 This episode was prerecorded as part of a live continuing education webinar. On-demand CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register at allceus.com slash counselor toolbox. I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation, Early Child Development in a Social Context. You know, last week we talked about developmental milestones and trying to prevent stuck points. And today we're really going to focus on kids. Last week we talked about, you know, how we could work with adults who didn't have an ideal childhood to help unstuck their stuck points, so to speak. Today we're really focusing on child development in a social context, but some of it's probably germane to adults as well. So we're going to describe the importance of building relationships with children and families, not just the child. You know, we want to understand what's going on the other, you know, bazillion hours that they're not in our office. Describe the relationship between the children's social emotional development and challenging behavior. The behavior means something. They don't just do it for the heck of it. Describe how challenging behavior serves a function for children and describe the relationship between environmental variables, children's challenging behaviors, and social and emotional development. So for example, if you are, you know, running through a very crowded airport to try to make a plane, and the child is tired, you know, those are some environmental variables. And the child is four, you know, they may not have the social and emotional development to keep it all together. Wow, because you're exuding stress and there's lots of people around and, you know, more people means more of an audience. So we'll look at some of those. Identify strategies that can be used to build positive relationships, design environments, schedules and routines, structure transitions, help children learn rules and routines, and plan activities that promote engagement. And we'll finish up by talking about how to use encouragement to support children's positive social behaviors. I know I'm guilty of it with my own children that, you know, too often, I don't give them kudos when things are going well. What I do comment on is when things are going poorly. So I need to make sure that I regularly check myself to make sure that I'm giving them props for doing the right thing. So examining our attitudes about challenging behaviors, we want to think about this from the very beginning, because every person, regardless of whether you're a therapist or a parent or a teacher, we have different buttons. So what behaviors push your buttons? And, you know, think about how these behaviors make you feel. And so for me, one of the behaviors that pushes my buttons is insubordination, back talk, those sorts of things. When my daughter rolls her eyes, I swear I can hear her eyes rolling. And that pushes my buttons because it makes me feel disrespected. How does this impact the child's relationship within the family? Well, you know, that is a power play in the family when the child is being insubordinate, they're testing their limits. What function might these behaviors be serving? And how does this impact your relationship with the child and his or her family? So if you're the therapist, how does this behavior the child's exhibiting affect your relationship? Sometimes parents are going to come in and go, I told you to fix her. Why is she not fixed? So that the parents and the family can get frustrated with us if the child's behavior is not changing in the time and way they want to see it. So again, think about when you deal with kids, which behaviors most truly push your buttons. And you know, if you want to offer some of those in the chat room, I would love to add that in. So for us, what we need to do is manage our personal stress through thought control. When we have upsetting thoughts that child is a monster, this is ridiculous. He will never change. I am sick of always having to follow him around and micromanage or putting out put out fires. Okay, that thought may go through our head. It does. However, you know, then we want to stop. And if you think about psychological flexibility, we've got to remember that there are two sides to everything. And we've got to remember that, okay, this thought, this behavior that the child is doing may be upsetting to us. But what is the function? Organisms don't do things that don't have a benefit. So we want to look at what is the child trying to get out of this? Is the child trying to elicit attention? You know, sometimes when there's a new baby in the house or grandma's over or whatever, children will act out more because they're trying to get more attention. And they may, you know, in this particular example, they may forget to do things and they may get into more trouble. And whenever you think you finally put out the fire and everything's good, all of a sudden they're doing something else. So you want to say, why? What is the child trying to achieve? Are they trying to get boundaries set? Are they trying to get attention? Are they overstimulated, overwhelmed, and they don't know how to deal? They don't know how to calm down? You know, we want to figure out what's the function. We want to think to ourselves that my job is to stay calm and help the child learn better ways to act and react. So if they're trying to get attention, you know, we want to say, I recognize that there have been a lot of changes with your new baby brother, you know, coming home from the hospital. And, you know, you may feel like I'm not giving you as much attention, but this is not the way to get attention. So what can we do to help you feel like you're getting enough attention? You know, you want to talk to them and obviously you want to do it on an age appropriate level. If the child is upset and just doesn't know how to regulate his or her own emotions, which, you know, children aren't born with the ability to self-regulate, we want to help them figure out what can we do? When you feel this way, what do you need to do? And those of you who've been in my classes before know this story, but I will share for the new people. When my son was about two and a half, he was a micro-premie. So he had a lot of issues with getting sensory overstimulation. And he would get overstimulated easily. And when he got overstimulated, he would go, we had his