like language and communication skills, attention and working memory skills, emotion and self-regulation skills, and social thinking skills.

So back to the story. I go out to meet this young girl and her mother for consultation. And the first thing I, of course, like to do is to make some connection with the child who is probably wondering what they're doing here and why their parent dragged them here. And I go out into the waiting room. I see this girl who's in this amazing getup. She's got this big straw hat, is one thing, with dozens and dozens of beaded necklaces that are wrapped all around the hat and draping down from the hat, that she's clearly made. And she's also carrying, clutching close to her chest, what looks to me like a diary. And I was pretty sure it was a diary because my daughter used to have one just like it. So, in any case, I walk up, and I get down to my knee to meet her, eye to eye.

And I say, "I love your hat." And I said, "it's really cool. Did you make those necklaces yourself?" And she says, "yep." And I said, "and is that a diary?" And she looks at me, and she says, "no." I said," oh, it is not a diary. Okay. Well, what is it?" And she says, "it's a book." So, of course, I said, "oh, what kind of a book?" And she said, "a book, you write stuff in." And I was like, "oh, cool, okay." Following along, "what kind of stuff do you write in the book?" And she looks at me, and she says, "private stuff." And I'm thinking to myself, sounds like a diary. And so I say to her, "oh, it sort of sounds like a diary." And she says, "it's not a diary. It doesn't have a lock." I was thinking to myself, ah, okay.

To be a diary, it must have a lock or else. It is not a diary. So I'm taking a mental note. And I say to her, um, so do you mind me asking the kinds of private stuff you like to write in there? And she says, well, I can't tell you much, or it wouldn't be private. I said, good point. And she says, but I'll tell you that I do like to write songs. Oh, okay. She says, I just wrote a new one. Want to know what it's called? I said, of course. And she says, "Mad."

So I said, "oh, okay." And she says, "do you want to hear it? I said, "of course." And she says, "okay, it's eight minutes long. And don't interrupt me!" At this point, I decide, you know what? I should probably take this from the waiting room back into my office here, especially if it was going to be eight minutes long. And she willingly goes back into the office with me and then proceeds to recite, by heart, an eight-minute song with the theme being "mad." Now I share this little anecdote with you just to say again; you don't have to be a neuropsychologist to figure out in the first minute of an interaction with a girl like this the types of skills that she likely struggles with that lead to her behavioral challenges. In other words, the reason that her mother was bringing her in to see me and into our clinic in the first place. And which area should be screaming loud and clear at you, cognitive flexibility skills.

Now, of course, if you're paying close attention, you're wondering yourself, okay, her song she's writing all about is "Mad." Maybe there are some emotion-regulation challenges there, and yes, you might have guessed from our little interaction that social thinking skills may not be her strong suit. Which is a good reminder, folks, that it is extraordinarily rare that a kid will struggle in just one of those five areas that I mentioned because they're interrelated. They are not mutually exclusive. And for instance, I've never met a kid who has been very rigid, concrete, literal in their thinking like her, who struggled with flexibility, who doesn't also struggle to regulate their emotions, and have some difficulties in social interactions. Because the reality is when you're a very black and white thinker, you're sort of always operating in this state of hyper-vigilance—wondering when the world is going to throw the next gray thing at your black and white thinking brain, which has you in sort of a state of heightened anxiety.

And, of course, social interactions are all about taking another person's perspective or point of view into account, even if it doesn't align perfectly with yours, which makes for a lot of social subtleties, being hard for a child who struggles with cognitive flexibility skills. I hope this little anecdote is helpful to bring it to life. Again, the big take-home point here is that if a kid is struggling with their behavior, it's about skill, not will. And we know the types of skills that you need to be on the lookout for. And if you're looking for those skills, even in the slightest of little interactions, you'll get confirmation about whether your hypotheses are right or not. And once you figure out which skills the kid struggles with, well now, you know what you need to on, because if it's about skill, not will rewards and punishments and things like that. They're going to be barking up the wrong therapeutic tree. Instead, after identifying the skills that a child like this struggles with, our job, as adults, as helpers in this child's life, is to help them build those skills.

 

Dr. Stuart Ablon, Director of Think:Kids, highlights the importance of addressing the mental health needs in our communities. With a compassionate and collaborative approach, Dr. Ablon will provide practical, evidence-based strategies that can transform our schools.

Dr. Stuart Ablon | Governor’s Summit on Innovative Education | August 2019

What are executive functioning skills and how can we strengthen them?

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon

You may have heard the phrase “executive functioning skills.” It is becoming more and more common language for parents and educators alike and even in the workplace. So what exactly are executive functioning (EF) skills? They are a family of interrelated skills in areas like managing our emotions, controlling our behavior, focusing and shifting our attention, holding multiple pieces of information in our mind at one time, and thinking flexibly. Specific examples include controlling our impulses, staying calm in the midst of frustration, handling changes, initiating and sticking with an activity or task, shifting from one task to another, filtering out distractions, multi-tasking, and even perspective-taking (Wang et al, 2018).

Neuropsychologists have long recognized that EF skills are critical to reasoning, planning, problem-solving, and managing life’s demands in general. Given how crucial these life skills are, it is not surprising that good EF skills are associated with things like better achievement, health, economic stability, and relationship success in addition to preventing substance use and incarceration, and with general quality of life (Diamond & Ling, 2016).

Let’s discuss the good news first: EF skills can be improved. Like any other skill, EF skills improve with practice, and the research shows the more practice, the better. Also, like many other skills, if you don’t keep practicing, you likely will lose the skills you may have gained. In other words, when it comes to EF skills, it is “use it or lose it.” Research has also shown that it is important to make sure the practice is challenging to keep skills sharp (Diamond & Ling, 2016). The complexity and novelty of training help. And relying on external rewards to motivate someone to practice actually decreases EF performance.

So what’s the bad news? EF skills don’t transfer or generalize that easily from the situations in which they are practiced to other situations. In other words, if you practice EF skills in artificial circumstances, don’t expect them to look better in the real world.

But back to some good news: If you take what we know about how best to build EF skills into account, approaches like Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) are tailor-made for the job (Ablon, 2019). CPS improves EF by helping people practice EF skills through natural attempts at problem-solving in their own lives (Pollastri et al, 2013). Parents, teachers, mentors, managers, and supervisors can use the three ingredients of the CPS process to tackle any problem that comes up during the day. Baked into the CPS problem-solving process is the opportunity to practice dozens of EF skills. Each situation provides a new opportunity to practice those skills without needing to translate them into the “real world” because they are already being practiced in the real world using real problems.

Like it or not, real life also throws us plenty of opportunities to try our hand at solving complex problems, so the practice never gets old or stops and doesn’t require taking extra time out of the day to practice. We also know dosing is important for any form of skill-building, since skill-building is code for changing the brain, and changing the brain requires repetition without hammering away too much, or neural networks become “refractory” and stop responding (Perry & Ablon, 2019). Using naturally occurring problems as the practice field for building skills supplies new opportunities spaced out throughout the day/week.

Finally, when using CPS, we teach people to resist using motivators to solve problems. On the contrary, we help people see that when someone is struggling to handle a situation well, it is most likely an issue of skill, not will. And incentives don’t teach skills. But problem-solving practice does—especially EF skills.

Previous research has shown that CPS builds neurocognitive or thinking skills, especially EF skills, but we again put this idea to the empirical test in a study with our partner, Youth Villages, led by Dr. Lu Wang and Dr. Alisha Pollastri of our research team.

Thinking Skills

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We studied whether delivering in-home CPS improved EF skills over time by looking at youth, caregiver, and staff reports and administering objective, tablet-based neuropsychological tests. CPS was associated with building youth’s overall EF skills, specifically flexible thinking, attention, and working memory skills. We also wanted to explore what factors might predict these changes and learned that the more caretakers embraced the philosophy of CPS (remember it’s about skill, not will), the more skill growth happened, resulting in better behavior. These findings provide empirical validation of the theory of change behind the CPS approach: behavior is determined by skill, not will. When we shift our thinking to realize this and focus on practicing problem-solving instead of relying on incentives, EF skills improve, resulting in behavior changes.

 


References:

Diamond, A., & Ling, D. S. (2016). Conclusions about interventions, programs, and approaches for improving executive functions that appear justified and those that, despite much hype, do not. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 34–48.

Wang L, Pollastri AR, Vuijk PJ, Hill EN, Lee BA, Samkavitz A, Braaten EB, Ablon JS, Doyle, AE. (2018) Reliability and validity of the Thinking Skills Inventory, a screening tool for cross-diagnostic skill deficits underlying youth behavioral challenges. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 41:1, 144-159.

Ablon JS. (2019) What Is Collaborative Problem Solving and Why Use the Approach?. In: Pollastri A., Ablon J., Hone M. (eds) Collaborative Problem Solving. Current Clinical Psychiatry. Springer, Cham

Pollastri, AR, Epstein, LD, Heath, GH, & Ablon, JS. The Collaborative Problem Solving approach: Outcomes across settings. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 2013, 21(4), 188-199.

Perry BD, Ablon JS. (2019) CPS as a Neurodevelopmentally Sensitive and Trauma-Informed Approach. In: Pollastri A., Ablon J., Hone M. (eds) Collaborative Problem Solving. Current Clinical Psychiatry. Springer, Cham

This article originally appeared on PsychologyToday.com.

In this interview elementary school principal Michael Stanton of the Vincent M. Igo Elementary School in Foxborough, MA shares the broad impact Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) had on staff, students, and parents.

Using the CPS Approach in the Vincent M. Igo Elementary School

Why did you want to bring Collaborative Problem Solving to your school?

We've had to grow our skills, our toolbox as educators, what we can do to support children. Also, I think, similar to schools, not only in Foxborough but across the state and the country, there's a lot of social-emotional needs as well. We're seeing children come to us with a variety of needs; sometimes they're being met, other times they haven't been, and we struggled with that. And in search of that, we came across Think:Kids and the Collaborative Problem Solving approach, which really has helped our school.

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How was your experience with Collaborative Problem Solving?

The experience has been wonderful. It's been transformative for our school. The Collaborative Problem Solving approach, really at the core of it, was a philosophical shift for many of us as educators. It required us to look at students and their behaviors differently. The philosophy is "Kids Do Well if They Can." And understanding that, and as educators so many times, we strive to solve problems. It's well-intentioned, but what we found is that we were trying to solve a problem, and we were aiming over here, but the child and the core of it was here.

Also, it really starts with the adults. It starts with building our skills and being able to understand what is that approach to really listen to a child, to ask the right questions, to be curious, to take a piece of information, but not look to act on it, instinctively we do that sometimes too much. It's well-intentioned, but to really take our time and be curious about that and to drill down to see where it might take us somewhere the child needs us to be.

How is Collaborative Problem Solving different from other approaches you've tried?

It's different because it works and it's lasting. In the past, if you looked at a challenging behavior, you try to impose your will, and you know if I was a principal and I'd give my "principal look" or my "principal voice," it could have an immediate effect, but, it wasn't lasting. And what this has done, this approach from Think:Kids and Collaborative Problem Solving, we're looking at the skill deficits and building those. And our own efficacy as educators is strengthened. We can make a difference. We've had that power, and we've seen the results, which as a team coming together professionally has helped, and I think the students can see that we care. They knew it before, but I think once again it looks a little different because we're having the conversations. We have more one-on-one time with students who might be experiencing some challenging behaviors.

What impact has Collaborative Problem Solving had on your staff, students, and school?

I can give an example. We had a student about three years ago, when we were just starting the program, and he was in second grade; tremendously challenging behaviors, extremely disruptive. In the past, I probably would have been looking at in-district resources such as a therapeutic program or what else could have been done. I would have looked outside of the school. But because of Think:Kids, we were able to meet that child's needs like we've never done before. The child blossomed and what we realized is he had been in 14 different homes, even before 2nd grade. There was a reason for the behaviors and looking at the demands that we were placing on him, plus those lagging skills. It helped us to create a support network, and it's really started with just that empathy and understanding that once again, the behaviors weren't directed to us personally; they were happening for a reason, and I'm proud to say that it changed his life. The parents have been so appreciative of the support, I think the staff as well, and once again, even on an administrative level, it's allowed us to keep children in-district and have that part of it. So, we're saving some money that potentially could have been out. It really impacts everybody. So, it sounds powerful, but it has been it really has been an approach that's changed our school. It's changed our practices which has translated to making our children happy and safe, and they're learning.

Seeing mental health issues through the lens of skills.

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon and Dr. Alisha Pollastri

 

We are often asked how challenging behaviors relate to mental health disorders. Historically, psychiatry has understood mental health problems through the lens of categorical diagnoses listed in the always controversial Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder which is in its 5th edition (the DSM-V). One of the reasons that the DSM is controversial is that categorical diagnoses imply that a person who has depression is different from a person who has anxiety, etc. However, the last decade’s advancements in genetic and brain imaging technologies have told a very different story. Genetic research has found that there is a significant cross-heritability of psychiatric disorders. Suppose someone in your family has one mental health disorder. In that case, you are indeed more likely to have that disorder than another randomly selected person, but also more likely to have another psychiatric disorder, even one from an entirely different diagnostic category.

Meanwhile, brain imaging research finds significant overlap between the parts of the brain that are affected in people diagnosed with disorders that were previously thought to be separate. As a result, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) now emphasizes a framework for understanding and studying the common elements that contribute to all mental health disorders. These common elements underlie all the different mental health disorders in the same way that flour, sugar, and eggs can make cookies on one day and cake on another, depending on how they are mixed and with what. The “ingredients” of all of these mental health disorders include components of our cognitive, social, regulatory, and sensorimotor systems. These components represent the skills we need to navigate the complicated environments in which we live. These systems mix in a certain way with our environment to produce our psychology, including mental and behavioral health.

Challenging behaviors are simply the downstream effect of neurocognitive skill deficits, which underlie many mental disorders cutting across diagnostic categories, including mood disorders, anxiety disorders, disruptive behaviors disorders like ADHD, autism spectrum disorders, and psychosis, to name several. “So what?” you might ask. Well, then focusing on these skills instead of the diagnostic categories they reflect has important ramifications for early identification, prevention, and treatment:

  1. Challenging behavior is the canary in the coal mine, informing us of early trouble in neurocognitive development before the typical age of onset for many psychiatric disorders.
  2. Building neurocognitive skills associated with managing our behavior can prevent brain-based disorders (i.e., mental health disorders) or lessen their impact.

What we have learned from recent genetic and brain imaging research also helps explain why categorical diagnoses leave a lot to be desired for so many children and adolescents (and adults) with challenging behavior. Most kids don’t fit neatly into a particular diagnostic box but rather meet the criteria for a literal alphabet soup of diagnoses which is more overwhelming than helpful. And then some kids don’t seem to meet any criteria for any specific diagnosis but clearly experience plenty of problems managing their behavior. We like to say that you don’t need a diagnosis to have a problem; you just need a problem to have a problem!

For all of these reasons, we advocate for a focus less on categorical diagnosis and more on the underlying skills that someone struggles with that lead to their challenges in living which, if unaddressed can result in a mental health diagnosis. Focusing on skills also helps remind us of the good news that skills can be built through practice.

 

 


This article originally appeared on PsychologyToday.com.

Sue O'Connell of NECN/NBC LX interviews Dr. Stuart Ablon about the recent increase in school violence and challenging behavior from students. Dr. Ablon offers insights into why this is happening and what we can do.

What's causing things to spiral out of control and what can we do to fix it?

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon

As challenging as the last year and a half of school was in the pandemic, things are much worse now, and we should all be worried. Not a day passes where I don't hear of escalating behavior, classrooms out of control, exhausted educators, and school leaders at their wits’ end. Parents are concerned for the safety of their children as students with no history of behavioral difficulties are arrested for violent fights at school. As one colleague who leads an urban middle and high school said to me, it has been "one hell of a horrible start to the school year. Dysregulation is everywhere. Basic expectations are not being met. A total mess." That about sums it up. Teachers on the front lines echo a similar sentiment. Here are some snippets of their perspective from social media:

"My students don't know how to do school. It's a huge shift in behaviors and it's non-stop. You basically teach snippets in between non-academic issues all day long." "Everyone is so tired and many people are acting out. Adults and kids. Not sure what the solution is, but it feels like a mass fatigue."

"I've been at my current school for more than 20 years, and we've never had this many fights."

"Kid behaviors off the chain. The sheer number of kids who are disruptive, disrespectful etc. is 40% higher than normal yr."

"Kids are being real jerks to each other."

"My students haven't been to school since pre-k. They don't know how to "do" school or interact with children that aren't their family members. They no longer have the stamina for 8 hours of school. it's teaching in-between de-escalating behaviors all day. We don't have the time."

"Lots of students struggling with the traditional school setting after being away so long. Teachers burned out/have a shorter fuse/overwhelmed by behaviors. Many more kids below grade level & they feel inadequate while teachers feel pressured to still teach grade level content."

"Everyone is so tired."

"Kids have forgotten expectations and social norms. Basic, basic school skills (like not having food fights in the cafeteria, or even just not standing up and shouting out in class) are just... forgotten. It's like the Wild West, and it's just exhausting."

"The student who were always OK bounced back. The students without routine & high expectations at home went feral on us."

"Nobody is OK. We have collective trauma & fatigue from what we've lived through & continue to live through, but no one has time to process it. It looks like exhaustion, apathy, acting out ... from educators AND students."

"My kids have zero school social skills."

"Students are angrier than ever before more apt to violence quicker to lash out both physically and verbally. I have been assaulted by a student that has never happened before. Vandalism. I may retire."

So, what can we do to fix these problems? The answer lies in first understanding what is causing all this chaos. Challenging behavior happens in the gap between demands placed upon someone and their skills to handle those demands. The pandemic has tipped the scale such that demands seriously outweigh skills–for both students and educators. We need to acknowledge that students did not progress academically or socially as they would normally have in the last year and a half of remote and hybrid schools and social isolation. Most students' skills are developmentally behind, making it impossible to meet typical grade-level expectations. I am not just talking about academic skills here. I am referring to social skills, skills at regulating emotions and controlling impulses, flexible thinking skills, and the list goes on. The pandemic has caused an epidemic of developmentally appropriate expectations being no longer developmentally appropriate due to lagging thinking skills.

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The same is true for the expectations we have for our teachers. As one teacher described: "Expectations for educators seem to have gone back to 'normal' - even though the pandemic and the ripple effect in education that comes with it has yet to end."

To make matters worse, as you heard loud and clear from the teachers above, both students' and educators' social batteries are getting depleted so much more quickly after being out of the practice of school and socializing. This lack of endurance is leading to all-out exhaustion from everyone, making it even harder to meet these previously typical demands of the day.

Additionally, let's not forget that many students and educators alike have experienced real trauma during the pandemic, including losing their parents, partners, colleagues, and friends.

What can we do? We only have two levers to pull: reduce expectations and build skills.

The latter obviously takes time. As a result, in the short term, the focus needs to be on reducing expectations to be better aligned with where kids are developmentally and what both students and teachers have the energy to handle. In an ideal world, we might consider simply having everyone repeat a grade—a do-over of sorts. As helpful as that might be, it is unlikely to happen and would cause other downstream problems. So, we need to focus on immediate, concrete, and realistic ways to dial back the demands. These include shorter days, more break time, more opportunities to focus on enjoyable activities, regulating physical outlets, and reducing academic expectations, including revising the speed at which the curriculum is taught. These things taken together would help combat fatigue and enable educators and students alike to feel more successful again while slowly building back endurance. A marathon runner who hasn't run more than a few miles in two years doesn't expect themselves to go out and run 26 miles right out of the gates!

Reducing expectations to be more realistic is easier said than done. Schools are not known for being particularly nimble systems, especially given all the mandated testing benchmarks. But let's be clear that our schools successfully pivoted in much more sizable ways when needed in the height of the pandemic. If we recognize the need and urgency to do it again now, we can. I hear loud and clear that our schools are in crisis, so now the time is to act.

A word of caution, though, when it comes to re-setting expectations: expectations not only need to be clear and realistic, they need to be taught – or, in this case, re-taught. Students can't meet expectations that they are unaware of or that have felt like a moving target during the pandemic. The best way to re-teach expectations to students is to involve them in that process of re-setting expectations. When students are co-authors of expectations, they tend to be much more invested in meeting them. Crucial to recovery from this tailspin in which our schools find themselves is a collaborative process of re-setting expectations.

Finally, let's not forget that the other level we can pull is to build back skills. While this process is not a quick fix, it is critical to emerging successfully from this chaos in the long term and getting students back on the wave of healthy development. Even prior to the pandemic, Social Emotional Learning approaches had been gaining traction in our schools. They are needed more than ever now. Grounding the curriculum in the social and emotional needs of the students and educators is mission-critical. Approaches that build flexibility, emotional regulation, social thinking, and problem skills, in general, must be front and center. As part of that effort, traditional school disciplinary approaches (which are primarily punitive) not only won't help us see our way out of this mess, they will make matters much worse. We must practice relational approaches to discipline at this time, or we will lose some of our most at-risk students.

My advice may be fairly simple, but it is certainly not easy. Our schools are allergic to the idea of reducing expectations for good reasons. But these are not ordinary times, and they require bold actions from our school leaders and support from our communities if we are to right this ship.


