It has been over a year now since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the world continues to adapt to the changes brought on by COVID-19, it is important to acknowledge the ways in which children have been affected specifically.
Continue reading The COVID-19 Pandemic: What Has Been Difficult for Children and How They Are Adapting to Change
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the ways in which children around the world are learning, playing, and interacting.
Understandably, parents have felt worried and uncertain about their children’s physical safety, social isolation, and academic progress in school.
Aside from physical and academic needs, children have basic psychological needs that are essential to their well-being.
When these needs are met, children can continue to grow and thrive, even during times of change and disruption.
Continue reading Children’s 3 Basic Psychological Needs and the COVID-19 PandemicIn recent weeks, the only constant has seemed to be that there is no normal. Every day we are inundated with reports and numbers and projections that do little to quell the collective anxiety we are feeling. Parents, in particular, are struggling to balance suddenly having to homeschool their children in addition to keeping up with whatever demands their work requires. It can be hard to see past the immediate uncertainty and fear, but once we do, we find that much can be learned from this situation about our children, how they learn, and how to educate them most effectively. Remote learning opens up new possibilities for individualizing education. Individualizing education, in turn, allows us to encourage curiosity, internal motivation and learning beyond studying for tests. One population in particular that can benefit from this kind of individualized approach to learning are twice-exceptional children.
Continue reading Twice-Exceptional Children: Meeting Their Educational Needs“I want to know: how do I compare in the world of 12-year-olds? How many people in the world are there with a personality like me? Where do I fit in?”
All children need connections in order to thrive. Learning to establish and maintain friendships is a crucial part of every child’s development. Sharing, turn-taking, trusting, communicating, and compromising are some of the vital skills children practice while interacting with peers. Although for some children acquiring these skills comes naturally and making friends is easy, others struggle to find and keep friends. Twice-exceptional children—because of both components of their exceptionality—often have difficulty finding a peer group and maintaining friendships.
Twice-exceptional children are children who are identified as being gifted while also having a disability. While “disability” is not the ideal word, it is the word used by schools and other agencies and, for sake of consistency, will be used here. The disability could be a learning, emotional, physical, sensory, and/or developmental disability (The Twice-Exceptional Dilemma, 2006). Dyslexia, ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder are just some examples of disabilities that impact a child’s functioning.
Continue reading Twice-Exceptional Children: Why Making Friends Is Hard and How to Support Them
Understanding the various components that make up a neuropsychological evaluation!
“Is my child gifted? Is my child delayed? What is my child?”
“Gifted and ADHD, how can it be both?“
These, and similar questions were asked by parents of children who were eventually identified as twice-exceptional.
Twice-exceptional children are a misunderstood and under-identified group of children. Many educators, professionals, and parents are not familiar with this term and do not understand the challenges and experiences of these children. It “can feel so overwhelming that you do not know where to start,” stated a parent of several twice-exceptional children. The first step in helping this group of children is to understand what it means to be twice-exceptional.
Continue reading Twice-Exceptional Children: Who They Are and Why We Need to Talk About Them Have you ever wondered what IQ testing is all about? Has your child been tested, but you have questions about what the results mean? Our latest project, a three-part video series on cognitive testing, helps answer these questions.
It’s the middle of the school year.
Winter break has come and gone, and you and your child are back to the all too familiar arguments about completing their homework before any screen time.
The teacher has sent e-mails letting you know that the work isn’t being done and meetings have been held to try to resolve the issue. At home, behavior charts have been made, decisions on grounding have been enforced, and privileges have been taken away.
Despite all the effort that has been put into the situation, it doesn’t seem to be getting any better. When you tell your child that it is time to go do their homework, they explode. Your child starts throwing books on the ground, crumpling papers, and snapping pencils in half. Yelling matches ensue. You feel drained, and your child’s frustration seems to have reached a new threshold.