room, we had one wall that was perfectly white, nothing on it. And he would go into his room and just kind of stare at the wall and, you know, he couldn't hear anything. He couldn't, well, he could hear a little bit, but he wasn't being distracted by the TV or people running around or pictures or anything. And it allowed him to kind of get control. And I just remember one day perfectly, I was working in the living room on my computer and Sean walks up to me and he has his binky attached to his shirt. And he goes, Mommy, I'm overstimulated. I need to take a break. Pops his binky in his mouth, walks in, sits down in his fire engine bed and stares at his wall. He came out a little while later and, you know, we talked about why he felt overstimulated, but it was the end of the day. You know, it was probably three or four o'clock and he had had a lot of stuff going on and he knew in his mind he felt like he was going to make poor choices if he didn't get control of himself. So we want to help children learn to identify early warning signs and articulate what's going on and figure out what to do. We can also tell ourselves that, you know, we are the adults. We can handle this. We're in control. The child has learned some ways to get control. They've learned how to push our buttons. Children are really good at this. It's what they do. They're not trying to misbehave. They're trying to figure out how to manipulate their environment. And, you know, how do these things work? If I turn the stove on, it gets hot, okay? If I am disrespectful to mom, she gets hot. So they're figuring these things out. So we want to share with the child there are more appropriate ways to get your needs met. So key social and emotional skills that children need as they enter school. And this is, you know, kindergarten and pre-K. We want to make sure that kids have these skills. So I would encourage you to think about and please share in the chat ways that you think we can help children learn these skills. So the first thing is confidence. They need to feel like they are in control of themselves. They need to feel like they are in control to a certain extent of their environment. And they need to have confidence in the caregivers. They need to have confidence that the teacher in the classroom has their best interest at heart. They need to have confidence that their parent is sending them into a situation that is safe and healthy and growth producing. They need the capacity to develop good relationships with peers and adults. So, you know, obviously helping children develop relationships with peers as they're getting into school. This tends to be easier. There's a lot less bullying, not saying it doesn't exist, but there's a lot less bullying in pre-K and kindergarten. And the few children that do have some acting out issues and biting issues often have something going on somewhere else that is triggering it. So we still want to help them figure out how do you interact with others? How do you share toys? How do you assert yourself? And how do you communicate with adults? Because you don't treat adults the same way necessarily that you treat your peer. They need to have the ability to concentrate and persistence on challenging tasks. A lot of times kids will give up as soon as, you know, something gets tough. They're like, I can't do this and they'll walk away. I remember, you know, when my kids started learning algebra and they're like, I can't do this and they kind of walked away. And it was up to me at that point since they were homeschooled to figure out, okay, what's a better way to teach this? How can I help them figure out how to get through it? Because the way you teach to one person is not going to be the same way that another person learns or another person learns. So I had to learn different techniques such as using manipulatives or giving real life examples. When we learn fractions, we cooked in the kitchen a lot. So, you know, if we needed a cup of milk, I would give them a quarter cup measure and I'd say, how many of these do we need in order to get a cup? And they would learn their conversions that way. So we want to help them be persistent. Even when they feel like giving up, we want to encourage them. We don't necessarily want to do it for them, but we want to help them. They're stepping out of that comfort zone, just like, you know, if you took gymnastics, when you first learned to do a back bend, you didn't just wake up one morning and throw yourself back. You woke up one morning and you went to the gym and your coach spotted you by putting his or her hand behind your back so you wouldn't fall down. And you gradually worked down there. So somebody was there to spot you to help you to encourage you. They need to have the ability to effectively communicate emotions, which means they need to know what they are. So, and with kids, I break the rule of happy, mad, sad, glad and afraid. With adults, I have them use different words, but with kids, especially with little kids, one of the fun things to do is to ask them, what does happy look like? And what does angry look like? And they'll make the face and then we can say, what makes you angry? And kids know this, but they have to break it down. When they're in that mood, when they're in that emotion, it's harder for them to think, just like it's hard for us to think when we're enraged. So we want to help children learn to identify some of these emotions and learn how to cope with them. When you're angry, what can you do? Not hit, not bite. You know, what are some alternatives? They need to have the ability to listen to instructions and be attentive. And especially with kids with ADHD, this can be really difficult. But even for other kids who don't have ADHD, we can't give 15 part instructions. To a six year old, you want to give one or two things. And we're going to talk about ways to develop that and to set up a home or a classroom in order to help children remember. Because sometimes parents will come in and they're just like, you know, he's in second grade. And I'm still having to henpeck him all the way through getting ready for getting ready for school in the morning. So we want to talk about, okay, what are some ways that you could scaffold so you can back off of having to micromanage and the child can be empowered to follow instructions. And the ability to solve social problems, you know, when there's