This article originally appeared on PsychologyToday.com

Think:Kids team members Dr. J. Stuart Ablon, Dr. Lu Wang, Amefika Paige, Beth Holliman, and Ed Morales join parents and caregivers for a conversation about back-to-school in October 2021.

Although the first day of school is well behind us, many families start to experience challenging behavior from their children once the excitement and novelty wear off. Whether your child is 3 or 18, this year can be especially hard given the impact COVID-19 has had on schools, students, and educators. Whether it is a reluctance to go to school, fighting you on homework, trouble getting out the door on time, or acting out in class, the team from Think:Kids understands and offers parents practical strategies to get through these challenging moments.

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon

The new school year is just getting started, and students are finally back in the building. Unfortunately, many school districts are sending home emails about yet another dangerous new social media challenge on TikTok, the “Devious Lick” Bathroom Vandalism Challenge.

What is the “Devious Lick” challenge on TikTok?

On TikTok, students record themselves vandalizing school bathrooms and then encourage classmates to do the same and share their destruction videos. Schools are finding missing or broken soap dispensers, damaged plumbing and fixtures, and extensive paint and toilet paper messes. This is an especially hard time given the importance of handwashing and keeping bathrooms clean to limit the spread of Covid. It is also providing ample opportunity for students to visit the restroom more often. This “challenge” seems to play out in middle and high schools, but that doesn’t mean your younger child, who doesn’t have unsupervised access to the Internet, won’t learn about dangerous social media challenges at school through peers with older siblings.

What Should a Parent/Guardian Do?

The most important advice to give people when talking to our kids about difficult things is to talk less and listen more. While it can be comforting to us to prepare some sage words to pass onto our kids, the best thing we can do when we are concerned about something they are seeing, reading, or hearing about is to listen to them. We really can’t know what to say until we understand more about their understanding of and reaction to something in the first place.

We, adults, tend to be wordy. So if you need to start a conversation like this, bring the topic up neutrally and succinctly. Perhaps something like: “Have you heard of this thing called “Devious Licks” on TikTok or the Bathroom Vandalism Challenge?” Then ask for information: “What do you think of it?” And bite your tongue. You may well be rewarded by having a chance to hear their perspective, their point of view, or perhaps even what worries or concerns them about something like the Vandalism Challenge. You can ask plenty of clarifying questions like, “Why do they think kids are participating when they clearly know it’s wrong to do so?” If they simply shrug their shoulders or offer the all too common, “I don’t know,” you can make some educated guesses. Is it peer pressure, to garner attention and be “cool,” or are they hoping to gain followers and clout on social media?

Once we hear them out, we will be in a better position to try to answer any questions our kids may have to the best of our ability. And yes, then (after listening to them first) we can provide critical adult perspective and advice while setting the clear expectation that this kind of behavior is not acceptable by explaining our concerns, including that this behavior is illegal and could have serious consequences. But it remains still more important to ask questions, reflect what we hear from them, and show interest in hearing more from them since they probably already know that this kind of behavior is not acceptable. This advice applies to all disturbing or confusing content or undesirable behaviors seen on the Internet or anywhere else, for that matter. Because ultimately, if we want our kids to listen to us, we should start by showing them how we listen to them!

If you are pretty confident this hasn’t happened in your child’s school yet, it can still be important to have this conversation proactively. And if you want to know more about what’s going on in their social media world, make sure to follow them on social! Nothing like seeing things firsthand to put us in a good position to ask questions and learn more from our kids directly. If, however, you already know your child was involved in something like this, your first instinct is probably to take their phone / social media access away or issue other punishments. While understandable, reactions like this rarely address the issues that give rise to challenging behavior. As hard as it can be when furious at or disappointed in our children, try listening first if you want to solve the problem in a durable way.

 


This article originally appeared on Psychology Today.

Mindy Todd, the host and producer of The Point on WCAI which examines critical issues for Cape Cod and the Islands hosts this episode focusing on the social and emotional aspects of learning.

Schools are seeing a significant increase in the number of children with social and emotional challenges, often manifesting in disruptive behavior. Think:Kids is a program developed at the Department of Psychiatry at Mass General Hospital to train parents and educators to work cooperatively with children to solve behavior issues. On The Point, we talk with one of the architects of the Think Kids program, and adjustment counselors at local school districts who have initiated the training.

Here is a list of the guests on this program:

 

Listen to the Episode >>

Emotion Regulation skills help us control or manage our feelings, whether that be excitement, anxiety, sadness, anger, frustration, or any other form of emotion. Self-regulation skills are things we do to help control ourselves. This includes things like delaying our impulses, so we can stop and think before we act, waiting for something, or managing our energy level to match the situation around us.

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon, founder and director of Think:Kids, explains emotion and self-regulation skills and how when these skills are hard for someone, it can often lead to challenging behavior.

Thinking Skills

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Transcript

Today, I want to talk to you all about a set of skills that, in professional jargon, we refer to as emotion regulation skills. And try not to get tripped up by the jargon because if you think about it, the word regulation or to regulate simply means to manage or control. So when we're talking about emotion regulation skills, we're talking about our skills at being able to manage or control our emotions. And this is an area that if somebody struggles in their ability to manage their emotions, it often leads to challenging behavior. In other words, challenging behavior, whether that's oppositionality defiance, aggression, or refusal, you name it, those things are often the downstream effect of difficulty managing our emotional response to things like frustration.

I want to share a quick anecdote from early on in my career. One of the first times that I was working in a juvenile detention facility, we were doing some training there; I had a chance to talk one-on-one and do an interview with a particular young man who'd been accused of a pretty heinous crime. And I want to admit I was fairly new to this and fairly naïve. And so as I sat across from this young man at this little table, so our heads were pretty close together, I started off by asking him a pretty silly question. I'm very interested in how our thinking or our difficulty thinking or our thinking skills that we struggle with, how they lead to challenging behavior. So I'm really interested in what's going on in people's heads before they exhibit challenging behavior. So I made the mistake of asking this young man if he could tell me when he did what he did, what was going through his head. I actually asked him directly. So, can you tell me what you were thinking when you, and I'll never forget it, I still get goosebumps thinking about it because this kid leaned in even closer to me, so our noses were a couple of inches apart, and he looked right at me, and he said to me, "That is the stupidest f-ing question anybody's ever asked me." And I have got to admit, I thought to myself, may very well be the case. And I was naïve but not defensive. So I decided to carry on, and I asked him, okay, that may be the stupidest question anybody's ever asked you, but do you mind explaining why it's such a stupid question? And there was this long pause, and then he leaned back in even more. And he said to me, this I'll never forget, he said, "do you think I would have done this if I was thinking when I did it? You moron." And I remember thinking to myself right there, well, of course.

But it's interactions like that with kids where I often thought to myself, I perhaps could have skipped a couple of years of grad school as well, because what you learn in these interactions is things you can read in a textbook, but man, did they sink in when you learn it firsthand from a youth who's struggling with skills like this. Because I learned in graduate school that, for instance, proactive aggression, planned proactive, pure, proactive aggression, it's actually really rare in the animal world, including us human animals. Most aggression is what we refer to as reactive aggression. It's driven by, for instance, a poor response to frustration, which is an emotion regulation skill. It's difficulty managing our emotional response to frustration. And unfortunately, this young man was in prison at that point, so he would remember not to do something like that in the future. And of course, what he articulated to me very clearly is when he's calm and when he's got his cortex accessible to him, he knows he shouldn't do those things. That's not the problem with him. The problem is this skill that, to use jargon again, we clinicians call our ability to separate affect. Why do we call it separate affect, affect meaning emotion? Because what we're trying to do is we try to separate the emotions that we feel from the thinking that's going to be required to respond to a feeling like that. And the reality is with us humans, feeling comes flying in whether we like it or not, but we've got to go to the door, as my grandfather used to say, and whistle and call thinking into the mix.

And some of us are better at that than others. Some of us are able to stay calm in the midst of frustration and not be flooded by emotion. Because, in essence, there's a negative correlation or an inverse relationship between how much we humans feel and how clearly we can think. And I want to be very clear that this is not an advertisement for not feeling. No, feeling tells us there's a problem, but feeling doesn't tend to solve problems. What you need to do is you need to tamp down the feeling enough. So thinking can rise to the fore also. So you can decide using the smart part of your brain, "How am I going to handle a situation that is making me feel like this?" And unfortunately, in this situation, this young man was so flooded by emotion that there was no thinking going on whatsoever. Now, what does this kid need? He doesn't need time to think about his actions and what he's done; what he needs is help developing his skills at managing his emotional response to frustration. So he can think straight. And again, if you realize that challenging behavior is the result of skill, a lack of skill, not a lack of will. It sends you in a completely different direction. So you'll stay away from a punitive or a correctional mentality. And instead, embrace the mentality that the goal here is building skills.

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon

As our kids and educators return to school this year, we are confronting the reality that this year (which we had all hoped would provide a return to normal) isn’t looking so normal at all. Kids are headed out of their homes and into actual school buildings this fall, some of whom haven’t been inside a school in over 500 days. Still, that progress comes with the risks of exposure to the Delta variant for kids and educators alike, especially our youngest and unvaccinated students. Both kids and adults enter new school years with anxiety and uncertainty; this year, they are also carrying the effects of this past year with them, which for some include tremendous loss and trauma. To state the obvious, stressed students and stressed educators make for little learning.

How might all this cumulative stress and anxiety manifest itself this year in our classrooms? Last year during remote learning, disengagement replaced disruptive behavior as the most common challenge facing our educators. Unfortunately, this year, we can expect to see more of both—disengaged students and disruptive students. In the face of these different flavors of challenging behavior, we need to resist the temptation to resort to traditional discipline, which exacerbates the problem by adding stress. Rather, we need to remember that challenging behavior at times like this is simply the downstream effect (or symptom) of trouble accessing skills due to chronic stress. In other words, we need to remember that it’s about skill, not will! Right now, the world is throwing a lot at our kids, their teachers, and parents too. Ironically, it is hardest for us to access the skills that help us tolerate anxiety, frustration, and uncertainty in times of stress like this.

Now more than ever then, we need to stay true to the grounding philosophy of our work at Think:Kids—the notion that students do well if they can—and so do educators! We are all doing the best we can to handle what the world throws at us with the skills we have at our disposal at that time. So let’s go easy on each other and ourselves and, most importantly, practice empathy. Empathy means working hard to understand what someone else is experiencing, what they are thinking and feeling.

How can we all practice empathy in the midst of a busy day, especially when we are stressed ourselves?

Stopping to take the time to learn what’s going for someone else is a challenge at school, where time is too scarce. But it might just be the most important way to spend our time this fall because empathy is calming, and no one teaches or learns effectively when anxious and stressed.

 

This article originally appeared on Psychology Today.


References

Ablon, JS, Pollastri, AR. The School Discipline Fix: Changing Behavior using Collaborative Problem Solving. New York: Norton; 2018.

Perry BD, Ablon JS. (2019) CPS as a Neurodevelopmentally Sensitive and Trauma-Informed Approach. In: Pollastri A., Ablon J., Hone M. (eds) Collaborative Problem Solving. Current Clinical Psychiatry. Springer, Cham

 

 

A panel of Collaborative Problem Solving experts, with personal experience as parents and educators, talk about how we can prepare for Back-to-School in the context of COVID-19. Recorded September 1, 2020.

 

Dr. J. Stuart Albon: Good afternoon, folks, or good morning still, to those on the west coast. Thank you for joining us for what is, at this point, planned to be our last CPS Chat. I have to say I have really enjoyed this opportunity to connect with people in our community here at Think:Kids and folks who are broadly interested in supporting kids and families who struggle with behavioral challenges.

So today, very aptly, on September 1st [2020], is our back-to-school focus. I’m going to introduce our panelists here and set the stage for this conversation. For us to get going, so if I could, please ask Ben, and Hallie, and Lucas if you all want to turn your video on so folks can see you as well; thank you. There you all are.

Thanks for joining us. Let me make a few introductions. Ben Stich and Hallie Carpenter are members of our staff at Think:Kids who are not only talented trainers and coaches but serve all kinds of other roles in the organization, including notably Ben overseeing our Certification program. And Lucas Vincent, who is joining us, is a participant and a graduate of that program as he is certified in Collaborative Problem Solving. Well done, Lucas. I think that there are a few things that we all share here with the panelists. But first, let me just say a little bit more about Lucas, who’s joining us from McMinnville High School out in Oregon who, as I understand, has been the lead teacher in their Social-Emotional Growth classroom. And you’ve been working with students who struggle with their behavior for more than a decade now.

In addition to his work with these kids, he also shares what Ben and Hallie, and I share here, which is also having children of our own who are heading back to school in this very crazy and uncertain environment. Lucas has two active elementary school-age boys, and so he and his wife are navigating it from that side of the fence, if you will, as well. I know personally for me I’ve got three kids. And my family’s sort of a study unto itself because for our three kids, we have each one of the scenarios we have one kid who is completely remote, one kid who is there in person, and one kid who’s got the hybrid two days there three, days remote. So, we sort of run the gamut within my own family. So, I hope that we will all be able to foster a dialogue both when it comes to the professional angle on this and the parent angle on this.

So for our attendees, if you haven’t been to one of our CPS Chats so far, what we like to do is I’m going to kick off the conversation and start asking some questions to Ben and Hallie and Lucas, and just get the conversation going. As you all are listening and thinking about the things on your mind, please use the Q/A function to type in any questions or comments, or areas you would like us to touch on. After about 15-20 minutes of discussion or so, we’ll start making our way through all of those questions in hopes of getting to all of them or at least as many as possible. But don’t hesitate at any point to type in any comment or question; sometimes, we’ll just sort of take a break in the action and go right to them. I’m hoping this is going to be as much a dialogue with the attendees as it is a dialogue with my co-hosts here. As I take a quick scan of our attendee list, and I know that we’ve got some people who’ve joined already who have a wealth of experience at the leadership level when it comes to navigating challenges in the school environment in districts that we’ve worked with so I’m hoping we hear from our attendees as well. And the last thing I’ll say before kicking it off is that we do record these. So, we’re glad to say that we found these chats reach many, many, many more people after the fact. Folks who are not able to join us live, not surprisingly, because many people are dealing right now with the things we’re going to be talking about today. So, this will be available; we’ll send out a link on social media and other ways so that people can listen in at any point.

So, without further ado, let’s get to the topic at hand. I got to say this heading into this crazy school year; I think in many ways this is a school year that calls out for Collaborative Problem Solving more than any other school year. Because my goodness is everybody, kids, educators, parents, being asked to display skills related to flexibility, frustration tolerance, and problem-solving like we have never before. But as we’ve talked about on some of these other CPS Chats, one of the sad ironies is during the chronic stress of a pandemic like this, our ability to access our skills is much more limited. So right when we need those skills the most, it’s harder for us all to access those skills. And to make it worse, if you’re interacting with somebody else who’s feeling chronically stressed and having a hard time accessing those skills. What we say is “dysregulation breeds dysregulation,” and pretty soon, everybody can have a hard time doing their best. Many who know our work know our mantra is Kids Do Well if They Can, Teachers Do Well if They Can, Parents Do Well if They Can. We’re all doing the best we can to handle these circumstances. But this is tough. This is a tough time right now. So, we’re hoping to provide some guidance to folks and some assistance.

I thought I’d start asking you all, Ben, Hallie, and Lucas, about just backing up a little and talking about expectations coming into this very uncertain school year. This is a school year that maybe we tested the waters a little bit at the end of last school year. But if anybody can even remember back then, this is going to look very different. Does anybody want to chime in a little bit about the importance of expectation setting and communicating? Here I’m talking about both at home and school, and I’m curious if people have any thoughts on this topic.

Ben Stich: I’m happy to jump in first. I mean, my thought is it’s critical, and I’m sure that goes without saying, and that’s why you led there, Stuart. I think it’s really important for parents and teachers to step back and rethink the expectations they have for themselves, their kids, and their students because it’s a completely different set of demands and circumstances and context for which these kids are going to be learning. I think about my brother’s family a lot; there’s three kids, nine, seven, and two. They’re all from home; some of them have some learning difficulties. They’re working from home. There’s a two-year-old running around, wants to get on every device. What are realistic expectations for what the kids can do? I think a lot about kids with significant difficulties with cognitive flexibility. I think making sure that expectations are flexible, based on whatever the needs are of the kids is it’s going to be pretty essential. And very difficult right because there’s this negotiation that happens between parents, parents’ desire to meet teacher expectations themselves at the school, and the district has of them the challenge the district has to meet the expectations of an IEP, for example. I think the big picture is it’s essential to step back and think about what are realistic expectations how can we teach those expectations to the kids and not just thinking about the kids’ skills but the parents’ skills and their ability to deliver. I have a set of parents I’m working with right now where they keep creating expectations they love but aren’t realistic. Not about the kids’ ability to meet them, but about the parents’ ability to set them, remind them, reinforce them, remember them when they’re distracted with work. And so, the work with that particular family is not about Plan B right now; it’s about thinking about expectations.

Stuart: So just for folks who are sort of newer to our work Ben when he’s using the term Plan B, he’s using a sort of code for collaborating to solve a problem, whether that’s with a kid or a teacher. And what you’re saying, Ben is even before we talk about collaborating to solve problems, we’ve got to be clear about what the expectations are in the first place. And one of the things I’m struck by, and I’d love to hear Lucas and Hallie’s thoughts about this, is the beginning of the school year in any classroom is always about expectation setting because these are new kids to you, and your class is new to them. And I found particularly at the early ages when expectations are set the most effectively if they are done a little bit collaboratively. In other words, if your expectations are things that you’re imposing upon a kid or kids, you’re setting it up for some trouble in the beginning. Whereas if the expectations are set jointly, together collaboratively, then when an expectation isn’t met, it’s not just the teacher’s problem or the parent’s problem because it’s your expectation. Now there’s some joint ownership around this, and I’d love to hear others thinking on this front.

Hallie Carpenter: Actually, I’m glad you brought that up, Stuart, because I was thinking about that as Ben was talking about expectations because I’ve been trying to think back to what spring was like, and we really had like these fluid expectations that were happening because we’re trying to figure out what’s happening all the time. And I think one of the mistakes that I made is that I wasn’t very clear at articulating and like in a way that my kids could understand those expectations. And so I was thinking about this fall and starting school. I sat down with them and had a conversation with them about how the spring went and how there were some things that were kind of hard. We did have a nice discussion about what expectations or what things were important to us as a family to be figuring out what’s going to work best for them and also what’s going to work best for me and my spouse, who are both working at home in those same hours. And it’s really amazing. Sometimes you forget what amazing insights kids have. If you just talk to them, so even some of the things that my incoming kindergartner five-year-old came up with, I was like, oh wow, that’s a really good idea for what we should do. And I think it gets a little bit more buy-in honestly from them about being able to then meet the expectations because we talked about it, and we had a discussion around it. I think it’s really nice when we can do that even with the younger kids who sometimes we think, oh well, they can’t engage in a discussion around that, but they can surprise us sometimes around that.

Lucas Vincent: To piggyback off of you guys, I also think it allows them to have more of an understanding of what the expectations are if they’re bought into it. They’ve had the conversation; they’re going to really understand them a lot better. With everything’s shifting and moving so fast over the like the past several months, it’s hard to keep up with it if you’re not really involved in it.

Stuart: Well said. So I think part of the theme I’m hearing is that the more you cultivate engagement and co-authorship right from the beginning of what this new school year is going to look like, the more you protect against there being sort of problems as you as you get going.

Okay, so let’s talk about let’s say you’ve got your expectations set as clearly as you can they’re going to be so many problems this fall when it comes to people meeting expectations. And I say people because I mean all of us, I don’t just mean the kids; I mean us, parents, because of all we’re juggling at the same time and the teachers as well. So, I’m interested in sort of shifting into that area, and I’ll kick it off by saying this that I have been impressed throughout the pandemic and actually through the pandemics, I guess one could say how much advice there has been out there about how to talk to kids. and don’t get me wrong I think it’s extreme extremely helpful for us to know how to talk to kids, but one of the things I found is that the more guidance we adults have for how to talk to kids, the more we talk. and not just to kids but at kids and it’s great to have the stuff to say, but if we have it, we’re going to use it, and I think one of the things that is often missing is how to listen to kids. and honestly how to listen to parents, and how to listen to educators as well because to understand know how to solve a problem you got to understand what the problem is all about. and that’s I think going to be at a premium this fall is how do we listen to one another to understand each other’s experiences. So you all the three of you have a great deal of experience using Collaborative Problem Solving in your own homes, in schools; talk to me a little about how we can help people who are attending to approach problems when they arise in this new environment this fall.

Lucas: I’ll go ahead and Stuart, please as an educator uh working with parents obviously with students who struggle significantly I’ve offered kind of a resource like being able to work sometimes instead of working on their schoolwork let’s talk about what’s going on in the home how can we help support you in different ways. Because of what we do, typically with like my special ed part, I would be giving instruction in the classroom, and that’s been cut down significantly because of the way we are doing school now. , my special ed services in my mind parents benefit, students benefit, from me being able to provide Plan B conversations over Zoom and things like that. Allowing them opportunities to actually get more access to us and get more access to that problem-solving and the skill building that takes place.

