Working in schools over the years I have seen many children and adolescents diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Even with its high prevalence, there is still a significant need in psycho-education among parents, children, and teachers. ADHD still comes with many misunderstandings/stigmas and the trial-and-error journey of medication can make parents feel frustrated. and sometimes just give up. Check out this article from Additude Magazine that gives guidance on medical management and offers a free download of ‘The Ultimate Guide to ADHD Medication’
Free Resources for Social-Emotional Learning
Technology is our friend…when used appropriately. We have seen how technology has enabled students access at home to their education during a pandemic when it was not safe for them to be in-person. Another way technology can be our friend is in teaching children social-emotional learning. Now it is not a requirement to purchase social-emotional learning curriculum. If you are constrained with a budget, there are many great free resources on the internet. I created a Padlet last year when our school district transitioned to remote learning but I still needed to continue with my counseling services for students I worked with. Videos were curated from different sites including YouTube. I will be adding more, as I go. Feel free to use it and share.
Finding the Positives During a Pandemic
Although students are not being taught in the traditional form during this national pandemic, students are still receiving support, but in a nontraditional way. It has been a learning curve for students, parents, and staff on how to transition from an at school to an online learning educational atmosphere. As a School Psychologist, during crisis situations, we play a role to collaborate and support staff, students, and parents. Now that it has been almost three months since the school closures, it gives me time to reflect on my observations during this time. As I facilitate my counseling groups, I like to discuss positives before the negatives or challenges presented, so I will follow that, and start with the positives. How can we see positives during a pandemic? Let’s try.
Anxiety, Fears, and Things that Go Bump in the Night | Psychology Today
Anxiety and fear, like pain, are wired into our nervous system. Also like pain, they are signals that something requires our attention. Anxiety and fear are signals of impending threat. The body reacts virtually instantly to defend itself in the face of a threat. The threat might be a physical challenge, such as an attack by an assailant. Or it might be a psychological threat, such as taking an important examination, giving a speech in public, or having a suspicious spot on a medical X-ray.
A key step in managing fear and anxiety is practicing something we can do without any conscious effort—breathing deeply. But many of us have forgotten how to breathe deeply or never learned to breathe deeply in the first place. Gaining control over our breathing helps tone down our body’s alarm response and quells anxiety. Here’s a diaphragmatic breathing exercise you can learn in about a minute’s time:
1. Sit comfortably in a chair, placing your dominant hand on your stomach.
2. Place your other hand over your upper chest.
3. Breathe deeply, inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth, taking in a sackful of air that pushes out your dominant hand with each in-breath. Try to keep your other hand still while breathing in and out. In this way, you regulate your breathing through your diaphragm and not your chest or throat muscles.
4. Match breaths so that each in-breath and out-breath are approximately equal in length.
5. Once you get the knack of it, you can remove your nondominant hand from your chest, letting it lie comfortably on your side.
6. To deepen your state of relaxation, pick a calming word you can repeat silently to yourself on each out-breath, such as the words "one" or "relax." Simply repeat this word silently to yourself each time you exhale. Stretch out the sound of the word as you repeat it. Breathe deeply in and out, repeating your calming word on each out-breath.
Supporting Transgender Children
Sexuality used to be the "hot button", but now gender has grown in to it's own space amongst children, adolescents, and adults. What is now termed "gender incongruent", is when someone expresses that they are of the different gender they were born with. I have seen students as young as elementary school, dressing in the stereotypical opposite sex clothing, wearing their hair differently, and expressing themselves of wanting to be identified as the opposite sex. Working in the schools and with a diverse population, we must be sensitive to all kinds of students, with the addition of the "gender incongruent" group of students we most likely will encounter. As anything new, people may react differently, positively or negatively. What we need to be is an educator. Those that have questions whether it be students, parents, or staff, we need to be able to feed them the information they need to understand where these students are coming from and about the issue at hand.
What We Know About Autism: Separating the Science From the Scandal
Shortly after pulling a controversial documentary linking autism and common childhood vaccinations from the Tribeca Film Festival, Robert De Niro issued a statement explaining that festival organizers and members of the scientific community “do not believe it contributes to or furthers the discussion I had hoped for.” Instead, his decision has sparked a conversation that has recirculated discredited theories, leaving even the most informed among us feeling slightly confused.
As it happens, there is no proven link between vaccines and autism spectrum disorders, which are characterized by difficulties with social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication, and repetitive behaviors. The theory’s origins lie in a study of 12 children published in 1998 in the British medical journal The Lancet. The article blamed the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine typically given to babies between 12 and 15 months for the eventual onset of behavioral problems among the children. It was retracted in 2010, and Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who led the research, has since been stripped of his medical license.
“It’s positively clear there is no relationship between the vaccine and autism,” says Eric Hollander, MD, director of the Autism and Obsessive Compulsive Spectrum Program and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center in New York. According to the CDC, one in 68 American children—one in 42 boys and one in 189 girls—is on the autism spectrum. The disorder is 10 times as prevalent as it was 40 years ago (though as a society we’re more informed about early signs, which means that higher detection rates are likely behind the surge).
