Positive Interactions with At-Risk Children

Enhancing Students' Wellbeing, Resilience, and Success

Mojdeh Bayat, Naseem Jamnia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351616379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Find the tools and knowledge you need to build resilience in all children from an early age through appropriate interactions and conversations. Presenting a wide range of research in an accessible format, Positive Interactions with At-Risk Children explains how to understand and assess behaviors in the context of children's developmental stages.

This book introduces Bayat's original Resilience-based Interaction Model (RIM), which combines behavioral and emotion-based theories of development to provide practical steps for early childhood teachers and professionals. RIM features research-based practices, including relationship building, behavior guidance, body-mind exercises for both teachers and students, as well as strategies to promote strengths of character in children and aid future learning.

Ideal for new and veteran educators alike, Positive Interactions with At-Risk Children is an invaluable guide to early years behavior.

1
Children’s Mental Health in the United States

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I grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s. Like most decades, it was a time of change, but millennials are unique for a reason: these were the years where the internet picked up traction, where computers were beginning to be found commonly in households. Now, nearly three decades later, it’s practically inconceivable that someone wouldn’t have a smartphone or laptop within easy reach. Every year, technological advancements grow to places we never would have conceived, showing us even more about human ingenuity.

This spread of technology is necessarily linked to a spread of information—and misinformation. Back in the ‘90s, my parents used to carry around WHAT IS AUTISM business cards to hand to people who’d stare at us in public; the “1 in 68” Autism Spectrum Disorder statistic wasn’t plastered on billboards everywhere (we’ll discuss more about autism in future chapters). Now, people are using #ActuallyAutistic to increase not necessarily awareness, but acceptance, of neurodevelopmental disorders like autism.

—NJ

Discussions about mental health and illness have shifted in the last few decades as the public becomes more aware of it. Thanks to the media coverage—propagated by the internet in this age of mass media—of political conflicts in the Middle East and other regions of the world, the term PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and the condition it represents has permeated cultural consciousness in the United States. People are beginning to realize the serious and inevitable effects of war trauma in our returning combat veterans—and with it, a gradual understanding of the deleterious effects of any trauma on the brain and body of an individual. This is, of course, ignoring all the PTSD and other mental illness-related jokes people casually make, which adds to cultural stigma. But here’s a question that not enough people are asking: If strong soldiers are adversely affected by trauma in such a severe way, how would developing children on the home front—those who face daily adversities and traumatic events in their lives—be able to weather it?

Trauma may seem like a far reality for children, but the truth is much bleaker than that. One op-ed in The New York Times stated for every soldier with PTSD, there are ten—ten!—children in the US who are traumatized for a variety of reasons like violence, abuse, assault, or neglect (1). What’s worse, these children are suffering to a comparable degree as those adults who’ve been in literal war. And those children become adults; mental health scholars have frequently stated that individuals who have histories of childhood trauma—that is, neglect and abuse—make up almost the entire population of people who are incarcerated in the US criminal justice system (2, 3). (A brief note here: This is not to say experiencing trauma will result in incarceration. Problems with the criminal justice system aside, we’ll come back to the issues of stigmatization of mental health and illness later in this chapter.)

These are staggering statistics. And yet, because children do not show signs of mental health issues the same way adults do, most adults think young children don’t feel the effects of adversities and maltreatment, or that as they grow up, the effects will gradually disappear. There is also a perception that unless an event of a serious nature happens—a trauma with a capital T—daily adversities can’t actually hurt children.

If it wasn’t clear by now, this could not be further from the truth. Children do, in fact, experience trauma. But it’s only been within the past decade or so that scholars have begun to understand that trauma in children doesn’t have to result from a single or multiple serious events and that children may show the signs of trauma differently than adults. In this age of social media, there are already signs of this being true; as people step forward and share their own stories, we’re able to see the ways both similar and different types of trauma have lifelong effects. In 2018, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz published an essay about how his childhood rape affected not just his relationships, but his entire life (4). His is not a unique story, and such trauma doesn’t have to be from something as catastrophic as rape for the results to be the same.

As we will explore in Chapter 3, what might constitute a trauma for a child can be different from what is deemed as such in adults. The type of trauma children experience is almost always one of an interpersonal nature. Ongoing daily stressors, such as those that result from an unresponsive caregiver, or worse, from maltreatment, can have long-lasting traumatic effects on a child. Under certain conditions and based on the child’s developmental capacities, sometimes even an event which one might deem ordinary can have a deleterious effect. This isn’t to lessen what an actual “trauma” is—it’s to broaden the definition.

Many children grow up in communities or in families dealing with an ongoing amount of daily interpersonal stress that may result from a family crisis, lack of financial and material resources, domestic and/or neighborhood violence, and parenting issues. These children are particularly at risk for becoming traumatized—for trauma to have lifelong effects that may become deleterious. Experiencing ongoing stress amounts to the same effects on the brain as stress from a single severe traumatic event. On that front, here’s something else to consider—how often can we even find communities or families in which stress isn’t ongoing for a child? The vast majority of children growing up in the world, including many children who grow up in the United States, do, in fact, deal with ongoing stressors, which can present risks to their development.

We will explain later (Chapter 3) what “amount” of stress may be toxic and over time change the architecture of the developing brain. Research from the past three decades shows the brain cannot recalibrate after ongoing interpersonal stress and/or trauma without intervention. These effects are usually long lasting, often leading to more serious mental, behavioral, and physical health problems later on.