Stuart: And Lucas, you’re bringing up something that may be my biggest concern heading into the fall. When I think about our work with schools, you know we’re teaching people a lot how to do this thing again you refer to Plan B, this Collaborative Problem Solving thing, where you listen hard to the other person, you express your concerns, not your solution, and you invite collaboration to figure out how to solve a problem in a mutually satisfactory way. One of the things that it hinges on is the opportunity to do it. And pre-pandemic I think it’s the biggest question any teacher has coming out of our training is “I love this, sounds great. But, how do I make the time to do Plan B? Even it’s just a few minutes, how do I find that time to have even especially a one-on-one conversation?” Now I think there are lots of opportunities to do Group Plan B even in a fully remote environment. But grabbing a few minutes to connect with a kid individually is absolutely critical in my mind, and I’m really worried about the diminished opportunity to do that this school year. And I’ve been sort of encouraging a lot of schools I work with to think about what’s that going to look like? How are you going to do this on remote days? Or, if you’re fully remote, what’s that going to look like? And I wonder other people’s thoughts about this particular challenge.

Lucas: I think one of the ways that I’ve gone around it for me is trying to schedule office hours and letting the parents know, letting the students know hey when we need to if you need to connect, or these are the times that we’re going to connect. I think you have to be purposeful about building it in because otherwise, it really won’t happen.

Ben: There’s no question that creativity needs to come into play. I know some high school teachers, for example, they’ll text their students or use email, and while it’s not the same kind of organic natural flow of a conversation, there are still questions, there are still answers, there’s still kind of engagement. So, I think there are creative ways of doing it that way. And from a parent’s perspective, I’d like to jump on the Group B bandwagon a little bit. I think there are opportunities if they’re siblings and in the home, to have family meetings daily, weekly, because I think when you participate in this problem-solving process, one of the risks is thinking, okay we’re going to talk about this problem like logging on time or getting your homework done, or whatever and the problem you have a solution it doesn’t work. There’s a risk that it’s a static process where, okay, we tried to problem solve it didn’t work, so now what do we do? Versus looking at problem-solving is just a process. It’s a continual process where we’re going to have a conversation we’re going to then check-in in a few days the family is we’re going to figure out if it’s working. Then we’ll make some adjustments, and hey, what else is hard about this and being curious about what the kids’ experiences are. The group process can be very effective and can address some of that time challenge, especially if you bake it into time that you might be together already, like a meal or right before watching a movie on Friday night while you’re eating pizza. And whatever it is that your family traditions might be. And I do hope it.

I’ve been curious. I mean, I want to give Hallie a chance here, but I do think something worth noting is also really working hard, and this is hard, and I can tell you it’s been hard is stemming from the impulse to know what’s going on for the kid for your child or for your student. I’ve been so surprised that when I think I know why a child is having difficulty logging in or engaging with their classmate or responding to their teacher, sometimes I’m right but more often not the reason something was so far removed from my radar. And to your point that you mentioned earlier, Stuart, until you know what the concerns are, what’s going on for the child, it’s really hard to solve for it.

Stuart: Right. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked the question, “what do I do when my kid isn’t engaging in their remote work?” And my quick answer to that is, I have absolutely no idea what to do. And the reason I have absolutely no idea is because I don’t know why yet. And there’s myriad reasons a kid won’t. What we try to embrace in Collaborative Problem Solving is that we may not be so happy that they’re not logging on, but you know what? I bet there’s probably a good reason, and I suggest for teachers and for parents that’s the leading, that’s the lead into this conversation, “Hey, I’ve noticed you haven’t been logging on. I’m sure there’s a good reason why, and I just want to understand what that’s about.” And to Ben’s earlier point, man, you’ll be surprised how many different versions of concerns there are that all lead to the same endpoint of I’m checking out when it comes to this remote learn Hallie jump in, please.

Hallie: Well, I have a perfect example related to that, and it’s like you couldn’t have set it up better, but I was thinking about I had almost this exact same conversation. It’s almost like we worked together. This last spring with my, let’s see he was a second-grader, and he was not wanting to log into his Zoom whole class meetings, and I was like, oh he just wants to rush through get his all work done so he can play, and so those are my like initial assumptions and thoughts that came up. And like you said, we found little moments in which to have the conversation in chunks. He loves food, so we had started it at breakfast; we didn’t quite finish the conversation. I said, “Hey, I just really noticed that it seems hard to log into your whole group Zoom meetings. Can you tell me what’s going on?” We got a little bit going there, and it ended up being totally off of my radar for what I thought the concern would be is that when he saw all the kids on the Zoom call, it made him really miss his friends, and so it made him feel sad because he was seeing them and wanted to have like some one-on-one time like he had had in the classroom with them. And so I was like, whoa, that really challenged a lot of assumptions that I had, and also that’s a concern that I have too is that he’s not getting that social interaction with his friends. And so, we were able to come up with a solution to connect find some other times to connect with friends in different avenues so he could have some of that one-on-one time. It still made it hard right when he was logging in to his Zoom meeting still had some of those feelings, but and we continued to kind of talk through those as we went through, but I got a better understanding had a lot more compassion for what he was going through and experiencing and had a better understanding about how to support him in some other ways. And really felt this stronger connection with him throughout the process. And again, it wasn’t this one static sit down conversation with him, but rather it was something that kind of happened over time, and each time we talked, we got a little bit more information, or we got a little deeper into it because I think he had some different insights as well into it. And so, anytime I have these interactions with my own children or children in schools, I feel like I learn something new right you come away with some new type of opportunity of learning well with them so.

Ben: I really appreciate that we have some mantras at Think:Kids, “be prepared to be surprised,” “be curious, not furious,” and I think of another family I worked with where the child also was refused to log on. The issue was that they saw another student in their classroom chat something mean to another student and they were scared that they would be bullied or be on the receiving end of something mean. And the parents were convinced that do with curriculum or the teacher or being too tired or not getting to bed at the right time or whatever it might be. And to me that also helped in segues to another point which is, I think the increasing demand to collaborate between family and school. Right so, in an example like that, the parents can do a wonderful job of understanding what the concerns are, but there are limitations to how they can solve for it right without the teacher’s involvement.

Stuart: Yeah, and I used to, before the pandemic, I think one of the things we all dealt with was challenges with kids meeting expectations around homework, and one of the things I counseled every family I worked with and teacher was if it’s a homework issue there’s got to be collaboration across home and school. Because it’s supposed to be done at home, but it’s assigned at school, so there’s a whole bunch of people involved here and understanding where the breakdown is and what might be going wrong. Well, actually, now if it’s remote learning like school, all of the school is in that position. And so, I think you’re absolutely right that the need for communication and collaboration across school and homes just it’s extraordinary right now. And, of course, educators, I mean time to use the restroom and grab a quick bite to eat during the day forget to do anything else while you’re trying to teach the curriculum. So how do we afford those opportunities so that teachers can be communicating? Because all of a sudden their class, their colleague in the classroom is now 35 parents who are out there in their homes, and so that’s an extraordinary challenge, I think. And it does, by the way, point out uh something you said, Ben which is the need for incredible creativity here in terms of how we’re going to do this. And I want to actually bring up one great creative example a charter network in the Boston area that we work with kicking off the school year. One of the things they’ve started to do is trying to work their schedule rework their schedule because, of course, the schedules are entirely reworked to figure out how they could have another adult popping into Zoom classrooms, and then if something’s happening and you literally see a kid disengaging, some issue going on, they’ll invite that student to a zoom breakout right then and there one-on-one. So, you’re able to quickly say, hey, I’ve noticed that you turned your video off, and you’ve been off well, don’t worry, you’re not in trouble, but what’s going on? Everything okay? Just checking in with you. And so that’s one creative Zoom use of trying to connect one on one, but clearly, we’re going to need a lot of other creative ways to communicate, to collaborate, and I guess the other thing is to build a relationship. Right, I mean, we haven’t said this yet, but like, what does this all rest on? This all rests on relationship building. And how do you do that? Especially in a largely virtual environment, and even if you’re in person, by the way, with half your face covered, trying to stay far away from one another and everybody on edge. It is hard enough there to create a relationship.

Let me see here, folks, we’ve got uh some things coming into our Q&A here that I think I’d like to pivot to a little bit here, so one question is: “How we would engage with a school that refuses to implement an IEP for your kid when she really needs one? They say homework’s not a school issue when it is, and that’s when she has the most troubles with her anger and aggression.” So, this tough question. I guess I’ll be interested to hear others’ perspectives here. I shared my bias a few minutes ago that I believe everybody does the best they can, even schools. And what I mean by that is, just like if a kid’s refusing to do something, I take the perspective of let me understand their concerns. If a school’s refusing quote-unquote to do something, that’s what I’m interested in understanding too. What’s their perspective on the role of an IEP here? But I would also add that I got to tell you, I’ve worked with kids who’ve had tremendous IEPs, the best IEPs in the world, and they haven’t been implemented well, so it doesn’t matter. And I’ve worked with kids who don’t even have a 504 plan of any shape or kind, and they get incredible assistance because the educators really know who the kid is, what they’re struggling with, and how to help. So I would say to you sort of less about, and I know there are legal protections and coverage here but less about the IEP and more about can we help the school to understand why she is having such trouble with her anger and aggression when it comes to homework. And it’s important to remember that sometimes in schools it’s very hard for us in a school to understand what might be happening at home because kids will look totally different at school than they do at home. I can’t tell you how many educators I’ve said, wow, you’re working with this family; why do they have a psychologist involved? She’s like the easiest kid; she’s delightful; she’s a class leader. And I say, oh well, that’s funny. I don’t think her parents would describe her that way. And by the way, it happens in the reverse as well angel at home trouble at school. Why is that? Home and school are completely different places with totally different demands. Now, of course, in the remote environment, they’ve got similar demands too. But anyways. Lucas, Hallie, Ben, I don’t know if anybody else wants to chime in on this question here at all well.

Hallie: I was thinking, I mean you’ve made a lot of really great points, Stuart. One of the things I was kind of thinking about along those lines that’s been helpful sometimes when we come into situations where we feel like from a school setting, we’re looking at things totally different than the home setting right where we’ve kind of got these dueling solutions that are out there. Because oftentimes what happens is people come to the table with two sets of solutions, and we try to talk through the solutions, and behind each of those really are valid concerns, right? Really good concerns, and if we can take the time to break it down a little bit and really truly address or find out what the concerns are behind them, behind those solutions, oftentimes we come up with more mutually satisfactory types of solutions. And sometimes we realize that we’re actually coming at things from the same place but in a different way. And so, I think one of the things that has sometimes been helpful is to work on completing a CPS Assessment together right and to look at and examine what are the behaviors that we’re seeing across home and school. What are the specific situations that we notice are really challenging for the youth at home and at school? And what are some of those lagging skills that are behind it? And sometimes, that can get us to a place where we can come up with an action plan for what we want to do or how we want to move forward with some solutions. And so, as much as we are able to team together to do that process or some sort of process to examine things a little deeper, I think that can be helpful too.

Ben: I think the other thing I would add, and again I want to acknowledge what you said, Stuart, is that there are certainly legal implications of compliance with an IEP. It is perhaps for the family to identify who has the best relationship with their child. Regardless of whether or not it’s the team chairperson is in charge of the IEP process or the school administrator, it could be a paraprofessional; it could be the special ed teacher. It could be a general education teacher, but I think perhaps one option is to explore the conversation with them first because those are people who really understand their child who might be able to hear their, the parents’, concerns and work together to try to think through how best to meet their child’s needs. I’ve seen a lot of success with that, really leveraging relationships. As you said earlier that everything rests on the quality of relationships.

Stuart: Yeah, yep. Well, and I think one of the other things I’m hearing from both of you is, when possible here the importance of being as proactive as possible. And we did have a little bit of a window into what things might look like at the tail end of last school year. And so if your child, if your student, was struggling in particular ways then, it would be a pretty good bet that it might be trouble again this fall. And so that’s the importance of a teacher communicating to their colleague who this kid is coming into their class. What did you see in the remote learning environment? But as parents, also if we have concerns about how our kids were able to engage, getting ahead of that. And as Hallie said, also if you look through the lens of “skill not will,” which is what we try to do here at Think:Kids, and see that when kids are struggling or anybody for that matter, it’s more likely a struggle with skill instead of a lack of will to do better. If you look through that lens and keep in mind what are the skills that your child struggles with that are making it even harder right now, getting ahead of that and helping your teacher, your kid’s teacher, to know that this is an area of growth for them that we’re expecting is going to be a challenge. It is going to increase empathy right from the beginning and help teachers to be more proactive.

Ben: And teachers usually tremendously appreciate that kind of communication for families. I hear that universally.

Stuart: So we got another question coming in here which is: “How do we suggest Plan B-ing,” and again we’ve got the lingo here, so that’s shorthand for how do we suggest collaborating to solve “doing school remotely,” which is that’s a big question, Deborah Ann. But she’s saying, bring teachers and parents together is challenging remotely, as we’ve been saying. Homework used to be a big issue, but what I read your comment/question here saying is teachers are understandably, as they should, trying to pursue a whole host of expectations. When for some kids, just the fact that they are showing up online is a success. And how do we try to? These are my words, not hers, not sweat the small stuff. So, for instance, if a kid shows up in PJs as opposed to more serious attire, we might not like it, but we’re happy they’re there. And, I think first of all, since we are talking to a lot of educators here, even before we talk about how to collaborate to solve a problem, one of the things we talk about is prioritizing. Just deciding what are you working on and what are you not working on. And in the middle of a pandemic, with the most unusual start to a school year, I think there’s a lot of things that we need to decide. You know what? Maybe those used to be important. They’re not so important right now. And I would put PJs on that list in my book, and it’s not to say, if you’re there in person, I actually think what kids look like does matter. It does show a certain appreciation for the importance of the learning environment. But if we’re just hoping that kid’s going to show up. You know what? I’d rather have them there in PJs than not there at all. And so, people familiar with Collaborative Problem Solving, that’s what we mean is use Plan C. Decide proactively I’m not taking up the PJ thing, just happy they’re there. Now, if the year gets going and they’re there a bunch, and things are cooking, and you want to address the PJ thing, then you bring that back, and you decide to take that on collaboratively. But Deborah Ann’s question is also “how do you talk to the teachers about this?” And before I open this up to the group, the one thing I want to say is remember the most important piece of Collaborative Problem Solving its empathy. Right? I mean, Teachers Do Well if They Can. Teachers are not trying to get our kids to wear something other than their PJs because they want to cause trouble. No, they’re just trying to pursue good expectations, and if you think we need to prioritize a little bit differently, start with empathy not for your kid, but empathy, in this case, for your teacher. And understand their perspective and concern first before you share yours. And that’ll get the conversation going. So my fellow panelists here, anything to add when it comes to addressing Deborah Ann’s question here?

Ben: You kind of said what I was thinking. Yeah, it’s the same lead-in, right? “Hey, I noticed that the kids not wearing PJs seems really important for your class. I’m kind of confused by that. Can you help me understand it?” Right? And then understanding the teacher’s perspective and then sharing your concern. Like, “well, really, it’s been so hard to get my child to participate. It’s actually creating a lot of conflict and making it harder for them to learn.” Whatever the parent’s concerns.

Stuart: So, the Plan B you’re doing is actually is the parent with the teacher, okay. Now some might be saying, “oh wait a sec, so you’re saying I actually use Plan B on the teacher?”

Ben: No, with the teacher.

Stuart: And that’s what I would say, is no you don’t use Plan B on anyone folks it’s not some special technique that use surreptitiously. No, you collaborate with them, and by the way, it’s okay for them to know that’s what you’re doing. But notice what Ben said; you start with their concern, as opposed to starting with yours. Here’s what starting with yours looks like, “hey, I just don’t think that it’s important that my kid be wearing something other than their PJs. And I think we should just be happy that he showed up, and so I really think it would be good if you were to just lay off for the PJs.” Right? What happens if you’re the teacher? You feel disrespected, you start to get dysregulated, and collaboration goes out the window. If however, you say, “hey it seems like him not being his PJs is important, and I bet there’s a very good reason because this is this is important that they show up at school and take this seriously.” Right? “So, I just wanted to touch base with you about that.” What are you doing? You’re regulating that teacher through empathy. And by the way, teachers, it’s the same exact thing when we’re saying how do you talk to a parent who has who’s upset about something start by regulating them before you’re going to share your concern. All right, Deborah Ann, I hope that’s helpful there.

Hallie: All right, can I add on that too?

Stuart: Of course, Hallie, please.

Hallie: Well, I think one of the also things that we think about too with Plan B that’s so important is building relationships. Right? And we’re talking about not only building strong relationships with but also creating those strong bonds and relationships with other adults. Which is equally important if we think about moving forward in working because part of the success of educating our kids is having strong relationships with families, right? We know that that creates really good outcomes, and so this process of utilizing collaborative problem solving helps to build relationships amongst everyone. And so it’s equally important to use it with adults as it is with kids.

Stuart: Thank you. All right, if anyone has any other questions or topics they would like us to address in the closing minutes here, I would invite you to type those in the Q&A, and in the meantime, if not, I’m going to encourage each of our panelists just to share any last words of wisdom, anything that you would suggest people keep in mind when it comes to this very challenging year ahead so if anyone wants to chime in with some final thoughts for the group here.

Hallie: One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and in my role as a parent and working in schools and working with people in different places is how we apply this model to ourselves as well. So, we can be very hard on ourselves and if we can go back to that philosophy of People Do Well if They Can, it means I’m Doing Well if I Can. And have more compassion for ourselves and recognize that we are in a challenging situation and that our skills are going to be stressed right now. And so, how do we apply? Perhaps we need to Plan C, let go of expectations for ourselves as well in the multiple hats and roles that we serve. And that when we can also do that for ourselves, we’re also going to see things improve for everyone around us. So that’s been my mantra lately.

Stuart: Yes, very well said Hallie, thanks for I think that’s phenomenal advice. Ben, looks like you’re going to chime in next?

Ben: Yeah, so to piggyback off that, Hallie just talked a lot about the philosophy that Kids Do Well if They Can, People Do Well if They Can, that We Are All Doing the Best We Can and the idea of problem-solving can not only occur with children, but between adults, parents, and teachers, teachers and parents. I think that is also true for households with two parents. And it’s really important in this era. You know your spouse or whoever else is living in the house is doing the best they can. The demands that everyone is facing now is unprecedented, you know, working from home, having to figure out homeschooling, not having daycare, not being able to. I was on a call with a friend last night, and he was talking about how he’s such an extrovert and how hard it’s affecting his ability to be as motivated and energized as normal because he’s missing that part of his life. We’re all under tremendous stress, and this model can be applied in all relationships so you can problem-solve with your spouse, you can be empathic to your spouse. You can remember that they’re doing the best they can, just like you’re doing the best you can. And that might mean you might need to do what you described as Plan C. There might be some expectations right in your relationship that you guys need to let go of each other, you know, maybe it’s okay the dishes don’t get done on time. Maybe you divide and conquer in a different way. Maybe you just order out on Friday night instead of cooking. Really having empathy, support, and flexibility within the relationship can be important and will just there will be a trickle-down effect, and the kids’ ability to stay calm or what you’re describing is regulated because it will reduce the stress in the environment. And boy, is this environment stressful. There’s so much that we don’t know that’s going to happen. Right we’re talking about expectation setting. It’s like for this week, right? Who knows what’s going to happen next week? All the rules of the game are to change again, right? Who knows what this is going to look like?

Stuart: Exactly. Best laid plans. Well, thank you, Ben. Lucas, anything you want to share in our last minute here some parting words of wisdom for folks?

Lucas: Yeah, I think everybody be patient, be understanding, have that empathy the relationship’s going to be huge, and I honestly am really hopeful that because of the situation, having it be a necessity for us to be stronger communicators with families, that this will actually create more opportunity for us to have those better relationships just based off a necessity. I think in my mind as an educator; I’m at the school until five, six o’clock at night sometimes, and oftentimes I don’t have opportunities to connect with families. And I honestly feel like now, because of the situation we’re in, I might have a little bit more flexibility to make phone calls, to email, to do Zoom calls with families and do some more work with them, and hopefully provide some more resources. So be hopeful that wherever everybody is out there that they’ll have opportunities as well.

Stuart: Thank you, Lucas. And thank you, Divina, for your kind comments about this conversation, which we hope has been helpful for folks. Karen, I don’t want to leave you short here. You snuck your question in. I invited it, so I’m going to try to answer it super quickly. First of all, talk about empathy for kids under nine together 24/7. Oh my gosh. I feel for you already, but she’s asking a couple two of the four go from playing well together to all hell breaks loose in a split second. They use Collaborative Problem Solving after the fact, but often somebody gets hit before you can step in. Just make sure, Karen, that you’re not just doing what we call Emergency Collaborative Problem Solving, which is trying to sort it all out at the moment right after it’s occurred. But when the dust settles where people are not fighting with four kids under nine, you’re going to want to just like relax any moment you get to catch your breath. But, try to grab a couple of minutes to have a proactive conversation with those two, if not all four, to do a mini Group Plan B discussion where you simply notice what’s happening, and you try to gather information about why it goes from playing nicely to all hell breaking loose. You’ll get a better read on what the specific triggers are and how you might be able to address them.