a fight when you need to share, etc. So one of the, let's see. We definitely can encourage and teach these skills by appropriate modeling as parents. Definitely and teachers and counselors. If a child gets us upset, you know, they do something and it pushes one of our anger buttons. We can take a deep breath and acknowledge how we feel put a put a label on it. You know, I'm feeling angry right now. And, you know, then talk it out or, you know, model the appropriate coping behavior so the child can understand. The other thing we want to do with children is they are very egocentric. So if you're having a bad day, children often think it's their fault. So we need to make sure that we set some boundaries. If we're having a bad day and it has nothing to do with that child, we can say, you know what, I'm having a really tough day today. Has nothing to do with you. You know, I'm really happy to see that you're here today or, you know, for a parent, they can say the same thing. You know, mommy had a really tough day at the office today. I am so glad to be home and to get to spend time with you. So the child can say, okay, you know, that's all good because when child children sense stress, they tend to act out more yelling is definitely not helpful. Very true. When you start to yell, the child may become scared, may become intimidated or may learn because you're modeling that behavior that that's the appropriate response. And that's just an aggressive response. So we want to help them figure out what it is. And sometimes the most poignant corrections are when mom or dad doesn't raise their voice. If they're just very matter of fact, it's like, oh, I really did it now. Another suggestion from Kelly was finding an already established skill or something they enjoy or are good at to ground in and compare it from a strengths perspective. So if you're teaching them, you know, something that they're having difficulty with like algebra, you know, let's find something that they're good at. You know, maybe they're good with addition and subtraction and multiplication and figure out how to connect the two and look at the strengths. And then gradually move it forward. Depending on the age, you can use homework with adolescents in which they'll look at the mirror and say three to five positive things about themself each night in order to reshape cognitive distortions. So yes, Zachary, that's an awesome technique for adolescents and even for younger kids to develop that self esteem, the sort of Stuart Smalley approach to self esteem, reminding themself that I'm good. I'm okay. I can do this. And sometimes they can even just look in the mirror and remind themself of two or three great things they did that day. And they open the door for somebody to help somebody who whose locker was stuck or whatever the case may be. When children do not have these skills, they often exhibit challenging behaviors when children don't feel confident. They may withdraw or they may become they may act out because they don't want to be found out when they don't have the skills for emotional regulation or social problem solving. Then they may hit, they may bite, they may become more aggressive. So we need to focus on teaching the skills. We want to look at what was the function of the behavior and what are some alternate more appropriate behaviors that we can teach and use it as a teaching moment. If a child doesn't know how to read, we teach. If he doesn't know how to swim, we teach. Doesn't know how to multiply, we teach. Doesn't know how to drive, we get someone else to teach. I just, we teach. If a child doesn't know how to behave, what do we do? A lot of times we punish instead of using it as a cheap teaching moment. So that was a quote by Tom Herner. And you know, it's really poignant when you think about it because we do a lot of times when children misbehave, we try to eliminate the behavior. Get rid of it. We don't put anything in its place. We don't provide an alternate. We don't teach. We just punish. And eventually you're going to get a child who's like, I can't do anything right. I don't know what the right options are. I know what all the wrong options are. I don't know what the right options are. So basic assumptions. Challenging behavior usually has a message. I'm bored. I'm sad. You hurt my feelings. I need some attention. You know, the list can go on. Children often use challenging behavior when they don't have the skills they need to engage more appropriate interactions. They don't know how to deal with their anger. They don't know how to handle it if somebody is hogging the ball and won't share it on the playground or, you know, took their turn at in circle time. Behavior that persists over time is usually working for the child. Remember, I said, children, people don't do things that aren't rewarding. So we want to look at what's the reward to this. And sometimes even getting sent to time out or to the principal's office is a reward. And you're like, well, how can that be? Well, because the child was triggered in some way and they needed quiet. They needed time to get their thoughts together and they needed to shut the stimulation out for a little while. So we really want to look at what's the benefit. We need to focus on teaching children what to do in place of the challenging behavior. Create an environment where every child feels good. Not every child is going to be able to do everything that comes along. I remember when I was, you know, in school, I was awful in gym class. You know, that was like my least favorite class because, you know, I knew that that was not my thing. So I always dreaded going to that class. We want to create an environment where every child feels like they have some control and can have some successes. Design an environment that promotes child engagement. So ask them what they want to do. This isn't always possible in school. And it's not always possible at home. But you can give children options. You know, we need to eat dinner right now and do these things. But you know, once those things are done, what do you want to do? So provide a reward for the child. So they feel like, okay, if I play ball here, then I'm going to be able to get something out of it. Focus on teaching children what to do, such as teaching expectations and routines and skills that children can use in place of challenging behaviors. Again, like you guys