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    Believe Children: Understanding and Help for Children With Disordered Behaviour
    Believe Children: Understanding and Help for Children With Disordered Behaviour
    Believe Children: Understanding and Help for Children With Disordered Behaviour
    Ebook175 pages2 hours

    Believe Children: Understanding and Help for Children With Disordered Behaviour

    By Cynthia Rodgers

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    About this ebook

    By understanding how neurological processes can be influenced by the environment and interactions with others, we can then focus on helping all children survive and thrive. There is help for children and parents who feel traumatized by our society and culture and it starts with looking at the basics of skill development and acquisition necessary for appropriate behavior. This book details how neurological systems get derailed and then offers suggestions on how to help change the thinking and emotions that trigger disordered thinking. It also details how behavior change works and how you can apply these techniques to yourself and others.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateOct 15, 2017
    ISBN9781543915617
    Believe Children: Understanding and Help for Children With Disordered Behaviour

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      Believe Children - Cynthia Rodgers

      Bibliography

      Introduction

      Fill me with the strength of spirit and help me keep my fears at bay.  Stay with me and help me win the battle I face today.

      Avril Ann Weryk

      I have seldom known a period of time when I was not dealing with abuse in one form or another. I lived through the horror of my childhood feeling isolated and lonely because of the violence I witnessed at home. I then chose a profession that brought me face to face with abusive situations and behavioural issues suffered by children. As a mother, I encountered firsthand the distress and frustration parenting a child suffering from unacceptable school behaviour. And then there were my own mental health issues.

      I remember days in high school when it was impossible to get out of bed. Severely depressed, my shame and my pain covered me like a lead blanket. I wanted to do well in school and I wanted to graduate, so I gathered the courage to tell my teacher what was happening at home. I hoped she would help me, as it was her morning class I had the hardest time getting to.

      I paid a high price for confiding in this teacher. As I talked, I watched the disdain and judgement come over her face. She told me I was lying and was only missing school because I was lazy. There is absolutely no reason for you to miss school! she claimed. She then called my parents and told them what I had said to her.

      When I got home from school, scared, angry and frustrated, I was thrown across the kitchen and slammed against the refrigerator. My head hurt. I was stunned, frozen - filled with intense fear. To this day, that fear still haunts me. The teacher I had confided in refused to talk to me for the rest of the school year…. and my feelings of shame, isolation and loneliness only increased.

      Determined to help other children survive the quagmire of school, I entered a profession where I thought I could help children deal with issues most people don’t have to think about. Optimistic, I worked long hours in an effort to help children who misbehaved at school.

      After 10 years as a student counsellor, my optimism destroyed, I recognized that violence, aggression and anxiety in children were steadily increasing - not just in the number of incidences I was dealing with, but in the severity as well. After 25 years in this profession I had seen and heard things in our schools that stopped me from sleeping at night. I no longer felt safe at work.

      In 2004, there were four documented school shootings in North America, with one person killed and six people injured. Ten years later, there were 43 shootings causing nine deaths with five people injured. In 2009 a U.S. Government survey showed more than 60 percent of children were exposed to violence either directly or indirectly in their homes, schools and communities creating an increase in stress. This percentage was much higher than the number of adults during the same time frame..

      Exposure to violence or trauma leads to long-term physical, psychological and emotional harm which can be documented as brain damage. These children were more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol; suffer depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder; fail or encounter difficulties in school; and become delinquent or engage in criminal behaviour. According to the FBI there are fifty to one hundred serial killers operating in North America at any given time and many of these will go undetected forever. Canada’s youngest convicted serial killer admitted he was 19 years old when he first killed.

      All of us are on a journey of discovery, which can be enriching, destructive or both, depending on how we view and then incorporate what we learn along the way. I slowly sank into the realization that the established education and mental health setting was not helping and was perhaps doing harm to some children. At the same time, one of my own children began exhibiting anxiety, and I experienced, as a parent, how the school dealt with his misbehavior.

      During his school years, getting my son to school was often preceded by a fight. He wanted to stay home from school because he was feeling sick; because someone was bugging, bullying him; because there was nothing going on at school, etc. At school, he suffered from social anxiety, but we did not know this at the time. In Grade One, he was caught skipping and, for most of his elementary education, he would complain of wanting to throw up before school started for the day. When we talked to his teachers, they recommended we force him to go. When he threw up at school they would chastise my husband and I for sending him there.

      A couple of years after he graduated, my son explained that he managed high school by getting the assignments from his teachers when he could, working on them alone, in the library and handing them in at the end of the day. Only a couple of teachers ever allowed him to do this. For the rest attending class was mandatory.  Even though he is gifted in many ways, he feels intense fear around numerous people and this can become so strong that he will be physically ill. If his fear gets high enough he will throw up.