All right. On that note, we’re going to wrap things up, but I do also want to let people know that we do have a lot of other ways we can help you all online here. So teachers and parents, or anyone else for that matter, we invite you to consider our online training, which I’ve typed into the chat window here. These are intensive training where you can learn all about Collaborative Problem Solving; four afternoons a week on Zoom, it’ll be your own remote learning. And parents specifically, if you are interested in learning Collaborative Problem Solving along with other parents in a supportive environment, we have online parent classes. Those links are in the chat window for folks. Visit us at thinkkids.org. Lucas, thanks so much for being a part of our certified community and joining us today to share your experiences as a parent and an educator. Hallie, Ben, thank you for joining us as well.

But most importantly, thanks to all the attendees, we do hope this is helpful. We wish you the best of luck with this very uncertain year. And as everybody said, be kind to yourself, be kind to those around you, remember we’re all doing the best we can under very challenging circumstances. Good luck and take care, folks. Thank you, thank you.

 

 

Edited for clarity.

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon

September 3, 2018

Wish your teenager would do his homework or his chores just because it was important to him instead of because you bribed him to do it? Wish people on your sales team would strive for higher numbers not just when an incentive trip is dangled in front of their noses but just because they want to be good at their job?

Parents, teachers, managers, and CEOs alike all search for the Holy Grail of performance: internal motivation. How do you internally motivate someone, and is asking that very question antithetical to the goal itself? Can you actually help someone to be more internally driven?

Many people opine about the keys to intrinsic (as opposed to extrinsic or external) motivation, but let’s use empirical research here to set the record straight. There is, in fact, an entire field of research in this area. What do the data say? No, you can’t make someone internally motivated. However, it turns out that it is quite possible to help foster sustained intrinsic drive in others. The key lies in three very basic psychological needs that we humans must have satisfied if we are going to be internally driven to pursue a goal. These three basic and essential needs are:

  1. Mastery
  2. Autonomy
  3. Connection

Self-determination theory flows from research in this area and has shown that we must feel (1) reasonably good at something (i.e., competent), (2) that we have some independence, and (3) connected to those around us if we are going to internally motivated to pursue any particular goal in a sustained way. Think about your own job. If you like your job and feel internally motivated to go to work, it is probably because you feel good at your job, feel like you have some autonomy, and feel connected to your colleagues and others with whom you work. However, if you don’t particularly like your job and often feel unmotivated, it is likely because you don’t feel particularly good at it, you feel told what to do or controlled, and you feel and disconnected from those around you.

In my previous blog, I described the dangers of focusing on extrinsic motivators like rewards. One of those dangers is a marked decrease in intrinsic (internal) drive. There is a negative correlation between the two. This makes sense when you realize that using a carrot and stick approach doesn’t build skills, autonomy, or connection. In fact, when you try to incentivize people to perform, you are taking away their autonomy by attempting to control or manipulate their behavior. So instead of bribing someone, if we want to foster sustained, internal drive we need to think about how to help people feel more independent, more connected and better at the task or job at hand. But how exactly do we do that? Easier said than done for sure.

However, we’ve made some basic observations while teaching people our Collaborative Problem Solving approach for over 20 years now. When an individual is having a hard time meeting expectations, it’s important to not turn, as many of us do, to offering incentives or threatening consequences. Those only work for the short term because the only focus on increasing external motivation. If you really want long term change, you’ll need to invite your child, student, employee (or yes, even friend, partner or relative) to solve problems together with you, to foster connection and autonomy while also helping them practice and build their skills – skills that lead to them becoming and feeling more competent in the future. In fact, we actually see the ingredients of our Collaborative Problem Solving process as a sort of a roadmap for meeting these three basic psychological needs that lead to sustained intrinsic drive. Start by understanding and valuing their perspective on a problem before sharing yours. Then invite them to brainstorm solutions together with you, giving them first chance to suggest an idea.

So, if you want your child to get her homework done, don’t reward her with more Fortnite time whenever she actually completes it. That will just make her more motivated to play Fortnite! Instead, ask her what gets in the way of getting the homework done. Get her perspective on it. Maybe it’s a focus issue, a fatigue issue after school, maybe she often doesn’t know where to start without the teacher’s help. Whatever it is, assume she’s got a good concern and find out why before you share why the homework is important in your mind. Finish by inviting her to try to come up with solutions to the homework problem. If she’s co-author of some ideas to try, she will be much more invested in the solutions. She will also feel much more competent, independent, and connected to you while doing so.

Same deal with your colleagues at work. Start by finding out why, directly from them, that they aren’t jazzed about selling your new product. Express the obvious concern you have about sales numbers and invite them to the problem-solving table. All of a sudden, they are a part of the solution, not a part of the problem. And your team members will feel … you guessed it, more competent, independent, and connected – the recipe for fostering internal drive. If you use this process repeatedly, you are bound to see increases in internal drive—and long-term change. The data don’t lie.


This article originally appeared on Psychology Today.

References

Pink, D.H. (2009) Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverbed Books.

Ablon, J.S. (2018) Changeable: How Collaborative Problem Solving Changes Lives at Home, at School, and at Work. New York: Penguin Random House.

Ryan, R.M. & Deci, E.L. (2000) Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions, Contemporary Educational Psychology 25.

Why is it so hard to change problem behavior—in our kids, our colleagues, and even ourselves?

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon

May 27, 2018

The answer is actually quite simple. Our understanding of how to change problem behavior comes from our understanding of why the problem behavior exists in the first place. And our explanation for why people behave poorly is typically wrong! When someone doesn’t behave or perform as we would like them to, our default assumption is that they must not be trying very hard; they just don’t want it badly enough. This is true whether we are talking about a child in our home or school, our friend, relative, or partner, an employee whom we manage, or even a professional athlete on our favorite team. As a result, when people fail to meet our expectations, we typically respond with incentives intended to make them try harder in the future. Unfortunately, these conventional methods often backfire, creating a downward spiral of resentment and frustration, and a missed opportunity for growth.

But what if people don’t misbehave because of a lack of desire to do better, but because they lack the skills to do better? What if changing problem behavior is a matter of skill, not will?

Interestingly, neuroscience research has shown for decades now that people who struggle to meet others’ expectations (and even their own!) have challenges with specific thinking skills. It is time to listen to this research and accept the fact challenging behavior is the result of a lack of skill, not willskills in areas like flexibility, frustration tolerance, and problem-solving.

For the last 20-plus years, I have been teaching an approach called Collaborative Problem Solving to parents, teachers, clinicians, managers, and entire organizations interested in behavior change. The approach is predicated on the simple philosophy that skill, not will, determines behavior. I have had the opportunity to work with some of the toughest settings to try to change some of the most challenging behavior, and I have seen firsthand how powerful and effective this shift in mindset is. The simple but powerful skill, not will philosophy puts us in a far more compassionate and helpful place as a parent, teacher, friend, partner or manager. And the good news is that skills can be taught! We’ve shown that by practicing problem-solving skills, as opposed to resorting to incentives and punishments, you can improve just about anyone’s behavior. So the next time someone’s behavior frustrates you, remind yourself that we are all doing the best we can to handle what life is throwing at us. And if we aren’t handling it well, it’s probably more about skill than will. In fact, people who struggle with these skills are likely trying harder than anyone else to behave themselves—because it doesn’t come naturally to them.

I’m excited to announce the arrival of my new book, Changeable, which starts shipping June 5, 2018! In the book, I review the research behind this way of understanding challenging behavior and describe the simple and remarkably effective framework that Collaborative Problem Solving provides for helping anyone in your life (even yourself!) build skills related to flexibility, frustration tolerance, and problem-solving. I describe my experience applying the approach in some very tough settings, including state psychiatric hospitals for chronically mentally ill adults, prisons, residential treatment centers working with traumatized youth, and with police officers working in schools in the poorest congressional district in the United States. Regardless of setting, the basic tenets of the approach are the same. I then detail the implications for anywhere there is conflict between us humans, whether or not there is a power differential present—parent-child interactions, teacher-student interactions, relationships with friends, partners, and family members, as well as with employees and supervisees. Perhaps the furthest-reaching implications apply to problems on the world stage. In the book, I make the case that we all might benefit from a more compassionate and empathic stance towards others and legitimate attempts to solve problems in mutually satisfactory ways.

I hope you will join me here in the future as I go into more detail on different aspects of the model and tackle all kinds of related topics with some guest experts as well. For now, remember these 3 key take-aways:

  1. We are all doing the best we can with the skills we have
  2. The key to behavior change is thinking skill not will
  3. Skills can be built so we are all changeable!

 


This article originally appeared on Psychology Today.

References

Ablon, JS. Changeable: How Collaborative Problem Solving Changes Lives at Home, at School, and at Work. New York: Penguin Random House; 2018.

Greene, RW, Ablon JS, Monuteaux, MC, Goring, JC, Henin, A, Raezer-Blakely, L, Edwards, G. Markey, J & Biederman, J. Effectiveness of Collaborative Problem Solving in affectively dysregulated children with oppositional defiant disorder: Initial findings. JCCP, 2004; 72(6): 1157-1164.

Pollastri, AR, Epstein, LD, Heath, GH, & Ablon, JS. The Collaborative Problem Solving approach: Outcomes across settings. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 2013, 21(4), 188-199.

Pollastri, AR, Lieberman, RE, Boldt, SL & Ablon, JS (2016) Minimizing Seclusion and Restraint in Youth Residential and Day Treatment Through Site-Wide Implementation of Collaborative Problem Solving, Residential Treatment for Children & Youth, 33:3-4, 186-205

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon

June 19, 2018

In my first post for Changeable on Psychology Today, I described some of the foundational thinking behind the Collaborative Problem Solving approach that my colleagues and I teach. I pointed out that when someone exhibits challenging behavior, we typically resort to conventional methods aimed at motivating better behavior from them, safe in the assumption that what is getting in their way is a lack of motivation. Motivational procedures can make the possible more possible, but they do not make the impossible possible. If challenging behavior is the result of a lack of skill, not will, as I suggested in my first blog, then relying on rewards and consequences might be barking up the wrong therapeutic tree! However, I sometimes find myself less concerned about the fact that motivational procedures don’t work with the most challenging behavior and more concerned about their side effects. Not only may motivational procedures not work if challenging behavior is caused by skills deficits, but I often see them make matters worse.

There are two primary dangers to focusing on external reinforcers like incentives or rewards and consequences:

1. Decreasing internal drive

A very clear finding from thousands of studies in this area is that the more you rely on extrinsic rewards to motivate behavior, the more you eat away at a person’s intrinsic drive to achieve those very goals. I have seen this time and time again in my work with some pretty tough children and adolescents, and Daniel Pink and others have described what this looks like in the workplace for us adults. The more we rely on a carrot and stick approach, the more dependent we get on constantly producing shiny new objects for people to be motivated by. In the worst-case scenario, over-reliance on extrinsic rewards actually encourages unethical behavior when people we are trying to motivate become focused solely on how to get the rewards as opposed to the goals we are trying to get them to achieve with those rewards in the first place. Much research has confirmed the negative correlation between extrinsic reinforcement and intrinsic motivation. The more we try to incentivize someone to do something, the less internal drive they will feel.

2. Damage to trust and self-esteem

A related side-effect of over-using external motivators is something my 101-year-old grandfather describes best. He often says: If you give a dog name, eventually they will answer to it. This is his way of describing how when we treat someone as though they are lazy, unmotivated or just not trying hard enough, that we should not be surprised when over time they start to look like, and talk like, and act like someone who is lazy, unmotivated and not trying hard enough. I like to think that none of us would want to consciously try to make someone else feel as if there are lazy, unmotivated, and simply not trying hard, but the cold reality is that whenever we use reinforcers to try to motivate better behavior we are indeed sending the not so subtle message that we think things would go better if they just tried harder. This is a dangerous message to send, and I have seen its impact firsthand in homes, schools, treatment facilities, and workplaces all around the world. When someone is constantly subjected to external reinforcers, they really have no choice but to come to one of two conclusions: (1) either the people trying to motivate me are right—I must not really be trying very hard; or (2) the people trying to motivate me are missing the boat and don’t understand me at all. I am not sure which conclusion is more damaging—to one’s self-esteem or trust in others.

As a parent, teacher, clinician, manager, or leader, I hope this blog gives you pause before you design your next sticker-chart, demerit system, or employee incentive program. In my next blog, I have some good news. There is a whole field devoted to how to foster that elusive thing called internal drive. So if you want to foster internal drive and steer clear of the side-effects of external reinforcers I described above, I will walk through what to focus on instead. Together, we will dive into the fascinating field of what is called self-determination theory to highlight what actually does foster sustained intrinsic drive. Stay tuned!

 


This article originally appeared on Psychology Today.

E. L. Deci, R. Koestner, and R. M. Ryan “A Meta-analytic Review of Experiments Examining the Effects of Extrinsic Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation,” Psychological Bulletin 125 (1999): 627.

R. M. Ryan and E. L. Deci, “Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions,” Contemporary Educational Psychology 25 (2000)

D. H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverhead Books (2009)

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon

November 27, 2019

California recently banned suspensions for willful defiance in elementary and middle schools. When we shared this news on social media, the reaction was passionate—in both directions. It was lauded by many as crucial to addressing the school to prison pipeline and especially when students of color are suspended at alarmingly higher rates. And yet it was sharply criticized by others as being soft. The comment I read that struck me the most, however, was this:

“There has to be some alternative to just doing nothing. What programs is the state going to establish and pay for to help these students… what measures are being put into place instead of just banning?”

I’ve learned over the years helping hundreds of organizations change their disciplinary programs that you really shouldn’t take things away from folks before you give them something of equal or greater value to use in their stead. Otherwise, all hell will break loose. Taking away suspension for willful behavior might be a start towards more equitable and effective discipline, but it won’t make the problem go away, could make it worse, and will only be effective if educators have something effective to do instead.

I recall visiting a program serving adolescents with severe behavioral difficulties years ago. From the very beginning of the introductory training I was there to provide in our Collaborative Problem Solving approach, I sensed an unusual amount of tension and even hostility in the air. One of the staff members who looked particularly angry stared menacingly at me and asked, “Did you write that book on Collaborative Problem Solving?” I later learned that three days prior to my arrival their leadership had told the staff that they were no longer allowed to use their system of rewards and consequences to shape behavior since they had decided to implement this new approach I would be sharing with them. In the intervening days, chaos had ensued as people had no idea how to respond to episodes of challenging behavior.

Another phenomenon I’ve noticed is that if you take away one form of something from staff, they will likely resort to more of other forms of the same thing. In a therapeutic school to which I was consulting, the staff was told that they had to stop putting out-of-control students in the quiet room due to new legislation, which they did. Successfully. The problem was that they ended up restraining students at alarming rates instead. In essence, they traded seclusions for restraints. I can foresee how banning suspensions could simply result in dramatic increases in things like detentions and other forms of punitive responses aimed at curbing bad behavior. This is especially likely because when we fear increased disruptive behavior from easily dysregulated students, we get dysregulated ourselves and reach for more of the only thing we know, even if it isn’t working. Our followers on social media echoed these fears, suggesting that banning suspensions would be:

“Turning schools into holding pens for kids who lack the… self-control to attend class without behaving in ways that interfere with an instructor’s efforts to teach… Instead of teaching or learning, we are making laws to accommodate and tolerate unacceptable behavior.”

Other followers feared that taking away suspensions would render teachers defenseless and impact the rest of the students, commenting that:

“Kids that disrupt class and can’t be disciplined keep others in the class from learning.”

And that:

“Well-behaved students are punished by the disruptive behaviors of others.”

Perhaps the biggest fear of our followers could be summed up by this comment:

“So kids will learn there are no consequences for bad behavior… soon they will be out of school doing petty crimes and they will learn once again in California there is no consequence for that.”

Fortunately, there are proven alternatives to detentions and suspensions—which is especially critical given the tragic consequences of the disproportionality of school discipline across race lines. Research clearly shows that when teachers learn evidence-based, relational approaches like Collaborative Problem Solving or restorative practices challenging behavior is reduced so teachers can teach and students can learn. All students that is. The students who struggle with their behavior and the ones who are impacted by their behavior. And yes, these students take responsibility for their actions. How so? By being on the hook to solve the problems their behavior is causing. After all, isn’t that the most meaningful consequence there could be? Missing school provides no accountability. The most powerful consequence is one of accountability.

It’s time to focus on providing educators with intensive, high-quality training in alternatives to suspension. Just like our students, who do well if they can, so do educators! We are putting our educators in an impossible situation if we take things away without equipping them with the training and resources they need to do something else.

 


This article originally appeared on Psychology Today.

References

Ablon, JS, Pollastri, AR. The School Discipline Fix: Changing Behavior using Collaborative Problem Solving. New York: Norton; 2018.

Pollastri, AR, Epstein, LD, Heath, GH, & Ablon, JS. The Collaborative Problem Solving approach: Outcomes across settings. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 2013, 21(4), 188-199.

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon

October 19, 2018

Traditional school disciplinary strategies are guilty—guilty of being woefully ineffective and failing kids and educators alike. They aren’t needed for most of the students in our schools, and in a sad irony, they don’t work for the students to whom they are most applied! Research has clearly shown that disciplinary actions actually increase the likelihood of further discipline and are related to higher drop-out rates as well as lower academic achievement and even eventual juvenile justice involvement (APA, 2008).

Despite having learned a lot about the brain in the last few decades, school discipline hasn’t changed much. Sure, we have fancier jargon for describing these strategies, but the basic ideas and interventions are the same. Time-out, detention, suspension, expulsion are all aimed at motivating students to behave better—which ought to work if a lack of motivation is the reason kids are behaving poorly in the first place. But, as I’ve explained in a previous blog, thanks to research in the neurosciences we now know that this conventional wisdom about challenging behavior is flat out wrong. Students who struggle to control their behavior at school don’t lack the will to behave well, they lack the skills to behave well—skills like flexibility, frustration tolerance, and problem-solving. No end of motivational strategies will teach students neurocognitive skills like these that are the reason they are struggling in the first place. I’ve also discussed in a previous blog some of the dangerous side effects of the ineffective disciplinary strategies we use in schools.

As if all this wasn’t enough, guess who suffers the most from traditional school discipline? The most at-risk, misunderstood, and marginalized students, specifically students of color and students with histories of trauma and exposure to chronic stress. Students of color, particularly African-American students, are suspended at disproportionate rates and are on the receiving end of much more severe punishments than their white peers for far less serious behavior (Gilbert & Gay, 1985; Weinstein, Tomlinson-Clarke, & Curran, 2004). They are also punished for more subjective offenses because of something called implicit bias. Caucasian adults are much more likely to perceive the behavior of students of color as angry or threatening. It is absolutely imperative that we implement new approaches to school discipline that address these racially biased misinterpretations of behavior. Fortunately, we are finding that when we teach school staff how to focus on a specific student’s struggles with certain skills as the root of their misbehavior, they are less likely to rely on things like race and socioeconomic status in judging students. In other words, focusing on skill, not will, has the potential to reduce the harmful effects of racial or socioeconomic disparities in school disciplinary practices.

 

Cycle of Chronic Stress

Our schools aspire to be “trauma-informed” or “trauma-sensitive.” Many educators are being trained to understand the impact of chronic stress or trauma on students’ development, behavior, and learning. Educators have far more empathy for how chronic stress and trauma delay brain development, causing lags in skill development which result further downstream in challenging behavior at school. However, these same schools often then rely heavily on punitive school disciplinary strategies for these very students. And let’s be honest here: traditional school discipline is about as trauma-uninformed as it gets! Nowhere in the trauma-informed practice literature have I seen anyone advocating for the use of power and control to manipulate a student’s behavior. Using behavior charts and rewards and consequences is doing just that. Students who exhibit challenging behavior are often the students with trauma histories for whom these interventions not only don’t work, they do damage and make matters worse.

We have referred to this as the vicious cycle of chronic stress and punitive discipline (Ablon & Pollastri, 2018). Punitive discipline adds more chronic stress which further delays skill development resulting in escalating behavior which is then often met by raising the stakes with even more punitive discipline. Systems of escalating consequences are sometimes called “progressive discipline.” When it comes to curbing challenging behavior, those systems are anything but progressive. In fact, I like to refer to them as progressive dysregulation where both the student and the educators become increasingly dysregulated dealing with one another which leads nowhere good. In fact, it has been well documented that dealing with challenging behavior in the classroom is one of the biggest sources of stress for educators which drives talented, young teachers out of the profession just when we need them most.

What’s the good news here? We have the power to interrupt the cycle of chronic stress and trauma. Proven alternatives exist. Instead of adding stress resulting in further delaying skills and escalating behavior, we can buffer stress, build skills and reduce challenging behavior. These alternatives don’t rely on power and control and are restorative rather than punitive. And they are inclusive alternatives that combat, rather than reinforce, racially biased practices.