It’s something we have to think about if we’re serious about helping children, whether as healthcare practitioners, parents, or, yes, even teachers. Thanks to the work of child mental health scholars such as Cicchetti, Rutter, Masten, and van der Kolk, educators have recently become interested in understanding the nature of stress and its effects on a child’s mental health. Terms such as “trauma-informed education,” “trauma-informed schools,” and “trauma-sensitive teaching” have found their ways into the US public education system and even in state- and federally funded early childhood programs. In fact, as of 2018, many states such as California and Washington have begun promoting conceptual maps for schools to implement trauma-informed teaching practices that support children who are experiencing mental health issues.

There’s another thing to consider, too. Although stress and traumatic situations can change the brain, it’s now understood that all mental health disorders have biological origins. Stress and trauma are some of the obvious environmental conditions that can interact with genetic factors to result in mental illness. Many children also display signs of mental and developmental disorders from birth due to inherited genetic and neurobiological factors—without having necessarily experienced any toxic levels of stress or any traumatic events. Children who are diagnosed with a developmental disorder, such as Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), or global developmental delay (GDD), belong to this category. However—and this is vital to remember—these children are also, if not more so, vulnerable to trauma on top of experiencing interpersonal stress with adults, caregivers, and teachers around them.

Fortunately, in the last thirty years, because of the advocacy efforts of families of children with disabilities and the special education public law that followed, there has been a great deal of awareness about the nature and treatment of neurodevelopmental disorders, including ASD, intellectual disabilities, ADHD, and sensory processing disorders. (An important caveat: the last iteration of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was in 2004, and though it’s been due for reexamination in Congress for several years, it hasn’t been improved upon since its last amendment.) In fact, special education and most early childhood teacher preparation programs have integrated a good deal of scientific literature regarding developmental disorders into their curricula. Parents, siblings, and other family members have in particular taken an active role in understanding and advocating for the developmental and educational needs of children with various forms of neurodevelopmental disorders. And as we mentioned above, with the rise of the internet and social media, individuals with the disorders—especially in the autism community—have begun to advocate for themselves. (Some of this is even in direct contrast to what parents or educators think someone might need, telling us we still have a lot to learn even in these areas.)

While we, as educators and families, might have come a long way in understanding and advocating for the developmental needs of children with and without disabilities, we have grossly neglected one area of development of all children—their social-emotional, mental, and behavioral health needs. The US educational system, including its subsidiary special education, continues to be fragmented, taxed with lack of funding, budget cuts, and an inappropriately trained workforce. Furthermore, our educational system focuses on academic learning and performance—or “functional academic,” in the case of special education—at the expense of the mental health needs of children. In publicly funded early education programs, such as Head Start, Early Head Start, and state pre-kindergartens, the primary emphasis continues to be on the implementation of early academic curricula, despite an abundant body of research supporting the importance of social-emotional development in young children before literacy and numeracy are taught. Of course, this is both ironic and frustrating, as these programs are designed for and serve children who are at risk for a host of developmental and mental health issues.

While having the best academic training will ensure a better future for a child, having an unhealthy mind will destroy any possibility to enjoy that future. Putting the mental health of children at the forefront of education is not only the best approach, but the right thing to do. And that means more than just doing our best to prevent any sort of trauma or illness—it also means actively encouraging the positive mental health and wellbeing of the child. We need to focus on not just the absence of illness, but the active encouragement of children’s potential and abilities so they may lead whole, happy, and productive lives.

Mental Health Issues in Children

Mental health issues are far more widespread and prevalent in children and adolescents than people usually think. It is estimated 20 percent of teenagers and youth between the ages of 13–18 in the United States either currently live with or will live with serious mental illness (5, 6). The estimates for the number of young children with mental health issues ranges anywhere from 13 percent to 27 percent (7–9). (See Table 1.1 for statistics related to mental health issues in preschoolers.)

Table 1.1 Reported percentage range of US preschoolers with types of mental health issues, in research literature

Type of Mental Health Issues	Reported Percentage Range
♦ Anxiety Disorders ➢ Phobias ➢ Separation anxiety ➢ Social anxiety ➢ Generalized anxiety disorders ➢ Selective mutism	2% to 20% ➢ 0 to 12% ➢ 1% to 5% ➢ 2% to 5% ➢ 1% to 7% ➢ 1% to 2%
♦ Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) ♦ Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) ♦ Oppositional Defiant Disorder ♦ Depressive Disorders ♦ Conduct Disorder	2% to 17% 1.5% to 2% 2% to 13% 0.5 to 2% 1% to 3%

Because mental illnesses have neurobiological bases, it is possible many adolescents and adults who are identified with mental disorders might have displayed detectable behavioral signs in early childhood. This fact should make it obvious to parents/caregivers and educators that something can be and needs to be done both at homes and in schools to detect possible risks or conditions and to then take appropriate steps to intervene.

Some of the most harrowing events of our time, shooting tragedies...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Children’s Mental Health in the United States
• 2 Early Signs of Possible Mental and Behavioral Health Issues in Young Children
• 3 Child Stress, Trauma, and the Brain: What Does Science Tell Us?
• 4 Teaching Our Students to Be Resilient
• 5 Choosing What Works: Theories and Practices
• 6 Lessons From Positive Psychology
• 7 Resilience-based Interaction Model (RIM): Introduction
• 8 RIM: Behavior, Body-Mind Health, and the Strengths of Character
• Index