have pointed out, we need to model these behaviors. We need to help children learn from the very beginning. I know when I would take my kids to the doctor, I always hated taking them to the doctor because I felt like such a big bully because it was always for a shot. And they always looked at me with those eyes like, why did you do this to me? But before we would go, I would acknowledge we're going to the doctor. I know it's kind of scary. You know, what can I do to help you through it? So they could start putting a word or feeling to what their physiological response was. And they could start feeling like they had some control and we would talk about, you know, what was going to happen. In order to build relationships, we want to help each child feel accepted in the group. Help them find their strength, their niche. You know, when I used to work at a residential facility, therapy groups, you know, in-depth processing therapy groups, those aren't my strength. I can do individual, I'm great. I can do psycho-education, great. Intervention, great. Therapy groups, not so much. It's not my favorite. Can I do them? Yes, but there were definitely other people who were more talented who, you know, maybe didn't like to do or didn't feel as talented at psycho-ed groups. So we want to look at what can each child do? What can you bring to this? It's like a football team. You know, when you have a football team, there are a bunch of different positions. And not every child is going to be the quarterback or a linebacker or a running back. You know, each child has their own unique strengths. And we want to find those and help the child see their strength in the situation. Even if it's just, all right, your strength is your persistent. Assist the children in learning to communicate and get along with others. And, you know, we want to help children at this age really take other people's perspectives. How do you think Johnny felt when you did that? And if the child's like, oh, okay, how would you feel if Johnny did that to you? Well, that would make me angry or it would hurt my feelings. Okay, so if it would hurt your feelings, do you think it might have hurt Johnny's feelings? And help them work through that even if you have to do it piecemeal until the child starts developing that automatic emotional intelligence. Encourage feelings of empathy and mutual respect among children and adults. So we can do activities and that help children figure out, you know, what somebody feeling help them learn to read nonverbals and help them feel. When my son was in kindergarten, we was the time when Hurricane Katrina hit. And, you know, his, his dad was law enforcement and was going up to help in Mississippi. And I was in charge of the Katrina, you know, the people that were coming to our area, we had a grant for that. So we were both kind of immersed in Katrina stuff and he was going to school and you know everything was good. And I really didn't think much of it should have, but I didn't. And I remember one day, oh, he was just pushing my every button because he was not getting ready on time. He was not coming when I asked him to. We had to leave. He was going to be late for school and I was just, I was getting frustrated and I had to take a breath and because he wouldn't come. And finally we, I got him in the car and we got to school and I walked him into his classroom and he promptly walked up. And he had been going around the house looking between seat cushions and stuff and finding change. And he pulled change out of his pocket and put it on his teacher's desk and he said, this is for the people that were in the storm. And I was just like, oh, I feel so bad for getting frustrated with him. He wasn't going to tell me what he was doing. He had a mission and, you know, he had empathy for those people, even though he wasn't there. And children can get this from watching the news with us. So we do want to pay attention to how they're reacting and how they're feeling about what they see on TV. And we want to provide a supportive environment in which children can learn and practice appropriate and acceptable behaviors as individuals and as a group. That seems pretty self-explanatory. Children learn and develop in the context of relationships that are responsive, consistent and nurturing. And this is one of the challenges that a lot of, you know, not only parents, but teachers face. You know, we are, as clinicians, we generally see the child, you know, once a week. It's pretty easy to be consistent once a week. But for teachers that are seeing them all day, five days a week and parents that have them seven days a week, you know, it's a little bit more difficult to be consistent because, you know, life gets in the way. And, you know, they can have a bad day at work or, you know, maybe some other child is acting out or maybe they didn't sleep well the night before. So they let some things go that day. So consistency is really important, which is when I work with parents, I say, you know, rules are good. Rules are great. Children do crave structure, but too many rules, you're not going to be able to consistently enforce. And if the child figures out a way around it, and they will, then you're going to be fighting a losing battle. So make the rules manageable. Make them in a way that we can explain the reasoning for those rules, you know, why you have to be in bed at eight o'clock, why you have to brush your teeth, etc. And they need to be nurturing. They need to be rules that are going to help the child grow into productive human beings, not, you know, don't talk, don't trust, don't feel, sit over there, be quiet and watch TV. You know, that's not real nurturing there. So we want to make sure that we're responsive. Children with the most challenging behaviors need positive relationships, yet their behaviors often prevent them from benefiting from those relationships. Think about kids, you know, their attention span is not very long. When we do time out, we say one minute in time out for every year the child is old. So when they're in first grade, that's their six. That's six minutes. Six minutes is a really long time to a six year old. So, you know, it makes sense when, you know, a child is having to behave all day long in school and, you know, they're having to hold it together and try to keep it on the green light. And then they come home after doing that for six