Schools represent a remarkable opportunity to help our most vulnerable kids. Where else do we have kids the majority of their waking hours, the majority of their youth surrounded by trained, professionals whose goal is to teach them? So, let’s harness that opportunity and bring school discipline into the 21st century. We need a call to action. It is high time we fix school discipline.

 


This article originally appeared in Psychology Today.

References

Ablon, J.S., & Pollastri, A.R, The School Discipline Fix. (2018). Norton: New York, NY.

American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force. (2008). Are zero tolerance policies effective in the schools? An evidentiary review and recommendations. The American Psychologist, 63(9), 852.

Gilbert, S. E., & Gay, G. (1985). Improving the success in school of poor black children. Phi Delta Kappan, 67(2), 133-37.

Weinstein, C. S., Tomlinson-Clarke, S., & Curran, M. (2004). Toward a conception of culturally responsive classroom management. Journal of teacher education, 55(1), 25-38.

The Double Jeopardy of Behavior Bias

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon

September 29, 2020

Our understanding of the causes of challenging behavior often do not flow from science. They flow from bias.

We assume that kids who behave in challenging ways do so on purpose, in order to get or avoid things. Stop anyone on the street and ask them why kids misbehave, and you will likely hear some version of this conventional wisdom. These assumptions are what we might call an explicit or conscious bias. They are explicit because we are fully aware of, endorse and knowingly pass these ideas onto others. And they are a bias because the ideas have been completely disproven by science.

More than half a century of research at this point confirms that people who struggle to control their behavior do not do so purposefully, but rather because they struggle with the skills required to behave better. Skills like flexibility, frustration tolerance, and problem-solving. As I’ve written many times, it’s about skill not will. Countless kids have suffered as a result of this explicit bias about their behavior that leads to carrot and stick approaches which typically don’t work and often make matters worse because they are poorly matched to the actual problem.

Tragically, kids of color who struggle to manage their behavior suffer from double jeopardy when it comes to biases about their behavior. They suffer from both explicit bias that has their behavior misunderstood in the first place and implicit bias borne of racism that has them receive far more punitive responses.

Implicit or unconscious bias is what lurks beneath the surface, often outside of our awareness but causes people of color to be subject to far more frequent and severe discipline for lesser infractions. So kids of color with behavioral challenges are both explicitly and implicitly misunderstood and mistreated.

When we focus on the actual problem—skills struggles, rather than a lack of motivation—we can interrupt these two behavior biases and instead set the stage for relational approaches that help kids build the skills they need to succeed.

It’s high time we begin to listen to science—not bias—to spare kids of color from the double jeopardy of behavior bias.

 


 

This article originally appeared in Psychology Today.

Why change is needed to meet the needs of students exposed to trauma.

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon

I was asked to write a blog post about a recent trend in education for K-12 Talk that I find either exciting or concerning. So, I decided to write about a topic that is both exciting and concerning: the impact of trauma on learning and behavior. I’ve re-created that blog post below.

The School Discipline Fix

 

First the exciting part.

These days, many educators are being trained to understand the impact of chronic stress and trauma on students’ development, behavior, and learning. Schools everywhere are devoting significant professional development time to this topic and prioritizing being “trauma-informed” or “trauma-sensitive.” Thankfully, as a result, educators have far more empathy for how chronic stress and trauma can derail learning and be a primary cause of disruptive behavior in the classroom.

Now the concerning part.

These same schools often still rely heavily on punitive school disciplinary strategies. I recall visiting a school recently where the leadership proudly described their trauma-informed training and then proceeded to show me examples of the behavior contracts they use with their students. These traditional disciplinary strategies (including sticker-charts, time-outs, demerits, detention, suspension, and expulsion) aren’t very successful for the students to whom they are most often applied. Research has clearly shown that such disciplinary actions actually increase the likelihood of further disciplinary measures and are related to higher drop-out rates, as well as lower academic achievement and even eventual juvenile justice involvement (APA, 2008). And to whom are they most often applied? Sadly, to the most at-risk, misunderstood, and marginalized students, including those with histories of trauma and exposure to chronic stress. Students who exhibit challenging behavior are often the students with trauma histories because being exposed to chronic stress or trauma delays brain development, causing lags in skill development which in turn result in challenging behaviors. As a direct result of their trauma, many of these students struggle with skills like flexibility, frustration tolerance, and problem-solving. They don’t lack the will to behave well; they lack the skills to behave well. No wonder traditional school discipline doesn’t work with traumatized students: motivational strategies don’t teach students the neurocognitive skills they lack.

Even more concerning.

Not only do punitive interventions not work with traumatized students, they can do developmental damage and make matters worse. Nowhere in the trauma-informed practice literature have I seen anyone advocate for the use of power and control to manipulate a traumatized student’s behavior. Using behavior charts and rewards and consequences is doing just that. It is leveraging a power differential to increase compliance. Put more simply, traditional school discipline revolves around rewarding students when they do what we want and revoking privileges when they don’t: a toxic dynamic that many traumatized kids are already all too familiar with in their past relationships with adults. In other words, traditional school disciplinary strategies are about as trauma-uninformed and trauma-insensitive as it gets!

There are additional side-effects of this vicious cycle of chronic stress and punitive discipline (Ablon & Pollastri, 2018). When punitive discipline is ineffective, it adds more stress, which further delays skill development, which results in escalating behavior, which is then often met by raising the stakes with even more punitive discipline. Systems of escalating consequences are sometimes called “progressive discipline.” But this is a misnomer: when it comes to curbing challenging behavior, those systems are anything but progressive. In fact, I like to refer to them as “progressive dysregulation,” since both students and educators become increasingly dysregulated, with dire consequences for everyone, including the teachers. Dealing with challenging behavior in the classroom is one of the biggest sources of stress for educators; it drives talented, young teachers out of the profession just when we need them most.

Thankfully there is still good news.

We have the power to interrupt this cycle of chronic stress and trauma. We don’t have to respond to challenging behavior with punitive discipline. Proven alternatives exist. Instead of adding stress that further delays skills and escalates behavior, we can buffer stress, build skills, and reduce challenging behavior in a truly trauma-informed and trauma-sensitive way (Perry & Ablon, 2019). Effective alternatives, such as Collaborative Problem Solving and restorative practices, are relational forms of discipline that do not revolve around the use of power and control.

Schools represent a remarkable opportunity to help our most vulnerable, traumatized kids. Students spend the majority of their waking hours—the majority of their youth—surrounded by trained professionals who are experts in helping kids build skills. So, let’s harness that opportunity and turn trauma-informed principles into concrete, actionable strategies that transform school discipline.

 


References

Ablon, J.S., & Pollastri, A.R, The School Discipline Fix. (2018). Norton: New York, NY

American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force. (2008). Are zero tolerance policies effective in the schools? An evidentiary review and recommendations. The American Psychologist, 63(9), 852.

Perry BD, Ablon JS. (2019) CPS as a Neurodevelopmentally Sensitive and Trauma-Informed Approach. In: Pollastri A., Ablon J., Hone M. (eds) Collaborative Problem Solving. Current Clinical Psychiatry. Springer, Cham

Trying times require trying proven strategies.

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon

Everyone is struggling now. Parents, teachers, kids—we are all feeling incredibly isolated and stressed. Mass dysregulation is perhaps the best way to describe it. The COVID-19 pandemic is leading to escalating conflict in our homes and disturbing rates of abuse across the globe. And the traumatic effects are just beginning.

Responding to the pandemic is demanding extraordinary flexibility, frustration tolerance, and problem-solving skills from us all—much more than we have been accustomed to in our daily lives. Ironically, however, those very skills we need the most right now start to disappear on us under chronically stressful situations like this.

At our program at Massachusetts General Hospital, we specialize in working with people who struggle with flexibility, frustration tolerance, and problem-solving skills. And the good news is that there are a lot of lessons to be learned from that work that can be applied directly to today’s challenges. We can handle this together, but we need to do things differently.

First, we need to think differently. We need to realize that we are all doing the best we can right now under these trying conditions. We need to have extra empathy for each other and ourselves. Remembering our simple mantra can help: People do well if they can.” 

Next, we need to establish new routines and expectations. Many of those involve our kids. Rather than imposing new routines on them, we need to work together with our children to set those new routines, expectations and schedules. By making kids co-authors of their new reality, they will feel control, which is something we all need in the midst of a situation that is very much outside of our control. They will also be much more invested in the plans and routines working out well. When some of these new structures inevitably do not work well, it won’t be our fault as parents and teachers. Rather, we will be in it together with our kids and students.

Finally, when our best-laid plans don’t work out well, we need to avoid the impulse to attempt to restore our sense of control by resorting to power and control. Specifically, we need to avoid doling out rewards and punishments to try to make our kids adhere to those new routines. Instead, we need to engage kids in the problem-solving. Fortunately, we have a proven formula for effective problem solving with stressed individuals where flexibility and frustration tolerance are key:

1. Start by listening first to kids’ perspectives of why something isn’t working. Whether it is online classes, physical distancing, bedtime, the need for exercise, you name it—ask what’s getting in the way. What’s hard for them? If they are struggling to explain, try educated guessing. And if they don’t seem to want to talk at all, reassure them that you value their perspective and really want to understand it.

2. Only once we have a sense of their perspective on the issue, should we can share our perspective on the problem we are trying to solve.

3. Finally, once we understand each other’s stances, invite them to come to the table to brainstorm solutions that will work for all of us. Give them the first chance to craft solutions.

This is a process we call collaborative problem solving for obvious reasons. It is widely considered a way to manage conflict that is sensitive to the issues raised by traumatic events. It has been proven effective in the most chronically stressful situations even with kids with significant struggles with flexibility, frustration tolerance, and problem-solving skills. We know it can be helpful right now. 

Problem-solving like this reduces conflict peacefully, improves relationships, and maximizes skills. Listen first and then invite collaboration, all while trying to maintain empathy for ourselves and others.

These are trying times. Trying times require trying a different way. But let’s try one that we know works.


References

Ablon, JS.Changeable: How Collaborative Problem Solving Changes Lives at Home, at School, and at WorkNew York: Penguin Random House; 2018.

 Ablon, JS, Pollastri, AR. The School Discipline Fix: Changing Behavior using Collaborative Problem Solving. New York: Norton; 2018

Pollastri, AR, Epstein, LD, Heath, GH, & Ablon, JS. The Collaborative Problem Solving Approach: Outcomes Across Settings. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 2013, 21(4), 188-199.

As originally posted in Psychology Today.

Results of a meta-analytic study in the Jan/Feb 2011 issue of Child Development underscore the effectiveness of universal school based social-emotional learning programs targeted towards enhancing children’s social and emotional development. Investigators looked at the cumulative results of 213 school-based programs offered to 270,000 K-12 students.

These school based learning programs were focused on helping students recognize and manage emotions, establish and maintain positive relationships, set and achieve positive goals, make responsible decisions, and handle interpersonal situations effectively and constructively. Investigators found that compared to students in the studies’ control groups, students in the social-emotional learning programs demonstrated: 1) significantly improved social and emotional skills, caring attitudes, and positive social behaviors 2) decreased disruptive behavior and emotional distress and 3) an 11-percentile-point gain on academic achievement tests.

These results are consistent with several core tenets here at Think:Kids–social-emotional skills can be learned and enhanced–it is not the
case that students either have social-emotional skills or they don’t. The links which these results establish between helping students enhance their social-emotional skills and a decrease in disruptive behavior also resonates with our thinking that disruptive behavior is very often the product of underlying skill challenges. Interesting too, in light of the frequent discussion in schools these days about limited resources is  the fact that ALL students were shown to benefit positively from these programs, not just students from selected groups. What would our schools and society look like if well-designed social and emotional learning programs were routinely incorporated for all students into standard educational practice? That being said, we know based on the RtI (response to intervention) model, that not all students respond equally well to universal teaching, and not all students respond equally well to explicit skill training. Some students will need more intensive support for skill-building and will respond to more of an implicit skills training approach. That more intensive support and implicit training is one of the things that the Think:Kids model provides!

It’s only August, but already many families’ minds are turning to back-to-school issues. Certainly this is true for many of the families we see and work to support, given that the stresses of school often contribute greatly to behavioral challenges.  Furthermore, many families contend with ongoing worries about how their school’s discipline practices may impact their child.

A recent story in the Washington Post caught our eye in this regard.  It discusses a large study of Texas schoolchildren showing that nearly identical schools—in terms of student demographics, teacher experience, and a host of other variables—suspended and expelled students at
very different rates.  The article talks about how this “discipline gap” isn’t reflective of, for instance, one school having tougher kids than another, or anything else for that matter, but rather “it’s a choice that schools make.”

Of course, it’s a choice that is not without significant consequences, as the data from this and many other studies indicate that “suspension or expulsion greatly increases a student’s risk of being held back a grade, dropping out, or landing in a juvenile justice system.”

We know that, increasingly, many schools are making a very different choice about how to handle students with behavioral challenges—the audience at our recent Tier 1 Advanced Training was made up predominantly of educators—but much work remains to be done. This fall, as your own child returns to school, do what you can to educate staff at your child’s school about our approach, and see if you can’t help them rethink school discipline practices. And if we can, let us know how we can help!

In our work with behaviorally difficult kids and their caregivers (parents, teachers, milieu staff in hospital or other treatment settings), we are typically helping folks appreciate the role of kids’ lagging thinking skills and how they are implicated in challenging behavior.  An unmet adult expectation is often unmet because the child doesn’t have the skills to meet that expectation, to comply, etc.

One domain of lagging skill that comes up over and over again in most cases is that of executive functioning.  More and more making its way into the popular culture, it’s an umbrella term that refers to a whole host of skills from planning/organizing, time sense/management, working memory, the regulation of attention, impulse control, and other more specific skills.  Of course, one interesting thing here is that it’s now rather well known—and itself gradually becoming a commonplace notion—that the part of the brain responsible for such functioning isn’t done developing, by some estimates, into young adulthood, around about 24 years old!  And we don’t expect very young children to have good executive functioning; rather, we realize we have to do much of the executive thinking for them.

What has struck us of late is the fact that sometimes, when adults are clashing with kids over some particular unmet expectation or unsolved problem, the issue isn’t that the child is showing notably lagging executive skills, but that adults may be asking for a degree of functioning that the child simply can’t be expected to show.  This gets a bit into the world of cultural commentary here, but we live in a busy society, families work hard, there’s a lot to get done, and, to use a personal example from one of our own homefronts, maybe there’s nothing developmentally troublesome about a kid dawdling in the bathtub, and having trouble shifting gears to get onto the rest of the busy nighttime routine.  Maybe it’s not a completely fair expectation that a child move that fast, and it’s not their problem that mom or dad has a night of work still ahead, or the night is very short due to work schedules, or what have you.  It’s not always practical, of course, but maybe sometimes what’s most in point, aside from remediating lagging skills in a child, is recalibrating our own expectations and assessing how realistic our own demands are.

Fortunately, Plan B can still play a helpful role here.  But occasionally it’s useful to step back and ask oneself, “Are my expectations realistic here?”

We were encouraged to read that a state task force in Colorado is looking to put an end to one-size-fits-all school discipline that flows from zero tolerance policies. While the examples provided in the story are clearly egregious, they point out how unlikely it is that zero tolerance policies could address the issues in any specific individual situation. Much research has documented that zero tolerance policies not only don’t make our schools safer, they actually make our schools less safe! But it’s not surprising that zero tolerance policies continue to rear their ugly heads when it comes to school discipline. When we are scared, we run for more of the familiar. In this case, that means more traditional, punitive discipline when ironically what’s needed to ensure everyone’s safety is something very different. We have a saying that goes like this:  the more serious or unsafe the behavior, the more important it is to solve the problem and teach the lagging skills leading to the behavior in the first place. And sadly punitive discipline does neither well. Fortunately, there are alternatives, such as our approach, that focus on solving the problem leading to the unsafe behavior and teaching the skills that are lacking so it doesn’t happen again under different circumstances. You might even call such approaches a “100% Response Policy.”

Yesterday’s New York Times contains a piece sure to stir up a great deal of discussion. It reports on the increasing prescription of stimulant medicines to students struggling academically not necessarily due to a diagnosis of ADHD, but because their needs are not being well met in schools that are themselves often struggling and underfunded.

Leaving aside many of the moral and ethical issues this raises—and one might argue that there are compelling arguments from both sides—what troubles us here at Think:Kids is the notion that schools are so strapped that “other ideas” (that is, non-pharmacological ones), are unlikely to be implemented because they “cost money and resources compared to meds.”

Implementing a new approach to the problems of challenging kids certainly does come with a price tag and a learning curve, and it can seem costly, but not when the potential savings are fully considered. In our part of the country, some students who cannot succeed in the public school system are ultimately placed in out-of-district schools that cost the home school district upwards of $60,000 a year per pupil. Multiply that across a large school district, and even intensive consultation on an evidence-based approach like ours becomes a relatively inexpensive investment, which is likely to reap benefits beyond the one initial student. This is not to mention the dollar cost of the use of restraint and seclusion in schools. Research has shown that programs can save hundreds of thousands of dollars by dramatically reducing restraint and seclusion, which the CPS approach has done time and time again across a variety of settings.

Please help spread the word, and help school districts, legislators, and anyone else who will listen, that rethinking challenging kids, and getting serious about helping them succeed, doesn’t need to be ruled out on financial grounds. The likely benefits far outweigh the potential negative side effects, which in this case are…none!

As every educator knows, implementation of a new program, academic or behavioral, can be a costly endeavor, not only in terms of dollars, but also in terms of time and other resources.  As a result, educators often feel the frustration of being trained in the “latest thing,” only to have the training notebook end up on a shelf gathering dust months later.   Research clearly demonstrates that the typical one-day introductory training, affectionately known as the “train and hope” model, can increase one’s knowledge and skills, but rarely leads to sustainable changes in implementation.  However, adding a coaching component (which typically involves weekly case consultation, modeling, practice, and troubleshooting) can substantially increase the level of implementation (to as much as 75 – 90%  according to Joyce and Showers, 1993).  Of course, adding a coaching component also can add considerable cost.  But does it really?

Recently, when we were conducting a training for the Department of Education in New York City, an audience member raised this very question.  How much does it cost to implement this model in a school or school district in a comprehensive, sustainable manner?  Our response?  Considerably less than it costs to send even one or two challenging students to an intensive out-of-district placement.  According to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the cost of such placements ranges from $32,000/year for a program in a public collaborative, to $51,000/year for a private day program.  Placement in a private residential program can average $105,000/year.  And this doesn’t even include the transportation costs.

Now, to be fair, there are certainly many students who need these more intensive placements.  However, if the implementation of an evidence-based approach such as Collaborative Problem Solving leads to one or two fewer students needing an outside placement, the implementation has more than paid for itself in the first year alone.  And a multi-year implementation project can result in certified, in-house experts who can continue this level of training and consultation in a self-sufficient, self-sustaining manner with little additional outside costs.

If you would like more information about training and consultation cost and availability, please contact us.

At Think:Kids we often wonder who our “clients” are. Are they the kids we serve? Or are they the adults who raise, teach, and help them? Of course, the answer is yes!  This video from our colleagues on the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard could not make a stronger case for CPS and our work. Their theory of change is in fact the strategy we have been using to accomplish our mission. Think:Kids helps adults across settings learn a common philosophy and evidence-based process (that we call Collaborative Problem Solving) to build kids’ executive functioning, emotion regulation and problem solving skills. As Dr. Ablon has focused on in recent trainings with Dr. Bruce Perry of the Child Trauma Academy, the mindset and process of Collaborative Problem Solving also helps fosters co-regulation and builds helping relationships between adults and kids which leads to exactly what the Center on the Developing Child advocates for: a better environment of relationships essential to improving outcomes in kids’ lifelong learning, health, and behavior.

On June 3rd 2013, the White House hosted a day-long conference with experts in mental health and many administration officials to kick off a national conversation about mental health in the United States. Obama spoke about the often sited problem of the prevalence of mental health, and that the stigma associated with having mental health problems prevents adults from sharing their situation, and therefore help is not sought or offered.

At Think:Kids we struggle to get our model to those who need it. There are many kids out there who are behaviorally challenging who don’t get help because parents are embarrassed or ashamed that their child doesn’t behave. They believe their child’s poor behavior is a “mental health problem” and therefore an embarrassment.  We see behavior problems as an issue of skills not necessarily mental health.  Some of the kids we see do wrestle with more classic symptoms of depression and anxiety, but many just struggle with three crucial thinking skills: flexibility, frustration tolerance and problem solving.

Think:Kids believes behaviorally challenging kids lack the skill not the will to behave well.  It is so sad to think that a child suffers and parents suffer and that neither are to blame!  We believe some kids are wired in a way that makes flexibility, frustration tolerance and problem solving hard for them. The result is awful behavior when they are confronted with situations that need those skills.  These skills CAN BE TAUGHT and these lacking skills are not due to poor parenting but simply wiring.  Our model offers a view of poor behavior as a learning disability and like most learning disabilities it is NOT THE FAULT of parent and child but IS something that can improve with the right help

Obama said;

“The brain is a body part too; we just know less about it. And there should be no shame in discussing or seeking help for treatable illnesses that affect too many people that we love. We’ve got to get rid of that embarrassment; we’ve got to get rid of that stigma.” 