      I found myself in a peculiar situation, surrounded by conflicting viewpoints and hostility because we would allow our son to take breaks from school. Feeling both astonished and isolated, I came to understand the trouble my son was having at school and the troubles most of my student ‘clients’ were experiencing seemed to bear many similarities. I asked parents, children and teachers questions about their experiences and really listened to what they had to tell me. I stopped feeling isolated, because these people felt many of the same things I was feeling. One parent described the interaction they had with the school concerning their behaviourally challenged child saying;

      "Our education is made for a certain type of child, who learns in a certain type of way, and my child just didn’t fit."

      Educational curriculum delivery is much the same today as when it was first developed some 150 years ago. I understand and acknowledge that the focus of our current school system is on learning a wide range of subjects. Research in education goes toward finding better ways to teach the average student. It is programmed to meet the needs of the larger population. And the methodology for dealing with children manifesting ‘abnormal’ behaviour in our schools is still all about discipline in the form of punishment.

      The group of students I dealt with (including my son) was a small percentage of the total student population and there were no alternative strategies available for those that just didn’t fit.

      The methods used by schools to control unwanted behaviour did not seem to help decrease a child’s at risk behaviour and I began to wonder if they were possibly contributing to the increase in self-destructive behaviour I was witnessing. I started regarding the behaviour itself as a strong indication that something was wrong.

      I found consistent emotions – anger and a desire for revenge went hand in hand with these at risk behaviours. Whatever was going wrong, it was causing these children to act out in anger. Their attitude and behaviour was actually a desperate cry for help.

      Recent research into school shootings suggests that child killers are primarily motivated by anger and revenge. This research also suggests that killing was the final coping strategy – a way of making themselves feel better. At work, I often heard children talk about killing. Sometimes it was about video games; sometimes animals; sometimes it was about adults or peers; and sometimes it was all jumbled together.  These children also had limited coping and resiliency skills. I had many students exhibiting fear-based reactions in the forms of anxiety, eating disorders and school refusal. I was forced to take off my rose-colored glasses and felt dismayed at the emotional stress our children were dealing with. I could see the link between a child’s ‘abnormal’ behaviour and serious school and mental health issues. I became convinced that the tried and true methods of school discipline were not working with these students. In some cases, the discipline procedures of punishing these children – who were already suffering – made their behaviour worse.

      Punishment forces the child to change his or her mannerisms - to become quieter and more manipulative. Punishment only changes outward behaviour and does not get to the motivating factor, or the thought processes and emotions behind the behaviour.

      When I look at our communities and our country, I realize the use of punishment to control abnormal behaviour is still epidemic. But not everywhere. A promising indication this might be changing, was finding isolated pockets of areas, schools and educators; bright lights who were trying alternative methods with the behaviourally challenged student. Many of them were using the Ross Greene’s Collaborative Problem Solving method. This method works for all who are struggling because it teaches the skills necessary for behaviour change.  

      Ross Greene’s approach of teaching the deficient skills behind behavior works.  When I asked my clients what they thought of the approach, most of the children expressed relief. Parents said, It helped to have a person at the school who has my child’s back. The feedback I got seemed to tell me that the change from a punishment type method of discipline to that of a teaching one was worthwhile for all those involved; but I still felt there was more to discover.

      The ‘abnormal’ behaviour fascinated me and it became a puzzle I wanted to piece together. Why do these children behave the way they do in the first place? What goes on in their brain that makes them think a certain behaviour is acceptable in any given situation?

      I interviewed adults who had manifested these ‘abnormal’ behaviours when they were children, and also the parents of these former children. Some of the questions were:  Did your educational experience help or hurt you? How did this experience help or hurt your ability to overcome the behaviours you were punished for? What helped and what didn’t help when you were dealing with mental health issues within the education system? When, did you feel you finally got the help you needed?

      I found many common threads and common methods that helped - and some that made problems worse. A surprisingly high number of students did not get the help they needed with their behavioural issues until they were out of the education system.

      Parents knew the problems their children were having at school. They knew these problems impacted their child’s education and they knew the impact the education system was having on their families. Yet, both parents and children said they felt powerless, because the school system is so deeply and rigidly entrenched. The clear majority of parents said they didn’t want to say anything to the school about what their child was going through, because they didn’t want to make it worse for their son or daughter. The children (now adults) I interviewed all talked about feelings of isolation, shame and loneliness. Most of them admitted trying many different ways of getting help and, when none of them worked, they resorted to various inappropriate methods of avoiding school.

      A big part of my

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