hours. And they're just like, they run wild. They have all that pent up energy and it's just like, finally, I can breathe. I can let it loose. And it took me a while to understand that. But when we allow children to, you know, get out some of that excess energy, we want to help them direct it towards a positive interaction. What can you do? All right, we're out of school. Some kids just cannot go from school to doing homework to whatever. They need time to be kids for 30 minutes or an hour. So we want to say, okay, if you have a good day at school, we can go to the park or whatever. And sometimes, you know, we want to look at whether taking away the particular behavior or the particular activity is effective. Because, you know, if my kid came home from school and he'd been pent up all day and he had all this excess energy, but I found out that he had a bad day at school. He still has that pent up energy. And if I say, no, you can't get it out. You've got to go home and start your homework. How's that going to work? Because the child probably doesn't have the skills to hold it together. So we want to make sure that we're consistent and we're cognizant of what they have control of. You know, how long must it seem to be in school for six hours when you're six? Adults' time and attention are very important not only for corrective attention, but also positive feedback. So greeting the child when they get up on time and, you know, making small talk and giving them positive feedback when they have a good day at school or when they say something funny or when they have a good idea, you know, saying, wow, I never thought about it that way. You know, it gives kids a sense of pride. They're like, hey, cool. And parents are critical partners in building children's social and emotional competence. So like you pointed out, we want to make sure that parents have the interpersonal skills and the assertiveness skills and the coping skills to model what they need to for their children to model how to deal with arguments with somebody else, etc. So what can we do to build these positive relationships? We can play with them. We can play. There's obviously turn taking and we decide what to do and there's compromise and there's all kinds of cool stuff that comes out of just playing and it can be a card game. It can be, you know, in the summer, you know, how do you think we should make a slip and slide? You know, we always just got a shower curtain and a water hose, but, you know, you can encourage children's creativity. You can go out there and play and you can let them see that it's okay to have fun. Empathy. We want to be empathetic with them. What seems devastating to a six-year-old? You know, we may be looking at it and going, you know, okay, so Tommy was irritable with you. He'll get over it. Don't worry about it. But to a little kid, that can be extremely devastating because they don't have 30 years of experiences that we do. So we want to be empathetic with how they're feeling, what's going on. We can send happy grams, little notes in their lunchbox that just say, way to go. Thank you for doing the dishes or whatever to make sure that kids know that you love them and you've noticed when they're trying to do the right thing. You can send notes home if they do really well in session. Encourage teachers to send notes home if they do particularly well on a given day. Give kids time and attention. A lot of times that's all they want. Home visits are things that we can do in order to see the environment, but also to let the child know, hey, I want to know more about you. I want to know more about your environment. And we can share, you know, share our ideas, share our time, share our ice cream cones. And that can help build positive relationships and teach children how to share. Positive, another positive reward can be screen times, you know, how much time they get to watch TV. And that's a great reward that you can give. And sometimes if you want to use screen time and build relationships at the same time, you can make, and we have mandatory family movie night every Friday. My kids are teenagers, so they got to the point where they didn't really want to play games or anything anymore. So I had mandatory movie night and, you know, no, we're not doing a lot of talking, but we generally end up talking after the movie. So build relationships with children. If they've got friends at school that you want them to build relationships with, you can get pictures and put pictures of their friends around their, around their bed or in their room so they can look at their pictures of their friends or their cousins or their siblings. So thinking about how you build positive relationships with children and as a clinician, or as a, you know, whatever your role is, clinician, parent, grandparent, how do you build these relationships? And one of the things that I shared before is definitely knowing your own strengths and weaknesses. One of my strengths is, you know, I'm willing to go to the park, you know, I can do outdoor stuff. I'm great with that kind of stuff. I can do stuff in the kitchen. Great with that kind of stuff. I have no imagination. So tea parties and imagination games just go over my head. I can play board games. So I generally have a selection of things out there and if the child really wants to do pretend games, I'm like, you know, I'm not very good at that, but maybe you can teach me. Well, we build relationships with families. We want to make sure that we're not setting an identified patient or to the converse, blaming the parents for the child's behavior. The child is doing what the child knows how to do and the parents are doing the very best they can with the skills and tools they have. One thing I have found in order to help modify parents' behavior is to provide a coping skill like the ABCs or something that we want the child to learn. But you also want the parent to learn. You're like, parent could benefit from this. So I will teach it to the parent and I'm like, it's really important that when Johnny starts to get upset this week that you help him walk through this. So, you know, if you would practice it with him every single day, so he can learn it. And so the parents learn it in order to teach Johnny, but it makes the parents learn it and it helps kind of the whole family system instead of me going, well, it seems like you can't cope