We agree.  Parents need to seek help for better ways to cope with the suffering they and their kids experience.  You can help us on the front lines.  Not enough pediatricians and teachers know about Collaborative Problem Solving, how we perceive behaviorally challenging kids and how we can help.  Simply getting these front line folks, who witness or hear about behaviorally challenging kids, to send parents to check out our website can shift the parents’ understanding of their child and make a difference!

You may have seen Sheila Foster’s story covered on Nightline or similar shows recently. Sheila tells the tragic story of how her son, Corey, died while being “restrained” at school. [Read her story here.]

There are a lot of alarming things about this story, including the fact that according to the series of events described by Sheila, restraint protocols were not followed correctly (for instance, typical protocols indicate that physical restraint should be used only to stop a child from hurting himself or others, and only after less restrictive measures have been tried and deemed ineffective; they also instruct those administering the restraint to respond appropriately when a child says he cannot breathe).

In our opinion, though, the problem lies even deeper than this.  The problem lies with the assumption that restraining children is part of an effective “treatment” method. We have all heard providers report that physical restraint “gives children time to calm down safely,” or that it “teaches children that disruptive behavior will not be tolerated.”  And in some cases, we have even heard the assertion that “children feel safer when they are restrained, because they don’t feel so out of control.”

Imagine for just a moment that you are really mad about not being able to do something.  Really, really mad.  So mad that you lose your cool, yell at someone, and slam the door.  Hard.  Now imagine that two people approached you in that moment, physically laid you on the floor, and pinned you there. Would that help you calm down (or might it make you madder)?  Would you feel safer (or would you feel less trusting of your environment)? Would you suddenly have a new insight about how yelling and slamming doors is not a “good choice” (or did you know that already, but have a hard time accessing that information because you were so mad)?

The Collaborative Problem Solving approach gives us the tools we need to identify what skill deficits are getting in the way of a child being able to meet the expectations of his or her environment, and then trains those skills so that the child can better meet those expectations. In the example above, we might notice that you frequently have trouble with emotion regulation, and so we would help you practice responding differently when you’re frustrated. If a child isn’t leaving the basketball court when asked to leave by staff, we might wonder if that child has trouble with (1) transitioning between activities; (2) being flexible enough to share the court; (3) generating ideas of other things he might like to do; or (4) keeping mental track of time told that he could have “15 minutes more.” Taking the time to understand a child’s skill deficits provides you with information on how to intervene when problems arise (and prevent them from occurring in the first place). Most importantly, when staff have other options for intervention, and when they find those interventions working, they will be less likely to resort to the use of physical restraint.

Last week, we had the opportunity to work with more than 5,000 school safety officers and agents from the New York City Police Department (NYPD). Ironically, on the same day that we were training 1,400 agents and officers, a rally was being held on the steps outside the Department of Education’s (DOE) headquarters calling for action to be taken on aggressive policing in the NYC schools. Ironic because we were brought there as a result of a unique partnership between the DOE and the NYPD.

We were privileged to be chosen to train the agents and officers in how better to understand extremely challenging behavior in their schools and what to do about it. We taught agents and officers our three options for handling problems (The Three Plans) and the steps of Collaborative Problem Solving (otherwise known as Plan B). As we did though, we also found our ourselves gaining greater empathy for the NYPD staff with each day as we better understood the challenges they faced in being tasked with keeping everyone safe while also often being brought in to help to enforce school rules. Fortunately, we also found most NYPD staff to agree that how the rules are enforced has a lot to do with whether or not an incident become a true safety issue and even a crime. The clear goal stated from NYPD School Safety Division leadership was to avoid summons and arrests whenever possible as we know they are usually the beginning of ongoing involvement in the juvenile justice system. Of course, we realize that that goal will remain elusive as long as the understanding of why students exhibit challenging behavior remains steeped in conventional wisdom. Together with the 5,000 agents and officers, we worked hard to chip away at conventional wisdom and suggest that what these students really need is in fact the true definition of discipline: to teach. They need officers and agents to have ways to enforce compliance, not via force or consequences but through building relationship and skills and solving problems together. We were thrilled to bring some new ideas to the agents and officers and very appreciative of their feedback and hard work. Stay tuned for next steps!

Can emotional intelligence be taught? This was the topic of a recent article in the New York Times. An interesting debate that of course we have a perspective on. Not only do we think that you can teach social emotional skills, but the process of CPS lends itself perfectly to doing that naturally, that is through a relational process rather than in a formulaic way that understandably has raised criticism in this article. Like any other kind of learning, the more experiential and hands-on it is the more engaged the learner will be. Practicing social emotional skills through the process of solving problems that occur naturally during the course of the day is a far more powerful way to help kids develop skills than more didactic methods for doing so. Of course, like other approaches described in the article, implementing CPS as a vehicle for social emotional learning requires a solid plan with sufficient training and coaching to ensure its done with fidelity and effectively. While CPS is usually called upon to address urgent challenging behaviors at school, when all students and educators practice Plan B we may very well prevent behavioral difficulties from occurring in the first place by making sure that each student gets lots of practice developing their skills.

In his latest article for the New York Times, David Bornstein nicely articulates the effects that trauma, as well as chronic stress have on the behavior and learning of young children. He notes that children are frequently punished for misbehavior that they do not know how to control, which he compares to “punishing a child for having a seizure.”

He goes on to describe efforts across the country in which schools are finding ways to reduce stressors/triggers within a child’s school day, as well as ways to provide strategies for these students to more effectively manage stress.

We at Think:Kids applaud these efforts. And, we would like to see these practices taken one step further.  In addition to unilaterally reducing stressors and providing strategies, we know that involving the student in the problem solving process helps them develop the helping relationships which are crucial for a more positive outcome. Further, proactively problem solving specific unmet expectations, not only helps these students meet these expectations and reduce misbehavior, but it also builds the crucial thinking skills the students need to become self-reliant, independent, healthy adults.

This recent article in the New York Times highlights a positive change that we are seeing in schools across the nation.  Zero tolerance policies have not only been shown to be fairly ineffective, but they also disproportionally impact our students of color.  The vast majority of students who misbehave, particularly the ones that do so over and over, lack the skill, not the will to do better.  We know that punishment-based approaches not only do not teach children the crucial thinking skills which are lagging, but they rarely solve the problem in a durable manner.  The word discipline itself actually means “to teach.”  What should we teach?  Why, skills, of course.  And how can we teach these skills?  By engaging the child in a problem solving process in which we are as invested in hearing the child’s concerns as we are in sharing ours. Although not mentioned in this particular article, we are finding that many schools are beginning to incorporate Collaborative Problem Solving into their alternative disciplinary responses.  As a result, not only are they seeing reductions in disciplinary referrals, but reductions in problematic behaviors AND reductions in teacher stress.  When school staff and students collaborate to solve these problems, everybody wins.

 

 

Student background

Felix is a 10 year old 5th grade Native American male student. Felix has a physical disability that causes him to miss school for medical appointments. He is an empathic student. Sensitive about his own disability, he recognizes suffering in others more easily. Felix has few friends, but is close to them as well as his four or five cousins. Felix is quiet, but responds to questions after careful thought. Felix possesses excellent problem solving skills and came up with solutions after I gave him the invitation. Felix is a lover of animals and recognizes the reciprocal power of the human-animal bond. Felix is highly intelligent, articulate and could potentially be a “Gifted and Talented” student, but poor attendance has precluded this official identification. Felix relies on his mother to organize his things before school, to see him off to bed and to wake him up in the morning, but this year, family stressors have taken mom away from home significantly more, particularly on Sundays and Wednesdays.

Reflection

Attendance has been a concern for school officials since Felix’s Kindergarten year. The person who held my job before was not a social worker and practiced “Plan A” approaches like threatening social services and court involvement to no avail if a student’s attendance remained poor. Historically, school attendance and western time-keeping/promptness for Felix’s family have not been of great cultural value.

The past power struggles between school officials and Felix’s mom have left her reluctant to deal with the school. Mom missed two appointments we had set up and would not respond to messages I left on her phone. With patience and persistence, and nearly a month after starting to reach out to her, I was able to meet with her. I found a neutral territory to meet as the principal’s office seemed to put mom off.

We met for nearly two hours. Instead of threatening mom or starting off the conversation with the school’s concerns, I listened to what was going on in her and her family’s life. Recent deaths and health problems had put a lot of stress on the family.

Mom told me that since this last summer she needed to be away from Felix a few days out of the week and late into the night, whereas before she was with him most of the day outside of school and was always at home at night to put Felix to bed. This separation was taking some getting used to. Felix has had to take up more responsibility and has been struggling to go to bed at night. Mom would get home sometimes around midnight on Sundays and Wednesdays and find Felix still up and not having any of his stuff ready for school the next day. Mom would manage to get Felix to bed, but often would be too tired to help him get his stuff prepared for school and would not fight him the next morning when Felix kept hitting snooze or sleeping through his alarm.

I easily empathized with mom because I myself have been adjusting to getting my own son ready for Head Start, as his mom is starting a new job; change is draining, and as it turns out, neither mom, nor Felix or I are rise and shine types. We would rather stay in bed on these chilly fall mornings.

Felix’s mom had found herself in “Plan A” attendance conversations before, and was quite familiar with the school’s attendance policies and consequences for missing. I think this was why she had dodged me for so long. Fortunately, in the time I was waiting to meet her, I had gathered enough information about Felix so that my stated concerns were less about legal consequences and more about some specific academic and social impacts of Felix’s poor attendance. His teachers are impressed with how Felix manages to keep up his grades despite his absences; they think he is very bright and probably a student who would test as “gifted and talented” if he didn’t miss so much.

I also told mom that I saw Felix coming into class one morning looking very tired and was unresponsive to his teacher’s questions about math facts that she was sure he knew. His teacher said this was becoming more common and that they noticed Felix looked embarrassed when she or others, including students, asked about how his mornings were going. Felix simply shrugged his shoulders when I had asked him how his morning was going when I observed him in class that day. I told mom what I had observed and relayed the teacher’s concerns, including how Felix’s tardiness was becoming a distraction to her and others in the classroom.

Mom appreciated the concerns I mentioned. No one had told her before that Felix could possibly get the official designation of being “gifted and talented,” but this was not shocking either; she knows how bright he is. His mom expressed how she would like Felix to get ahead in school and not play catch up. She also apologized for the distractions Felix’s tardiness may be causing.

When I asked mom if she had any ideas on how we could solve this problem, she thought for a while and said maybe it would be a good idea if Felix stayed with his cousins and Auntie on Sundays and Wednesdays. Felix’s Auntie is sterner and has her own kids in bed by 8 and to school on time the next day. I checked on the cousin’s attendance and they had only missed a couple of days and were never late. Mom’s idea seemed pretty solid and I told her I would still like to meet with Felix and hear some of his concerns and ideas too. Mom said she didn’t have time to meet with Felix and me, but would love it if I would talk to him alone. I said the next day would be great and asked if she would give him a heads up and summarize for him what she and I had discussed. She happily agreed and we parted ways.

The next day I met with Felix and it was probably the easiest Plan B I had with a student so far this year. He had talked to his mom the night before and was thrilled at the prospect of staying with his cousins regularly. I asked him what was up with his attendance and he told me how hard it had been with his mom being away so much more these days. Felix plays Xbox late into the night, instead of getting homework done and preparing himself for school the next day. Felix likes to hit the snooze button many times and sometimes his alarm stops. Mom tries waking him up every morning, but does not fight him when he tells her to come back later and let him sleep. When Felix does wake up, he likes to spend some time with his cat before leaving his house and does not like eating breakfast until he has been awake for a couple of hours.

I told Felix I too have a hard time getting up in the morning, but that it helps me get out of bed when I think of how embarrassed I would feel if I showed up late. I mentioned the morning I had observed him coming in late and asked him if he felt embarrassed that day and if he thought that might be distracting to other students and his teacher. Felix said it was pretty upsetting to come to school late, but that it was still too hard to get up in the morning on his own. He said his Auntie would make sure he gets to school. I said that was a great idea and asked him if he had thought of any other ideas, since he wasn’t going to be staying with his Auntie on Mondays, Tuesdays or Thursdays. We agreed that his attendance was a problem on any given day of the week.

What happened next was surprising for a couple of reasons. Firstly, when I have offered the invitation to most students, they do a lot of shoulder shrugs. Like Lost at School suggests, students are more used to having adults assert their will and not consider the student’s unresolved problems, concerns or possible solutions. Because power struggles are more common, many of us do not have ample opportunities to develop some of our cognitive abilities.

Felix, however, has some pretty solid skills, and he demonstrated these when he said, “Maybe my cat can help.” We had talked earlier about our mutual love for animals and Felix had recalled that discussion and was now suggesting that his mom’s struggles to get him out of bed in the morning would be made easier if she just sent the cat into the room early in the morning to claw at Felix’s chest. The cat would jump on Felix sleeping sometimes, and her purring and clawing would always get him out of bed. Felix had not shared this with his mom before. I instantly fell in love with the idea and I hope I didn’t scare Felix with my excitement. This Plan B stuff had become rather fun.

The second reason what happened surprised me is that it actually appears to be working! I guess dealing with attendance for the last year has left me apathetic.  It’s been over a month now and Felix has only been absent two days due to a documented medical reason. And he hasn’t been late at all!

The relationship piece I believe has been crucial to Plan B’s success. Normally, I like to give positive phone calls to parents when I see any kind of improvement, but with Felix’s mom, I have been on the receiving end of the calls. She called me the day after we met to say how awesome her and Felix’s plan was working. I was excited too, but knew it was only the first day. But then, she sent me a text that read, “Yeah! We made it a whole week!” This was followed by similar messages in the coming weeks, and the last one read, “Yeah! A whole month!”

Of course, I told Felix personally how happy and pleased I was with his efforts, and I implored him, “Please thank your cat, too!

Usually when you send your child to school you don’t expect to get a call to head to the emergency room.  A recent article in The Wall Street Journal, “Parents Protest Emergency Calls” writes about a group of New York City parents who are taking legal action to prevent public schools from using the ER to cope with their child’s severe temper tantrum.  The article states that more than 22% of the 15,130 calls for ambulances placed by NYC schools in 2011-12 were related to disciplinary infractions.  Wow, that’s a huge  number of kids (3,329 to be precise) ending up in the ER for “bad behavior”.  The attorney representing the parents feels that schools are using hospital ER’s as time out rooms.  For example, a parent says one time her son was taken to the ER for “not listening and refusing to sit on the rug.”  The attorney says the law states that “children can be transported by EMS ONLY when a child’s life is at stake or it’s clear that a small delay will jeopardize the child’s health.”

The problems are numerous with this “behavior management approach.”  It’s costly to the city, it’s hugely time consuming for parents, it threatens job security for parents, and it causes all sorts of psychological damage to the child.  The article quotes a mother who says her son is now afraid of hospitals, police officers and doesn’t want to go to school. Can you blame him?  And even more troubling to us at Think:Kids is “he feels like he is always a bad kid and he’s always in trouble.”  We aspire to help kids, parents and teachers understand the lagging skills and teach them so kids don’t have the sense they are all bad and that they are stuck in this punishment loop which leads to school failure and often severe psychological problems such as anxiety and depression.

Two questions arise; are children, preschoolers in New York City, becoming more violent, unmanageable and dangerous causing the rise in ER visits or are teachers receiving poor or little training in managing disruptive behavior?  At Think:Kids we feel it is the latter and see a huge opportunity for the Department of Education to help teachers better understand and identify why kids melt down.

For Think:Kids we see this as a huge opportunity for better training of teachers. The first step has been taken!   The New York City School Safety officers who work in the schools have a contract with Think:Kids, and are receiving CPS training on just the sort of issues that land kids in ER’s.  Hopefully, teachers will want to join in and learn a better way to manage tough kids in their class rather than hitting 9-1-1.

Recently, the media (NBC, Today, The Wall Street Journal, NPR) has highlighted a quick and colorful way for teachers and parents to track student behavior through an online program. When we heard about it at Think:Kids we were intrigued.  For teachers and parents short on time (who isn’t?), with many expectations they need their child or student to meet (who doesn’t?) a method to get a child to successfully comply is really appealing (who wouldn’t want that?). So we checked it out.  Here is the scoop from our perspective.

It’s nothing new – it is classic behavior management – but it is packaged really well. Class Dojo can be found and signed up for anywhere you have internet, it has easy steps to follow to get it running on your computer at home and in the classroom.  Its catchy in that each child gets to design a little avatar to represent themselves. Students get points by the teacher for doing things like handing in homework helping another student, raising his hand, cleaning up his work space, keeping eyes at the front of the room.  You lose a point for things like interrupting, not following instructions, talking during class. It’s just like a classis sticker chart but online and much glossier.

Here is our big concern.  Some kids have the skills to follow this type of program and can easily add points to their onscreen Avatar thus feeling good about themselves by the end of the day.  However, there are many kids who don’t have the skills to earn the points – plenty of desire to do well amongst their peers – but if the skill isn’t there then they can’t win the points.  For example, the child who never has their homework for the night before may actually struggle with organizational challenges and until those specific skills are taught she won’t get the point next to her cute avatar.  So no matter how much she wants to get points for handing in homework she can’t do it. This then leads to other problems such as the child feeling poorly about themselves, resentful of school, and perhaps angry.

Another concern is it’s all public.  The computer screen is visible in the front of the room for all the kids to see so as the teacher enters a point or takes away a point it lights up next to the student’s avatar.  There is an option to keep it private but many teachers don’t use it that way. Teachers are relying on peer pressure to get students to behave/comply. If you had frustration tolerance issues might this be a problem for you? How humiliating if you keep losing points.  How shameful will it feel if the class needs a total of 20 points to get an extra recess and you are the kid unable to make transitions easily and you lose all the points for the class?  The only way those transitions will get better is if you are taught the skills you need to manage them – losing points just won’t get the job done.

Finally, shouldn’t kids be focused on their learning experience and less on outward motivators to make them comply?  Don’t we want our kids to do well because they care about learning or are excited to get to the next class, or are looking forward to music or can’t wait for that game at recess?  Shouldn’t those be the reasons kids behave well rather than to gain a point or lose a point?  The overall controlling micromanaging incentivizing shaming feels wrong to us.

There is renewed interest in the effects of chronic, overwhelming stress and trauma on children’s development. So-called trauma-informed care is emphasized more than ever. Yet, parents, educators, clinicians, mental health workers and law enforcement alike still struggle to understand the impacts of trauma on brain development in a concrete and tangible way. Perhaps even more so, adults trying to help these children and adolescents long for concrete strategies that operationalize what brain science tells us will be helpful to facilitate development arrested as a result of complex developmental trauma.

The Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT) and Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS). NMT is a developmentally sensitive, neurobiology‐informed approach to clinical problem solving. NMT is an evidence‐based practice and not a specific therapeutic technique or intervention. It is an approach that integrates core principles of neurodevelopment and traumatology to aid in the selection and sequencing of therapeutic, educational and enrichment activities that match the needs and strengths of the individual. CPS offers an evidence‐informed approach to assist parents, teachers and mental health providers identify children’s skill deficits that lead to challenging behaviors. It helps adults teach children flexibility, problem solving, and emotion regulation skills.

Learn more about NMT here

Learn More about CPS here

 

Congratulations to our colleagues, Drs. Holmes, Stokes, and Gathright, for their publication of a case series describing their use of Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) on an inpatient unit with children who have experienced complex trauma. We have been focusing a lot lately on the applications of CPS to treating traumatized children thanks to our collaboration with Dr. Bruce Perry and the Child Trauma Academy. In many ways, CPS operationalizes what trauma-informed care is intended to be:

The authors of this recent paper also emphasize that CPS provides a common philosophy, language and process with clear, replicable guidelines that can be used by non-mental health professionals as well (teachers, foster parents etc.) – a rarity amongst clinical approaches for working with traumatized children. The benefit of course is that when children like the ones they described working with leave the hospital there can be seamless transitions and continuity of care.

 

Clinical settings have aspired to provide what is referred to as trauma-informed care for some time now. We are glad to see other types of programs and systems doing the same. For example, schools are filled with children who exhibit chronic challenging behavior as the direct result of having been exposed to toxic overwhelming stress or trauma. As this article in the Times suggests, traditional school discipline is poorly suited to helping such children but there are other trauma-informed methods that are effective.

Later this week in our conference featuring Dr Ablon and Dr Bruce Perry, we will explore how Collaborative Problem Solving operationalizes trauma-informed care across all kinds of settings. When we use Dr Perry’s work to help schools understand how chronic stress (such as loss, living in poverty, abuse, neglect) arrests brain development, we find educators are better able to understand the behavior and respond empathically to it. In other words, there are well positioned to use CPS.
There is still time to join us this week to learn more!

Last week, Think:Kids hosted Bruce Perry, MD, of the Child Trauma Academy  for a joint training on how brain development is affected by trauma, and how the Collaborative Problem Solving approach addresses these neurobiological deficits. Dr. Perry and Dr. Ablon spoke for two days about the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT) and Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS), and attendees walked away with a better understanding of tools that can be used to assess and address challenging behavior in children affected by trauma.