Before bed after a particularly intense quarrel, you decide to search the internet for something – anything – to help that you haven’t tried before. To your surprise (and relief), you find that many other parents have posted about situations that are similar to yours. Their children display explosive challenging behavior under certain circumstances, but are well-behaved at other times. One parent wrote about how they stumbled across the idea of lagging skills and Collaborative Problem Solving, and how it helped restore peace to their family. You are taken aback by how lagging skills describe areas where your child struggles, and decide that Collaborative Problem Solving just might be worth a shot… Continue reading Anger in Children: A Different Approach
Children who struggle to manage their anger lack the skills to do so effectively – this was the idea we introduced in the first article of this series. The term “lagging skills” was coined by Dr. Ross Greene in his book, The Explosive Child, and it’s key to understanding WHY a child is behaviorally challenging, as well as how to help them. (1)
Take a moment to think about children you know who are considered behaviorally challenging. They may or may not have an official mental health diagnosis. However, knowing the diagnosis may not help you understand WHY and WHEN those children have outbursts. A diagnosis can validate that a child is different and requires support, but it also directs your focus to challenging behaviors rather than the reasons behind those behaviors. Continue reading Anger in Children: A Shift in Perspective
My child will not turn the tablet off when asked – even after ample warnings about the amount of time left to use it. When I finally have to take it away, my child screams and starts throwing books and toys. It’s not uncommon for me to be hit and told that I’m being completely unfair. I’m so tired of having this fight over and over again.
My student will not transition from free play to the class meeting on the rug without an argument. When I try to reason with them, I get yelled at in response and the rest of the class gets riled up. I can’t go the rest of the school year like this.
Parents, teachers, and caregivers sometimes find themselves in these types of situations. Something comes up that angers a child, and despite the earnest efforts of the adult, the child appears to become more and more consumed by their feelings of anger until the situation gets out of control. Ultimately, the situation is upsetting and frustrating not only for the child, but for the adult as well.
“Anger is a natural emotion that alerts us when something has violated the natural order of how we think things should go (1).” Not only is it normal to feel anger, but it is one of our oldest and most primitive emotions. It’s hardwired in our brain from millions of years ago. Our prehistoric ancestors became angry whenever they felt threatened or disadvantaged. This served as a survival technique and gave our ancestors the motivation and drive to compete for food and mates. While we may no longer become angry to compete for a piece of meat (thank you, grocery stores), our brains still can’t stand being treated unfairly (9).
When we feel threatened, the part of the brain that controls our emotions, called the amygdala, is responsible for sounding an alarm. The amygdala is incredibly speedy at this responsibility – as little as a quarter of a second kind of speedy. It sends signals to other parts of the brain to prepare our body for action. Our heart and breathing rates increase, muscles tense up, body temperature and blood pressure rise. Stress hormones are released into our bloodstream, and blood flows to our limbs and extremities to prepare for physical action – our bodies are ready to fight (1)(4).
Nowadays, most times we don’t need to physically fight someone off when we’re angry. For example, when someone cuts you off in traffic and gets to go through a yellow light while you have to stop at the line as the light turns red, you become angry at the driver of the other car. You might want to scream, or even ram your car into theirs. Thankfully, split seconds after the amygdala sounds the alarm, the prefrontal cortex gets activated as well. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that controls judgment and reasoning, and is responsible for determining how to respond to the triggering event that was recognized by the amygdala. This entire neurological response takes less than two seconds (3). Your prefrontal cortex tells you to take a deep breath, let it go, and keep driving.
The emotion of anger is present in human beings since infancy. Research shows that infants begin expressing anger during the last half of their first year due to the maturation of their cognitive abilities (9). Babies can become frustrated when an adult intervenes in an activity they are trying to do themselves, or when a favorite toy or object is taken away from them. At ages 3 and 4, having to share toys and personal space is a source of frustration. Increased expectations in kindergarten can result in anger (6).
As we explained earlier, our brains alert us when there is something to be angry about, then figure out how to respond to that trigger. In short, our brains are wired to react to an event before determining the sensibility and consequences of our actions. Learning to respond to our feelings of anger appropriately is a skill that has to be learned, not something we’re born knowing how to do. Thus, when babies get angry they respond by screaming and crying, and we have to do the anger management work for them. All through the toddler and preschool years, children are learning to manage their emotions (including anger) in socially acceptable ways. We help young children develop this skill by encouraging them to use their words, helping them identify their emotions, and providing them with strategies such as counting to 10 when angry.
Continue reading Anger in Children: What It Is and When We Should Worry about It