Autism presents itself in many forms—from cases that would have once been characterized as severe intellectual impairment to those of individuals with high intelligence and good verbal skills who aren’t diagnosed until mid-life. The common thinking today is that its causes are a mix of genetic and environmental factors, which might include air pollution, gestational illnesses such as diabetes, and parental age. “There has been some data supporting advanced age of parents, but there’s also a theory that people with autistic traits can be awkward and marry later in life, so what we’re actually seeing is it being passed down genetically,” says Andrea Roberts, PhD, a research associate at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She finds the gestational diabetes hypothesis more solid. “Obesity causes inflammation, which can have negative effects on the development of the fetal brain,” she says. “It’s plausible in terms of explaining autism’s increased prevalence—we used to be a lot thinner.”
In addition to identifying environmental triggers, scientists are still working to uncover the hundreds, or possibly thousands, of genetic mutations (there are more than 200 known genes linked to autism at present).
There is no FDA-approved treatment for the core autism symptoms. For now, says Dr. Hollander, researchers’ best bet is to focus on the 30 to 40 percent of cases that have a known genetic underpinning, and to attempt to create medical treatments to match genes. “It’s more of a personalized approach,” he says. “Every case is a unique interplay of several gene variations and environmental factors. This way of thinking doesn’t offer an easy solution.”
The most effective course of action is a combination of early detection (if a baby doesn’t point things out or smile at other people by his first birthday, it could indicate the condition) and intervention therapies aimed at helping young children build neural pathways, such as floor time and intense face-to-face interaction with a caregiver. “Late infancy is a major period of brain development,” says Rebecca Landa, PhD, director of the Center for Autism and Related Disorders at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore. “We’re not curing autism, but we can help children make sense of the world around them.”
No matter how patient and informed parents are, the meltdowns, anxiety, and difficulty expressing emotions that often accompany autism can be painful to cope with. Other experimental treatments gaining favor include transcranial magnetic stimulation, oxytocin (a hormone associated with social bonding that can be administered nasally), vitamin B12 injections (to improve brain function), and even cannabis (which has been shown to help those who suffer seizures).
Publicly Smart to Privately Normal
Our country boasts itself on our “equal education for all” constitutional right, yet it’s no hidden secret that our educational system in this country has an extreme gap in equality. Private schools are known to have higher quality education than public schools, as you have to pay tuition to attend rather than paid for by the government, but what about public to public schools?
I remember watching a documentary clip in one of my college psychology classes comparing the resources and educational experience of two public schools, one in a lower-economic status community and the other in a middle-to-upper-class neighborhood. The contrasts were dramatic. The school in the lower-economic status community hardly had any books available in the library for students to read. Their textbooks were outdated, and a PE teacher who seemed to have no grasp on the concepts the students were to learn led their science classes. Not only were resources limited along with the teacher’s knowledge of the subject, but also the students seemed to be less motivated to excel because of the lack of support in the school. In contrast, the school in the middle to upper class community had an array of books, in good condition, available in the library.
The students were learning higher concepts in their science class including hands on experiments. They also were able to go on school trips to the aquarium, zoo, etc. that the students at the other school didn’t have the funding to do. They seemed much more interactive in the classroom and prepared to continue on the higher education route. I asked a friend to write about her educational experience. Below Melody* anecdotes some of the challenges she faced when transitioning from a public school to a private school:
As an only child, with two very supportive, hands-on parents, I was continuously encouraged and told how great I was with everything I wanted to do whether I failed or succeeded. When I was in 2nd grade, I went to a well-ranked public school in the LAUSD. There were 25 kids to a class, a teacher and a teacher’s assistant, a 25:2 ratio. I was classified as "gifted" and placed in to a "Gifted Program". For a couple hours a day we would have one teacher give us special attention and we would work on more advanced subjects- maybe that of 3rd or a 4th grade skill level rather than 2nd grade. After the 3rd grade, our family relocated and I was enrolled in to a small private school. Even though I was in the “gifted program” in the previous school, when I started classes at the new school I became overwhelmed by the more challenging curriculum and workload. I remember one particular time; there was a Spelling Book that we had to complete a chapter in every week. It had a number of activities to learn to spell, and use correct grammar and punctuation. It was at such an advanced level that even the gifted program hadn't prepared me. I grew so frustrated that I couldn't complete the activities on time, they were too hard, I didn't understand the instructions, and I started to throw tantrums. Every morning my parents would literally have to drag me to school as I cried. My Dad later told me that during that time I had written a letter to the tooth fairy that said, "I am very sad and something bad is going to happen..." That would worry any parent. It got so bad that my teacher had to meet with my parents because she was so concerned. She said I had dark circles under my eyes and I wasn't making any friends. However, after I started to get personalized hands on extra help from my parents, tutors, and my teacher I grew more confident and happy. I started to make friends, keep up with the workload, and the rest was history. I was always a good student; I didn't have to try very hard to get A's, B's and the occasional C. I didn't take AP's in high school, but I still managed to do well continually through college. That one transitional period from public to private really threw me off for half of a year. I was always told how smart and capable I was and when I got to a place where I was the norm, things grew difficult. I thought everyone was extremely gifted at my private school, but I soon learned that though the syllabus was at a higher caliber than public school, people still struggled with different learning disabilities just the same.
Melody was able to overcome some of her challenges by having supportive and encouraging parents and also a supportive group of teachers and tutors. But what about those students who don’t have that supportive family and academic resources to lean on, how will they overcome their challenges? This is why funding for public schools, after-school programs, and ensuring teachers are quality-educated is important.
*Name changed