One phrase that has stuck with me from this training, and that can be a helpful anchor for all of us when we are working with challenging children, is “Regulate, Relate, Reason.” The order here is critical! Until a child is regulated (i.e., feeling physically and emotionally settled), he is unlikely to be able to relate to you (i.e., feel connected and comfortable). And until a child is related, he is unlikely to have the mental capacity to fully engage with you in the higher level cognitive processes that are critical for problem-solving, like perspective taking, predicting the future, and considering multiple solutions. This is not just true for traumatized children, but for all children (and all adults too)! So in honor of Dr. Perry, let’s pay special attention this week to our CPS regulating tools (reflecting and reassurance) during all three ingredients of our Plan B conversations. If you take the time to make sure your child is regulated, you’ll have a better chance of relating, and then ultimately, a better chance of reasoning!

You may know that many therapeutic schools and psychiatric settings seclude and/or restrain children for the purposes of de-escalation and regaining behavioral control.

“Seclusion” typically refers to the removal of an individual into a specifically designated space used for de-escalation (e.g., a small bare room with padded walls), while “restraint” encompasses a range of interventions by staff member including holding a child’s arms and legs, or use of special tools such as straps, in order to restrict the movement of the child. According to data released from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, 107,000 kids were subjected to physical restraint or were confined to seclusion rooms in schools during the years 2011 and 2012.

Some purport that these interventions are necessary and humane, however, evidence increasingly suggests that restraint and seclusion can be physically and psychologically dangerous as well as costly to agencies. A thorough investigation by the Government Accountability Commission in 2009 found hundreds of complaints of abuse and death caused by negligent use of restraint procedures in schools and pediatric residential treatment facilities, suggesting that there are small but grave risks when physical restraints are performed irresponsibly. Additionally, even when restrictive interventions are performed consistent with safety protocols, patients often report that they are psychologically harmful and aversive. This is particularly true for children and adolescents who have experienced prior trauma.

For a long time, restraint and seclusion were considered the only option if a child’s behavior was “out of control.” As eloquently said by Connecticut Child Advocate Sarah Egan, J.D. in this interesting New England Psychologist article, “They had the hammer and nail approach, not because they were evil but those were the tools they had and so that’s what they used.”

There is a lot of buzz about restraint and seclusion in schools these days because Sen. Tom Harkin (D – IA) and Rep. George Miller (D – CA) have introduced the federal Keeping All Students Safe Act (S. 2036/H.R. 1893) that would ban the use of restraints and seclusion in schools except in cases of clear physical danger.

The New England Psychologist article does a nice job of describing one reason why this issue is complicated: Current definitions and reporting practices of schools vary widely between states and between schools and agencies. Enacting federal legislation across such a heterogeneous system is bound to be very messy.
Another complication that we have been talking about at Think:Kids is this one: It can be very destabilizing to take away one tool without giving schools and agencies another tool to use in its place. If we ask a school to stop restraining and secluding children without teaching staff what else they can do to achieve their intended goals, we can expect mayhem. That’s why we suggest that schools begin acting NOW to think about other ways to de-escalate children and regain behavioral control (or even better, prevent escalation from occurring in the first place).

In 2011, DeHert and colleagues published a paper reviewing four interventions that successfully reduced rates of restraint and seclusion in youth settings. These interventions included a model of strength-based care, a behavioral therapy oriented management program, introduction of a padded room (in this case, they replaced restraint with seclusion), and adoption of the Collaborative Problem Solving approach. Averaging across these four interventions, occasions of restraint were reduced 93%, and occasions of seclusion were reduced 75%. As you can see, Collaborative Problem Solving is not the only way, but it is one way. Talk to us if you want more information.

A final note about the fate of the Keeping All Students Safe Act

Both sponsors of the bill, Sen. Harkin and Rep. Miller, are retiring from congress in 2014. In their absence, advocates are concerned that it will likely be difficult to get this legislation introduced and passed in future sessions. Staff members of both the Senate and House committees agree that it’s critical that concerned parents, advocates, educators and the public let their congresspeople know how they feel about the use of restraints and seclusion in schools and the importance of the Keeping All Students Safe Act. Without that groundswell of support, they say, the bill is likely to die. You can find the phone numbers for your senators and representative here.

Often times in our workshops, when we discuss the limitations of external motivators, we get a common question. It goes something like this: “But the world works on external motivators. After all, I go into work because I get a paycheck. Incentives ARE motivating. So, why shouldn’t we be doing the same thing with our children?” Well, it turns out that the truth is a bit more complicated, and that incentives can actually have negative repercussions under certain conditions. Watch this short clip from Dan Pink to learn more about when incentives may actually make things worse (we’ll give you a hint – think about our Thinking Skills Inventory) and what actually motivates people to do well.

The Impact of Trauma on Brain Development and What to Do About it

There is renewed interest in the effects of chronic, overwhelming stress and trauma on children’s development. Trauma-informed care is emphasized more than ever. Yet, parents, educators, clinicians, mental health workers and law enforcement alike still struggle to understand the impacts of trauma on brain development in a concrete and tangible way. Perhaps even more so, adults trying to help these children and adolescents long for user friendly and accessible strategies that operationalize what brain science tells us will be helpful to facilitate development arrested as a result of complex developmental trauma.

Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) is a practical, evidence-based process that all adults can follow in any setting to ensure trauma-informed intervention. CPS has been used effectively across systems to provide concrete strategies that operationalize fundamental principles of neurodevelopment.

Specifically, CPS first helps adults understand how children exposed to chronic overwhelming stress and trauma do not lack the will to behave well, they lack the skills to behave well. CPS helps adults understand how toxic stress and trauma arrests brain development by identifying the specific skills they children lack in areas like flexibility, frustration tolerance and problem solving. Then CPS provides clear guideposts for adults to use in order to engage children in problem solving discussions which build helping relationships with the children while fostering a relational process that develops flexibility, problem solving, and emotion regulation skills. All the while, CPS avoids the use of power an control which is re-traumatizing and instead aims to help reduce the power differential which traumatized children find so dysregulating.

The latest neuroscience research has shown that facilitating brain change is not about erasing old associations in the brain resulting from trauma, but about creating new associations in the brain – in other words, new neural pathways. Exposing children repeatedly to small, digestible doses of novel experiences with a different, more positive emotional quality to them creates these pathways. The challenge is that the brain processes information from the bottom up. So with traumatized children, one must help regulate them at the level of the brainstem before you can engage their limbic system to relate to them and finally then teach them the kind of higher order problem-solving skills that are located at the level of the prefrontal cortex or top of the brain. The CPS process respects this awareness of the sequence of engagement at the level of the brain by recruiting the brainstem first, then the mid-brain and finally the cortex. It begins by teaching adults how to help children stay regulated through the use of empathic listening and curiosity. Once a child is regulated, CPS then helps the adult relate to the child by sharing their adult concerns. Finally, the child is then asked to reason with the adult to collaborate and brainstorm solutions. The entire process is built to help adults expose children to these small, digestible doses of “good stress” needed to foster brain change.

Dr. Ablon was asked to participate in NAMIs' Ask the Doctor program. Click below to listen to a recording of Dr. Ablon introducing the approach and then taking questions from parents and clinicians.

Check out this great article from Dan Siegel whose work resonates with ours, He presents a neurobiological argument for an alternative to time-out. Trouble is most of us parents would love to do something else … but don’t know what. This is especially true in the heat of the moment when the child is likely not the only one getting dysregulated and having a hard time thinking straight! Dysregulation is contagious and we parents do well if we can, but we too can get awfully dysregulated quickly in the face of our child’s meltdowns.
The good news? The ingredients of Plan B provide a simple and clear stricture for what to do and say during a “time-in.” And in the heat of the moment reassurance and reflective listening are your best bet to help regulate your child so that they will be available for a teachable moment.

 

Back in May, we blogged about a possible federal ban on seclusion and restraint in schools. (See that post, which includes a lot of information about why this initiative is important, by clicking here.)

We are thrilled to see that changing regulations related to seclusion and restraint is getting both federal and state attention.

In fact, in Think:Kids’ home state of Massachusetts, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) is proposing changes to state regulations related to seclusion and restraint. And the Department of Education (DOE) wants to hear what you think.

This process couldn’t be easier: Take a look at the regulations on this page; you can see a version with proposed edits included. Then e-mail comments (including simple comments of support for the changes) to: restraintcomment@doe.mass.edu.

Move quickly- The deadline for submission of public comment is Monday, November 3, 2014.

Please send your comments, then spread the word to student advocates, friends, and family members through social media. Let them know that restraint and seclusion are ineffective for solving problems durably, and can be traumatic and physically harmful to children. Encourage others to send in their comments to support and strengthen the proposed regulations too. Together we can make a difference!

“My daughter avoids her weekend chores by sleeping the whole weekend away; I can’t get her up before noon!”

“My son stays up ‘til all hours playing video games or texting his friends, then can’t wake up for school in the morning! I end up having to yell and threaten him just to get him out of bed.”

It’s easy to think that your teenager is being lazy or just plain defiant when he or she stays up late and then can’t get up in the morning. However, the recent policy statement about teen sleep that was issued in August by the American Academy of Pediatrics reminds us that teens are biologically wired to go to bed and wake up later. This issue is getting increasing national attention, like in this NY Times feature, and the take-home message is this: Around the time of puberty, there is a shift in human circadian rhythm that makes it harder -and sometimes biologically impossible- to fall asleep early enough to meet recommended sleep hours in time for typical high school start times.

These difficulties may be exacerbated if your teen also struggles with other executive functioning skills such as difficulty planning ahead (“I know it’s hard for me to get to sleep by 11, so I’m going to put all my electronics away by 10,”) and difficulty switching gears (“I’m working on this project now, but I can stop now and then start again after school tomorrow”).

So what are the results of this? Many teens drag themselves out of bed, slump to school, and nod off through the first couple classes. Others, including some of the adolescents we work with at Think:Kids, find it impossible to get to school on time and end up engaging in frequent morning-time battles with parents.

The good news is that there is a national movement to consider later start times for high school students. This movement is picking up steam, and now includes schools in the Boston area, near the home of Think:Kids.

But if your child’s school isn’t making the switch to start later, remember the mantra: Skill not Will. If you are having morning-time struggles with your teen, consider his or her biology, consider what other skill struggles may be exacerbating the issue, and then try to work with your teen to problem-solve it together.

And don’t forget… wait to have that conversation until you’re both fully awake!

Here at Think:Kids, we have been an active part of the effort to reduce, if not eliminate, the use of restraint and seclusion in schools and other institutional settings for well over a decade. Our approach, Collaborative Problem Solving, was implemented as the model of care at Cambridge Health Alliance’s child and adolescent inpatient units in 2000, with great success. Since then, it has become a treatment model and a discipline model in a range of child, adolescent, and even adult settings. And we are delighted that there has been particular growth of interest in the model in schools, where children of course, spend the majority of their waking hours!

We, therefore read with great excitement news of changes to the rules that govern restraint and seclusion in Massachusetts schools.

While there is still a long way to go to help schools think differently about students with challenging behavior, this is an important step in the right direction.

For further reading on the subject click here .

 

For several years I had thought about implementing the Collaborative Problem Solving approach at Brown School, but I could never find traction to get the initiative rolling. A host of conventional thoughts prevented me from getting started; I don’t have the budget, my teachers are far too busy already, all that darn testing, how can we possibly find the time? In the spring of 2013, my school counselor attended the Collaborative Problem Solving all day workshop at a conference. She returned energized about a common sense, empathic approach to helping children solve problems. Her energy made me think of the old proverb, “The best time to plant and oak is thirty years ago. The next best time is, now.” In August of 2013 the faculty and staff of Brown School in Natick, Massachusetts began the Collaborative Problem Solving Journey.

For CPS to take hold in the school I knew I had to lead the initiative. I didn’t want the faculty and staff to think that this is an approach only for mental health professionals. I have taken several steps to demonstrate my commitment to CPS and how it could improve teaching and learning at Brown. First, Dr. Larry Epstein conducted a three hour training to begin the school year. He gave a comprehensive presentation that was energetic and engaging for the audience. Afterward, the faculty commented how valuable the training was for starting the school year. I reassured the staff that we would work on developing our CPS skills as the demand presented itself. In other words, “Don’t worry. I will help you with this initiative (reassurance).”

Later that year I attended the three day level one training with my school psychologist and guidance counselor. The training provided us the the structure and confidence we needed to begin making some deep attempts at CPS. We decided to give it a try. If our first attempts didn’t turn out so well, we would try again. That entire spring we worked with faculty and students using CPS to solve problems. We brought our learning back to the faculty and committed thirty minutes to every faculty meeting learning more about CPS.

It wasn’t long before an interesting dynamic began to happen. As teachers observed us working with students collaboratively, they began to ask more questions. Soon we were observing and coaching teachers while they worked on solving problems with students. It became more common for me to cover a teacher while she worked with a student on a problem.

At the same time I noticed that I was using CPS for difficult situations with adults. I quickly learned, “Adults will do well if they can!” It was amazing to experience the change in adult behavior when two people took the time to listen to each other. I once read a quote that said, “Are you listening to understand or listening to respond?” That quote has remained embedded in my thoughts and is present every time I sit down to have a difficult conversation. The beauty of CPS is; if you listen for understanding, your response has a much greater chance of making a difference.

Another way that CPS has impacted our school is in the child study process for academic, social, and emotional supports. Our conversations have shifted to identifying the lagging skill of the child and designing interventions that directly impact the lagging skills. Conventional talk has reduced and creative solutions for building skills has increased. The number of IEP referrals has dropped dramatically and I have only had six referrals from parents for special education in the last two years. Our IEP rate for students receiving learning center support has dropped to below 5%.

If principals really want to prepare their students and teachers for a new age then they need to teach them the problem solving skills that will help them solve problems that don’t exist today. I encourage all principals start Collaborative Problem Solving in their school NOW! Don’t wait thirty years.

Kirk Downing
Assistant Superintendent, Natick Public Schools, [former Principal, Brown Elementary School] Natick, MA

A core part of our mission here at Think:Kids is to help schools rethink discipline, and to offer them a detailed approach to implement to achieve this goal.  We’re glad that we’re not alone in trying to facilitate and lead this mindset-shift.  Take a look at this article about work being done in some California schools toward this end, which sounds very promising.

There are many good suggestions offered to staff that are described in this piece, and it’s exciting to see the tide turning against the conventional wisdom about challenging kid.  That said, we think that these efforts take hold most firmly when what is involved is a comprehensive approach to thinking about the underlying contributors to maladaptive behavior, and when staff have a overarching model to guide their efforts.

Let us know what you think!

Jordan Spikes

What a powerful ending to 2-1/2 days of intensive training.

The day was winding down. We had just met as groups to discuss the challenges we all will face when trying to implement the Collaborative Problem Solving model into our systems of care. By now we had spent nearly 20 hours together—all 100 of us—and thoughts were starting to shift toward traveling home and returning to work the following day. A young man respectfully called for the floor and offered a few words of encouragement to the group.

He stated that he knew we were going to face challenges from here on out, but that we should be encouraged to fight past those obstacles. He then made a statement that silenced the room and will likely stick with everyone in attendance for a very long time: “Plan B saved my life.”

He shared that he was once a “Kyle”—one of the fabricated individuals with challenging behaviors we trainers use to practice the model—and that he was headed toward incarceration if it hadn’t been for the one adult who took that extra step and reached out to ask him what was going on–modeling true empathy and a desire to understand his situation without judgment.

He went on to say that although we might not see the fruits of our labors immediately—or even ever—that one question posed to him had changed his life around for the better, and it can do the same for others. He’s now looking to pay it forward, and is excited to use the skills he practiced over the course of the training to be that person who reaches out to those youth with extremely challenging behaviors; providing them with a life-line of empathy and understanding.
I felt honored to have him share his story with us. He demonstrated great courage and vulnerability, and his words will stick with me and motivate me as I continue to spread the word that “Kids do well if they can.”

It was pretty incredible to hear the story first-hand. There was another young guy that I was near when the trainee was sharing his story, and afterward the other guy jokingly said, “Hey, I don’t come to these things to cry.”

This NBC News report on calm rooms featuring Dr. Ablon stating that there are “proven alternatives.”

WARNING: This video may be disturbing to some viewers.

Jessica Lahey’s January 13th Parenting Blog post in the New York Times is an excellent example of what we call “conventional wisdom,” the common belief that when kids aren’t meeting our expectations, they are just trying to avoid something or get something. We get this message all the time, and it can make both kids and parents feel incapable.

At Think:Kids, we are trying to push parents, educators, and helping professionals to think more deeply about those situations in which a child isn’t doing what we asked.  The child described in the article could do laundry last week but suddenly is jabbing at buttons and wailing that it is “too hard…” Could he have actually forgotten the order of buttons and need a patient refresher? Could he be nervous or distracted about tomorrow’s test, and this task, menial to you but new to him, suddenly seems overwhelming today? We contend that no child would choose to wail, flail arms, and be thought incompetent by his parents if he had the ability to meet the expectation calmly and competently.  Research indicates that kids (and all of us!) seek autonomy, competence, and good relationships with others… In short, kids do well if they can!

A refreshing voice among the others in this article, Dr. Bryson calls for some perspective-taking and flexibility in cases like this.  Kudos, we say!  So how do we do that?  One way is with Plan B. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this article, whether you agree or disagree; feel free to post them to our Facebook page.

Why is it so hard to change problem behavior—in our kids, our colleagues, and even ourselves?

The answer is actually quite simple. Our understanding of how to change problem behavior comes from our understanding of why the problem behavior exists in the first place. And our explanation for why people behave poorly is typically wrong! When someone doesn’t behave or perform as we would like them to, our default assumption is that they must not be trying very hard; they just don’t want it badly enough. This is true whether we are talking about a child in our home or school, our friend, relative, or partner, an employee whom we manage, or even a professional athlete on our favorite team. As a result, when people fail to meet our expectations, we typically respond with incentives intended to make them try harder in the future. Unfortunately, these conventional methods often backfire, creating a downward spiral of resentment and frustration, and a missed opportunity for growth.

But what if people don’t misbehave because of a lack of desire to do better, but because they lack the skills to do better? What if changing problem behavior is a matter of skill, not will?

Interestingly, neuroscience research has shown for decades now that people who struggle to meet others’ expectations (and even their own!) have challenges with specific thinking skills. It is time to listen to this research and accept the fact challenging behavior is the result of a lack of skill, not willskills in areas like flexibility, frustration tolerance, and problem-solving.

For the last 20-plus years, I have been teaching an approach called Collaborative Problem Solving to parents, teachers, clinicians, managers, and entire organizations interested in behavior change. The approach is predicated on the simple philosophy that skill, not will, determines behavior. I have had the opportunity to work with some of the toughest settings to try to change some of the most challenging behavior, and I have seen firsthand how powerful and effective this shift in mindset is. The simple but powerful skill, not will philosophy puts us in a far more compassionate and helpful place as a parent, teacher, friend, partner or manager. And the good news is that skills can be taught! We’ve shown that by practicing problem-solving skills, as opposed to resorting to incentives and punishments, you can improve just about anyone’s behavior. So the next time someone’s behavior frustrates you, remind yourself that we are all doing the best we can to handle what life is throwing at us. And if we aren’t handling it well, it’s probably more about skill than will. In fact, people who struggle with these skills are likely trying harder than anyone else to behave themselves—because it doesn’t come naturally to them.

I’m excited to announce the arrival of my new book, Changeable,which starts shipping June 5th! In the book, I review the research behind this way of understanding challenging behavior and describe the simple and remarkably effective framework that Collaborative Problem Solving provides for helping anyone in your life (even yourself!) build skills related to flexibility, frustration tolerance, and problem-solving. I describe my experience applying the approach in some very tough settings, including state psychiatric hospitals for chronically mentally ill adults, prisons, residential treatment centers working with traumatized youth, and with police officers working in schools in the poorest congressional district in the United States. Regardless of setting, the basic tenets of the approach are the same. I then detail the implications for anywhere there is conflict between us humans, whether or not there is a power differential present—parent-child interactions, teacher-student interactions, relationships with friends, partners, and family members, as well as with employees and supervisees. Perhaps the furthest-reaching implications apply to problems on the world stage. In the book, I make the case that we all might benefit from a more compassionate and empathic stance towards others and legitimate attempts to solve problems in mutually satisfactory ways.

I hope you will join me here in the future as I go into more detail on different aspects of the model and tackle all kinds of related topics with some guest experts as well. For now, remember these 3 key take-aways:

  1. We are all doing the best we can with the skills we have
  2. The key to behavior change is thinking skill not will
  3. Skills can be built so we are all changeable!

 


References

Ablon, JS. Changeable: How Collaborative Problem Solving Changes Lives at Home, at School, and at Work. New York: Penguin Random House; 2018.

Greene, RW, Ablon JS, Monuteaux, MC, Goring, JC, Henin, A, Raezer-Blakely, L, Edwards, G. Markey, J & Biederman, J. Effectiveness of Collaborative Problem Solving in affectively dysregulated children with oppositional defiant disorder: Initial findings. JCCP, 2004; 72(6): 1157-1164.