with anything. So let me see you in counseling and, you know, maybe Johnny's behavior will get better. You know, it's a two-part thing. So we've got to work it from both perspectives. But parents are generally really willing to try anything, any tool that they can teach their child to help their child behave better. We want to brainstorm a list of things that we could do to build and or strengthen relationships with children, families and colleagues. And this is a good list to have. So when you've got some downtime, you can reach out and do these sorts of things. Just to let them know you're there and you care. Identify two to three things that you're going to do to build stronger relationships. Okay. Ideas for making deposits in that piggy bank of relationship-ness. Greet every child at the door by name. So if they, you know, come in. Same thing if you're a parent, greet your children by name. And, you know, I'm one of those parents. I'll get frustrated about something and I'll get kind of flustered. We'd be in the middle of, you know, Sam's Club or something and I'd be like, boy child, come back here. You know, it happens. My grandmother used to go through every single child's name before she would find the right one. She had five. But we want to make sure that when the children come down, when they're doing something good, we greet them by name. We let them know that they are important. They're not just boy child or girl child. Post your children's work up. And as therapists, post children's work up. You don't necessarily have to have their name on it for confidentiality reasons. But children feel a great sense of accomplishment if something makes your wall. Encourage parents to have the child share one special thing or accomplishment at dinner each night. You know, so go around the table and say one good thing I did today was talk to a child's parent in front of them to say what a great day the child had or send home positive notes. You know, sometimes parents just come in and pick junior up. Therapists and teachers can both do this. Have parents praise children in front of family members and create a star chart. So we really want to make sure that everybody in the family hears the good stuff. But not everybody in the family necessarily hears the corrective stuff. Teach the parents to pull the child aside and go, OK, that's not working for me right now. Let's talk about what else to do. After a difficult day, say I'm sorry we had a tough day today. I know next time is going to be better. So sometimes kids will come in and they will not participate in counseling or it will be a bad day. Just encourage them. All right, today's done. Next time we're going to have a clean slate and we're going to start over again. And make sure to give high fives and thumbs up for accomplishing tasks. Watch your nonverbals when you're working with people from different cultures because sometimes high fives and thumbs up are not considered OK. Right on a T-shirt, all the special things about a given child and let him or her wear it. You know, it can be their T-shirt of pride. Or this child can make the T-shirt themselves. Acknowledge children's efforts. Find out what the child's favorite book is and read it to him or her. You know, sometimes you can't do this in a session. But you can, if you don't have clients like back to back, you may have an extra 10 minutes. I have a whole set of books called Skippy John Jones. And I just love those books. So sometimes we'll read Skippy John Jones. Give compliments liberally. Play with them following their lead. And let children make all about me books and share them at dinner or family time. This increases confidence and it reminds them of what's good. And then if they have a bad day, we can go back and look at this book because children tend to be very visual. Look at the book and remind them that there's a lot of good stuff about them. OK, they had a bad day. Let's learn from it, but it doesn't detract from who they are as a person. Develop a schedule that promotes child engagement and success by balancing activities. Nobody can be active 18 hours a day. So you have to balance active and quiet time. And each child is different. My daughter tended to be much calmer and, you know, she would, she was steady throughout the day. My son, on the other hand, when he was awake, he was wide open and then he would crash and he would sleep for like three or four hours. And then he would get up and he'd be wide open again and then he'd crash. So you want to know your child's or have the family know the child's rhythms and what works for them. Balance out family and individual time. And this can be having the child in a group, you know, with the family doing family stuff as well as having the child work independently, you know, have some quiet time where they're just off coloring by themselves and they're not getting as much input. You also want to have time where it's just a parent and a child. So it's one on one, but without the rest of the family. There are parent directed and child directed activities. Encourage families to strive to have some child directed activities every day. You know, maybe whatever it is they do after dinner or whatever it is they do after school, but before homework time. In order to give the child a sense that they've got to say in things. Teach children the schedule, establish a routine and follow consistently. And when changes are necessary, if possible, prepare children ahead of time. A lot of children have difficulty adjusting to change. And so we want to let them know ahead of time that okay tomorrow we're going to have a birthday party. Before we start lessons for the day. Instead of just kind of dropping it on them right then and there. Teach with visual prompts. Obviously this works really well for young kids, but it also works well with older kids who have any cognitive deficits or fetal alcohol spectrum issues. So washing hands. Make a chart that looks something like this. Obviously use representations that the child will recognize they may not recognize this is soap. I kind of thought that was orange juice, but so make a activity analysis chart for them and post it above the sink. That way they know what they're supposed to do in the morning. You know, they you can have a schedule that's posted on the back of their bedroom door that tells them what they're supposed to do first thing