Pollastri, AR, Epstein, LD, Heath, GH, & Ablon, JS. The Collaborative Problem Solving approach: Outcomes across settings. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 2013, 21(4), 188-199.

Pollastri, AR, Lieberman, RE, Boldt, SL & Ablon, JS (2016) Minimizing Seclusion and Restraint in Youth Residential and Day Treatment Through Site-Wide Implementation of Collaborative Problem Solving, Residential Treatment for Children & Youth, 33:3-4, 186-205

This article originally appeared on Psychology Today – “Help Anyone Change Their Behavior—Even Yourself!”

Now that bullying-prevention programs are required in our schools, students who are the victims of bullying are finally getting the empathy and attention they deserve. The work, however, shouldn’t stop there.

Bullying

Behind most bullying programs is the fundamental assumption that students who bully are choosing to do so in order to get something they want (for example, social status or attention), and that these students could behave more kindly if they wanted to. Because of this assumption, students who bully are frequently punished via exclusionary practices like detention, suspension, or even expulsion. The punishment, the logic goes, should teach bullies that their behavior gets them bad stuff instead of good stuff, and when they realize that, they will stop bullying and be kind instead. But if that logic is correct, why do bullies come out of detention, or return from suspension, and bully again?

Research actually tells us that students who are aggressive, oppositional, or otherwise behave in difficult ways are actually doing the best they can with the skills they have. All of us would like to have social status and attention; students who bully are lacking the skills they would need to attain status and attention in adaptive ways; skills like emotion regulation, self-regulation, communication, and social thinking. As a result, they seek status and attention in ways that prove harmful to others. Yes, bullies would like to avoid detentions and suspensions and they would if they could. But detention and suspension don’t teach skills; the bully returns with no more skills than she had when she left and so cannot behave any differently.

While not a popular view, it is clear that bullies lack the skill, not the will, to behave better. So if we want to effectively address bullying, we need to focus on helping bullies develop the skills they need to not bully. Our underlying assumptions about the cause of the bullying leads us to punish the bullies; ironically, it is only by having compassion and understanding for the bullies that we best help future students avoid being victims.

 

Excerpted from Education Week. Read the entire response here.

Listening to the other person’s perspective is a key ingredient in the Collaborative Problem Solving approach and in today’s digital era, listening to your child can help adults better understand some of the confusing, social pressures kids face online. With the rise of social media where web-based challenges can go viral and reach millions in an instant, children are sometimes confronted with messages and ideas that may have negative behavioral results.

Dr. Ablon, Founder & Director of Think:Kids, a program of the Massachusetts General Hospital, was recently asked by a parent about how to address this modern-day problem that is being shared across many households.  One important point is that a lot can happen on the internet; use these opportunities to listen, create conversation, and find out what your child is feeling and thinking about these situations.

Listen to the conversation: Mix1041 Radio Dr Ablon Weighs in on Internet Challenge

Read on Psychology Today: When-your-8-year-old-asks-you-about-the-momo-challenge

 

 

Bullying a bully doesn’t work. Here’s what does.

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon

April 16, 2019

Now that bullying prevention programs are required in our schools, students who are the victims of bullying are finally getting the empathy and attention they deserve. The work, however, shouldn’t stop there.

Behind most bullying programs is the fundamental assumption that students who bully are choosing to do so in order to get something they want, such as social status or attention, and that these students could behave more kindly if they wanted to. Because of this assumption, students who bully are frequently punished via exclusionary practices like detention, suspension, or even expulsion. The punishment, the logic goes, should teach bullies that their behavior leads to bad outcomes instead of good outcomes, and when they realize that, they will stop bullying and be kind instead. But if that logic is correct, why do bullies so often come out of detention, or return from suspension, only to bully again?

Research actually tells us that students who are aggressive, oppositional, or otherwise behave in difficult ways are actually doing the best they can with the skills they have. All of us would like to have social status and attention; students who bully are lacking the skills they would need to attain status and attention in adaptive ways—skills like emotion regulation, self-regulation, communication skills, and social thinking. As a result, they seek status and attention in ways that prove harmful to others. Yes, bullies would like to avoid detention and suspension, and they would if they could. But detention and suspension don’t teach skills; the bully returns with no more skills than she had when she left and so cannot behave any differently.

Fortunately, there are evidence-based approaches that help kids who exhibit challenging behavior build skills they lack, like self-regulation and social thinking skills that are linked to social aggression. Those approaches include things like Restorative Practices, Social Thinking, and our Collaborative Problem Solving model.

While not a popular view, bullies lack the skill, not the will, to behave better. If we want to effectively address bullying, we need to focus on helping bullies develop the skills they need to not bully. Our underlying assumptions about the cause of the bullying leads us to punish the bullies; ironically, it is only by having compassion and understanding for the bullies that we best help future students avoid being victims.

 


As originally posted in Psychology Today 

Research explains what (not who!) is really to blame for challenging behavior.

J. Stuart Ablon Ph.D.

As a child psychologist, who specializes in helping kids with challenging behavior, I hear how often we parents take the blame for our kids’ behavior, whether the behavior happens at home, at school or anywhere else. I can’t really blame folks for fingering parents because the blame should really reside with my field. Psychology and psychiatry has a long history of blaming parents (or more specifically, mothers!) for things we later learn they have less to do with than we thought. Take the example of what was referred to as the “schizophrenigenic mother” whose parenting style was thought to cause schizophrenia! Fast forward to the 21st century and we realize what an absurd notion that is (Neill, 1990). And there are examples that are just as astounding and have persisted even longer. The phrase “refrigerator mothers” was coined to describe cold, unempathic moms who were thought to cause ….. autism (Kanter, 1943)! Really. Of course, now we know that autism spectrum disorders are complicated neurodevelopmental challenges. Sorry moms for throwing you under the bus for decades!

My experience tells me that challenging behavior may be the latest example of the damage done when we inaccurately blame parents. We think that parents being passive, permissive and inconsistent leads to their children exhibiting challenging behavior because the kids learn that they can get things or get out of things by behaving this way. But is it really that poor parenting causes challenging behavior? Or is it actually the reverse – namely that challenging behavior causes us parents to look pretty bad?

Over the years in my clinical practice, I’ve noticed some patterns that suggest maybe the latter is more accurate. Many families come to see me for help with one of the children who exhibits severely challenging behavior, and I often observe that those very same families frequently have other children who not only aren’t particularly challenging, they are actually incredibly well-behaved! How do we explain that? Same parents, but different kids. I often say that if I could take a kid from my practice with very challenging behavior and transport them into the home of the ideal parents, those same parents quickly would start to look a lot less consistent and a lot more lenient. Likewise, show me a parent who is described as being too lenient and inconsistent and give them a really well-behaved kid and all of a sudden they will start to look a lot more consistent and less permissive. But unfortunately when we parents have well-behaved kids, we assume that it must be what we are doing that is working so well. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that probably has less to do with us as well! Easy kids are easy to parent. Kids with challenging behavior are really challenging to parent.

So who is really to blame then for challenging behavior? Or more accurately, what is to blame? Skills deficits – (Pollastri, 2019; Wang, 2018). Tons of research in the neurosciences have shown beyond the shadow of doubt that kids who exhibit challenging behavior struggle with skills in areas like flexibility, frustration tolerance and problem-solving. To be more specific and technical, they have a hard time with things like language and communication skills, attention and working memory skills, emotion and self-regulation skills, cognitive flexibility and social thinking skills.

So just like we’ve come to understand autism more accurately through a neuro-development lens, its high time to do the same when it comes to challenging behavior. Let’s learn from past mistakes and stop playing the blame game. Let’s start having empathy for parents whose job is already tough enough. They could use our support, not our judgment.

 

How Lazy Language Harms Kids

J. Stuart Ablon Ph.D.

I’m a bit of a stickler for language. I often have to resist my urge to irritatingly correct people’s grammar. But one thing I try not to resist correcting is lazy language that harms kids.

When kids behave poorly, we often throw around pat phrases as explanations. Here are some common ones you might recognize:

“He just wants attention”
“She just wants her own way”
“He just wants control”
“He’s an expert manipulator”
“She’s got a bad attitude”
“She’s making bad choices”
“He won’t cooperate”

Unfortunately, when someone utters one of these explanations, the typical response is nodding in agreement. But are we really sure these statements are accurate? Because if they aren’t, they reinforce inaccurate, derogatory views of these kids. And if they are even accurate, are they helpful? Let’s examine them together.

Because the definition of the word “cooperate” means to collaborate or come together. It does not mean do what I say now! See how we adults have literally changed the definition of the word to fit our assumptions? Imagine if instead we said that he had a time responding quickly to requests? Then perhaps we would be curious about whether he just needs more time to process things or whether has difficulty shifting gears in general. That is to say, we would be more likely to be curious, not furious with him. And that’s a big difference because it opens the door to more compassionate and helpful responses.

So, let’s work harder to use more accurate and helpful language when we describe kids with challenging behavior. Wait! I am guilty myself. Maybe we aren’t being lazy with our language. Maybe we just lack some awareness. I’m hoping this blog will help all of us rethink the words we choose. Our kids deserve better from us.

 


As originally featured on the Changeable blog in Psychology Today 

J. Stuart Ablon Ph.D.

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Science tells us why spray and pray training doesn’t work.

I’ve spent the last 20 years traversing North America and beyond conducting trainings for all kinds of organizations. Some are one-day trainings, others intensive three-day workshops. When I started doing this, the field now known as implementation science didn’t even exist. But since then, much research has been done to study whether trainings like this are effective by examining whether people actually do anything different after learning new things. We’ve done our own empirical research as well. And the jury has been back in for a while now: spray-and-pray training doesn’t work! Trainers like me swoop in and spray training over a group of people and head back home praying that what we’ve taught will stick. The data going back almost twenty years now suggest that people’s knowledge of the content taught will definitely increase if they like the topic and presentation is interesting. However, very few people will actually do anything different. One study from 17 years ago in schools showed that only 5% of participants do anything different even though they learned a lot. Imagine all of the time and money we waste on professional development seminars that fall prey to this reality!

But don’t worry–there is good news! Best practices from implementation science provide a clear path forward that mirrors what I’ve learned the hard way over the past couple of decades. You need to pay attention to four key things if you want training to stick:

1. Start by Assessing Readiness

I’ve seen so much valuable time and resources wasted over the years by organizations jumping headfirst into training when they really weren’t ready yet to take on something new. If they had attended to some of the things getting in the way before launching, it would’ve gone much better. Sadly, if someone or someplace isn’t ready, their experience will be negatively impacted and they will think the training “doesn’t work” or “isn’t worth it,” and it may be hard to come back to it successfully again later.

2. Get Training AND Coaching

The good news here really shouldn’t be a surprise to us. When we try to teach ourselves to do new things, what we are really attempting to do is change our brains. And we’ve actually learned a lot in the past few decades about how to change the brain. We know that we must follow the principles of neuroplasticity which tell us that one massive dose of information (like a whole day) in an artificial environment (like an auditorium) without opportunity for real-time practice can’t possibly change the brain. On the contrary, we need to provide ourselves with lots of small doses with spacing in between and opportunities to practice in the actual environment in which we are trying to utilize the new skills we have learned.

Fortunately, that same research I cited above showed that if you follow training with access to regular coaching where people are practicing in their real environment, 95% of people start to implement what they’ve learned. Amazing! So, whether you are a leader who seeks out professional development for your staff or an individual looking to learn anything new, make sure to follow your initial dose of learning with opportunities to practice repetitively in small doses with guidance and feedback from an expert.

3. Monitor How It’s Going

If you are trying to learn to do something new, you better have a way of monitoring how well you are doing it. In implementation science, we call this “fidelity monitoring.” It’s amazing how often we spend lots of time and money trying to teach people new things but don’t invest in any way of evaluating whether it’s working, i.e., whether and how well people are doing that new thing. So, make sure you have a way of assessing how well people are doing it so you can adjust your training and coaching plan accordingly.

4. Become Experts

One of the most frustrating things I’ve witnessed in our work is how hard it is to make something stick for the long haul. Sustainability. We’ve had situations where we work with programs for years to get them really good at our approach, and then the leader retires, the second in command moves to another organization and all of a sudden all the progress fades away. The secret to sustainability is making sure you create a team of culture carriers who are your local experts and carry the torch long after the initial training and coaching are done. We accomplish this through our certification program where we ensure organizations end implementation with a team of certified experts.

Implementation Science and You

You can apply these lessons to anything you want to learn or any behavior you want to change. It is especially important to be mindful of these factors with the hardest things to make stick.

So, the next time you want to learn something new or change your own behavior, keep these four keys in mind. And if you are trying to do the tough work of changing a whole system, it’s even more important to follow these guidelines. Good luck!

 


References

Fixsen, D. et. al (2005), Implementation Research: A Synthesis of the Literature

Joyce, B., & Showers, B. (2002). Student Achievement Through Staff Development (3rd ed.). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Pollastri AR, Ablon, JS, Hone M, eds. Collaborative Problem Solving: An Evidence-Based Approach to Implementation Across Settings. New York, NY: Springer Science + Business Media, 2019.

As originally featured on the Changeable blog on Psychology Today

The one thing everyone needs this school year.

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon

August 23, 2019

As schools across the country open their doors to our children, we hear a lot about back-to-school supplies – binders, notebooks, mechanical pencils, graph paper, calculators, maybe even a lock to keep things safe in lockers. I know it was one of my favorite rituals at the start of each elementary school grade when I was fortunate enough to be taken to the stationary store with list in hand to stock up on school supplies. Crisp, clean, new notebooks seemed to promise a fresh start to the school year ahead. Last night, I took my kids to the big box store that has all but replaced the local stationery store and felt a little of that same nostalgia as I watched my daughter try to find her favorite color notebooks to match her binders while my son was more focused on finding the right planner to keep his assignments straight.

Having had the opportunity to work with new staff in a local charter school earlier that day, I also found myself reflecting on what I think might be the most important school supply with which to begin the new year. I realized that it is something all teachers, parents, and kids will need this year, but you can’t buy it. And sometimes these days it seems like it is in short supply: Empathy.

When teachers struggle to manage their classroom, parents struggle to get their kids to school on time or to do their homework, or kids struggle to meet the expectations of the new school year, too often the blame game begins:

Let’s all try to start this school year off with empathy for each other. With the recognition that we are all doing the best we can – teachers, parents, and kids alike. No kid wants to struggle at school. No parent wants their child to be “that kid” at school who is disrupting the class for others and whom everyone is talking about. No teacher wants to feel the overwhelming stress of trying to manage an out-of-control classroom. Blame puts people on the defensive and only makes matters worse because it shuts down our curiosity. Empathy, on the other hand, helps us stay calm or what we psychologists call “regulated.” Empathy is the greatest human regulator. Feeling understood and supported is calming. Calm people are much better problem solvers. This is true partly because empathy encourages curiosity and understanding a problem is required before you can solve it! Assuming the best of each other helps us connect, relate and collaborate more effectively.

Instead of the blame game, empathy in those same situations might sound more like this:

So, at the start of this new school year, let’s remember that we are all in this together. Let’s remember that we are all doing the best we can and that with a little empathy we can help each other do even better. As the school year marches on and what were once fresh, new notebooks become a bit frayed at the edges just like us, let’s try not to run out of the most important school supply: Empathy.

 


References

 Ablon, JS, Pollastri, AR.  The School Discipline Fix: Changing Behavior using Collaborative Problem Solving.  New York:  Norton; 2018.

Perry BD, Ablon JS. CPS as a Neurodevelopmentally Sensitive and Trauma-Informed Approach. In: Pollastri A., Ablon J., Hone M. (eds) Collaborative Problem Solving. Current Clinical Psychiatry. Springer, Cham; 2019.

As originally posted in Psychology Today

Treating everyone the same just ensures that no one really gets what they need!

Dr. J Stuart Ablon

 Adobe Stock

As parents, we hear a lot about the need to be consistent—consistent in how we treat each of our children and consistent with our co-parents as well. This emphasis on consistency goes back to the idea that kids are looking for some way to exploit a lack of consistency, and if we just toe the line without any exceptions it will lead to better behavior and compliance with our wishes. We also work hard to treat our kids the same so as to not engender any uprisings caused by a perceived lack of fairness, especially since the call of “that’s not fair!” is especially piercing to our adult ears. The same is true at school where teachers often work hard to achieve consistency for the same reasons but with perhaps even more urgency, given the dozens of kids they have to contend with all at the same time.

But is our striving for consistency effective or perhaps even misguided at times?

Parents with multiple children often remark on how different their children are—how they must have “come out wired differently.” I know this stands true for each of my three kids: same parents, same household, same siblings, even same schools and yet very different kids. So why would we ever try to parent or teach kids in the same way if they are so different? In fact, doesn’t treating every kid the same ensure that no one really gets what they need? You see, the fact that kids are so different is precisely why we should strive to do things differently with them. Different kids need different things. In fact, the only way to make sure that each child gets what they need is to give them different things.

We’ve learned this lesson over time in our schools. We used to expect that all kids should learn the same way and at the same pace. If they didn’t, we certainly didn’t want them getting in the way of the learning of the other students. Thankfully, we have realized over time that “differentiating” our instruction (customizing our teaching to the specific styles and needs of individual learners) was not only helpful but necessary, and that doing so helps us to reach all students most effectively. While we have come a long way in that arena, the notion of differentiating our discipline is still a tough reality for folks to accept.

In our schools, I see teachers worry that if they make exceptions or offer individualized support to certain students, all students will want those accommodations. I encourage them to think about behavior as if it were a learning issue. One would never hold back offering support to a child with dyslexia for fear that every student in the class would then claim to have dyslexia! And we would have no problem telling the other students that we only differentiate when needed. In other words, we give help where it’s needed but not where it isn’t! It’s time for us to do the same with behavior and discipline—to not be shy about doing different things for different students and being confident in our rationale for doing so.

Next time we hear “It’s not fair!” in our homes or classrooms, let’s respond with a very clear pronouncement, “Yes, it is. Because fair doesn’t mean equal. It means giving everyone what they need, and different people need different things.”

Let’s let go of one-size-fits-all parenting and teaching. Let’s embrace the messy, remarkable and exciting individuality of our kids and give each other the permission to respond differently to their needs and challenges.


As originally featured in Psychology Today

Social science research tells us what to focus on.

Dr. J Stuart Ablon

For a long time now, we have known that therapy works. In fact, all kinds of different therapies work for different reasons, and they often tend to be equally effective with not a lot of differences in outcomes. This finding has been termed the “Dodo bird effect” – alluding to the line from Alice in Wonderland, “Everybody has won and all must have prizes.”

In graduate school and the years after, I was fascinated by the question of what makes different types of therapy successful. When I analyzed video recordings of individual therapies intensively using across 100 different variables, I often did find interesting dynamics specific to that particular patient-therapist dyad that predicted the outcome of the therapy (Ablon et al, 2002, 2006, 2011).

But when I analyzed dozens or hundreds of different therapies together, I repeatedly found that what has been termed “common factors” predicted outcomes. The most powerful of those common factors have been referred to as the “therapeutic alliance,” referring to the bond between client and therapist. Study after study has shown that the quality of the relationship between client and therapist is the only reliable and the most powerful predictor of a positive outcome. This construct has also been referred to as the helping alliance, the working alliance or the collaborative alliance. Whatever name you use to describe it, it refers to the bond between helper and helpee as they work together towards a common goal, a bond marked by non-judgmental acceptance and empathy.

During the 20-plus years since I left graduate school, I’ve focused on helping kids and adolescents with challenging behaviors, and things have come full circle for me. The helping relationship is the key to change. This is true wherever I’ve worked, whether it is a therapist-client, parent-child, or teacher-student relationship. The quality of the helping relationship determines success. And just to be clear: a helping relationship does not simply mean a nice or friendly relationship. A helping alliance is characterized by digging in and working on hard things together, but always punctuated by empathy, acceptance and a lack of blame.

The real struggle when it comes to helping kids with behavioral challenges is that it is very hard to build and maintain an empathic, non-judgmental stance when their behavior is so frustrating and disruptive. The more we feel triggered and disrespected by their behavior, the harder it is to maintain that helping alliance. This is why helping adults to have compassion for kids with behavioral challenges is more than half the battle. The approach we teach tries to instill an empathic and hopeful mindset while giving adults concrete tools to partner with kids to work on the challenges together (Ablon, 2018). In other words, the approach helps adult foster a therapeutic alliance with kids despite their challenging behavior. Our research has shown that the better the adults are at using the approach, the higher their alliance is with the kids, which given all we know about therapeutic alliance undoubtedly translates into better outcomes for kids.

So, what’s the bottom line here? The most powerful vehicle of change we have is relationships. Not surprisingly, our success in helping kids is entirely dependent on the relationships we build with them.

 


References

Ablon JS, Jones EE, Katzenstein T. Psychotherapy and controlled clinical trials: A square peg and a round hole. Psychoanalyst Psychologist, 2002.

Ablon JS, Jones EE. Validity of controlled clinical trials of psychotherapy. AJP, 2002;159:775-783.

Ablon JS, Levy, RA, Katzenstein, T. Brand names of psychotherapy: Identifying empirically supported change processes. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 2006; 43(2), 216-23

This article was originally featured in Psychology Today.

 

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