in the morning to help them get ready for school. And you want to review these posters with them periodically in order to make sure that they remember they're there and know what they mean. Plan for transitions. Children have difficulty switching gears. You know, it's something some kids do better with that than it with a do better with it than others. But in general, we want to help children with Trent transitions. So we want to minimize the number of transitions that they have during the day. You don't want to be switching gears every 30 minutes. Minimize the length of time children spend waiting with nothing to do. Remember what I said earlier for a six year old, six minutes is a long time. So when you're standing at a long line at the grocery store, when you're sitting in the waiting room at the doctor's office waiting for an airplane to come, children are going to get bored. You know, if it's longer than a couple of minutes, they're going to start getting bored. And when they get bored, they get curious. They start looking around and wanting to touch things. And, you know, they're curious. They're little scientists structure any transition so that children have something to do while they wait. Now with the advent of mobile devices. Most kids get this, but you do want to make sure that they have something like when you're flying and you can't access necessarily something on a mobile device. Make sure they have something to color with. I used to love when we'd go to restaurants that had coloring stuff on the back of the menus for the children and for me. But we want to make sure that children have something positive to do with their energy and their curiosity during this blank time. Prepare children for transitions by providing a warning in five minutes. We're going to leave the park and go home. You know, when you get finished with taking a bath, then we're going to read a story and get ready for bed. Make sure kids know what to expect. And if you can provide a warning about what's going to happen, teach children the expectations related to transitions. You know, in school, when they make transitions, maybe from the classroom to the lunchroom, they're expected to line up in single file, hold hands, do whatever they're supposed to do. They need to know what they're supposed to do or they're not going to do it. We can't assume that they know. We also can't assume that if we teach it on Monday, they're going to remember on Tuesday. So we want to repeat these rules periodically as well as have the chart up there. So your visual learners and your auditory learners are getting it until it's ingrained in everybody. And individualized supports and cues. Some people will need a little bit more nudging to get going. One thing you can do is have transitions with a visual and a timer. This works really well for TV time. If you've got multiple kids in a household and they only watch one TV, for example, they can have their picture and a timer. So they get to watch TV for an hour or they get to choose what's on TV for a particular hour. Other transitions with visual choice, you know, center time at school or after school have pictures of what you could do and have them up there. And then the child can choose from those cards, if you will, what they want to do. And, you know, in a classroom environment, two children can't do the same thing necessarily. So once somebody chooses this card, whatever it is, then nobody else is going to be able to do that. So then they start learning how to take turns and share and compromise. For family activities, we want to encourage families to plan activities but consider the length. You know, when children get tired, they typically emotionally dysregulate. They typically start acting out, you know, they're sleepy. They want to go to bed. Their goal is to get you to take them home. And if they act bad enough, you're going to take them home. So we want to consider the length and, you know, also extraneous factors. If you're going to the zoo, for example, the length normally on a 78 degree day, you could be there maybe six hours and the child would be fine. But if it's 95 degrees outside and they're just sweating buckets, they're probably going to get tired sooner. And so are you. So we want to encourage families to think about what is a doable length for everybody involved. Be clear about the purpose and goals of the activities. Are we going just to have fun? Are we going to get exercise? We always have that discussion when we go hiking in my family because when I go hiking, I'm going hiking for exercise. I want to see, you know, if I can keep my heart rate up and see how fast I can get through the trail. But, you know, other people in my family want to take pictures and they want a lolly gag. And so we have to have a compromise about what are we going to do if mom's going to go and hike for exercise, then we're going to meet up at the end of the trail. That way nobody gets their feelings hurt. Use family circle time to teach new things. So if something new needs to be taught, maybe grandma's going to come start living with the family. Family has to have circle time to figure out how that's going to change the routines that are going on. Implement the activity. Provide opportunities for all people in the family, not just the children, to be actively involved in planning the activity. And assign jobs to kids. If you're going hiking, kids can get water bottles filled. They can pack snacks. There are a lot of things kids can do even when they're knee-high to a grasshopper. Vary your speech and intonation patterns when you're working with them and giving instructions. You want to sound excited, not stressed, not irritated, curious, maybe. You want kids to get excited about the activity. If it's something the child can lead, occasionally have the child lead the activity. And pay attention to their behaviors. Family activities are really important, that everything we just went through, because it helps children build skills. They help learn how to plan and organize and create an activity, which they're going to need to do later in life. It helps them learn how to take other people's perspectives into consideration. It helps them develop all kinds of social skills. And it also provides them some individualized attention, because, you know, you're going to be interacting with each child. And generally when you're doing a family activity, hopefully, you know, everybody's not on their device texting or whatever. It's time where the children are getting attention. When you're planning and implementing, make sure to ensure the parents are clear about the goal. What are we going to do? You know, if you're going to grandma's house to visit grandma because she's been sick, that's very different than going to grandma's house to play and get in the pool. Encourage them to use peers as models. Ensure participation by all children. You know, you don't want one of the kids just falling back. Make it fun and provide feedback throughout the process. So if they're doing really good, you know, if you go to Disney World, the lines can get really long. So provide feedback. If the kid is standing in line and being patient, you know, even if you're starting to feel impatient, you can thank the child for being patient because you know the line is really long and it's frustrating. When you give directions, get the child's attention before you give the direction. Too often parents are just hollering up, you know, so and so you need to take a bath. You don't know if it's heard or not. I always have to have an acknowledgement in my house now that my kids are older. When they're younger, you want to make eye contact. You want to see them to get their attention. Minimize the number of directions given based on age. You know, really little kids can probably only handle one thing at a time. Go get your laundry and bring it to me. All right. Now what's the next thing we do? Older children can generally handle a few more things unless they've got ADHD, which you may still need to minimize the number of directions given, or if they've got some sort of cognitive deficit. Individualize the way directions are given. Some children will do really well if you just tell them, bop, bop, bop, this is what needs to be done. Other children need it written down and they need a chart to follow. You know, work with the child. Give directions that are positive. Instead of stop hitting when you're angry, don't hit. We want to say when you're angry, take a deep breath and go walk, go walk around in your room or something. So instead of stop doing this, what is the child going to do instead? Give children opportunities to respond to a direction. Ideally, especially with younger kids, have them repeat it back. So ask them, you know, I need you to go get your laundry and teach them to say, okay, mommy, I'll go get my laundry. So they learn how to paraphrase and you know that they heard you. When appropriate, give the child choices and options for following directions. You can do it this way or you can do it this way. And let them figure out what works best. You can take a bath or you can take a shower, but somehow you've got to wash that body. Follow through with positive acknowledgement of children's behavior. If the child goes and takes a bath and, you know, does a good job remembers to wash behind their ears. You want to give them kudos for it. When you're making rules, have a few simple house rules. Involve the children in developing the rules. Post them visually, teach them systematically and reinforce them at high rates initially and then lower rates throughout the rest of the time. So initially when we learn something, we typically need more frequent rewards in order to get it ingrained because change is hard. But then over a while, once it becomes a habit, you don't need to have as many rewards presented. But again, make sure to keep it, keep the rules minimal. Only the ones that you know that you can consistently monitor and enforce. Have children help generate the rules and name the rule and have the child demonstrate it. Like we used to have, when we would go into stores or wherever, we used to have something called library voice. And my son's favorite place in the world with the library. So that was good for him. And we named it library voice so he would know what that meant. Have children identify visuals that might go on a poster and have them decorate a rules poster if you've got rules. And this can be really helpful if you're getting ready to go to grandma's house, for example, where there might be different rules than there are at home. You can make a rules poster before you go and go over it so the child knows what to expect. So this is an example of a rules poster for preschool. Rules should usually address noise level movement inside i.e. no running in the house. Interaction with property, what is okay to touch what's not okay to touch. Are you supposed to put your toys back when you're finished playing with them. Interaction with adults and interaction with peers and parents. So, you know, what are you supposed to do with the family reunion. Give children attention when they're engaging in appropriate behaviors. You know, we've said that one. But we also need to monitor our behavior to ensure that we're spending more time using positive descriptive language and less time giving directions or correcting inappropriate behavior. So again, instead of saying don't hit don't bite don't back talk, you know, we want to say, I see you're angry right now. What it what would be a better choice to communicate that anger. Observe a recording of yourself or the parent with the child. That way you can identify whether you're paying positive attention and, you know, have a little video camera set up, whatever. Count the number of positive comments made and positive nonverbals. It's not always a verbal comment. Sometimes it's a smile or a pat on the back or a hug. Explore what types of comments and nonverbal behaviors were exhibited. Generate some ideas to help the parent remain focused on the positive throughout the day. How can their focus on the positive if, you know, little Johnny is not adjusting to having a baby in the house and is is acting out. What are they focusing on and include some of these ideas on an action plan to create an action plan for the parent. What I need to do to help Johnny develop the skills that he needs. So when we talk about increasing positive behaviors, we can talk with the parent or the teacher, for example, and say, what are three to five behaviors you would like to see increase, you know, what are you looking to see what positive changes. You know, we're not talking about eliminating, you know, so if the teacher says, I want them to not get out of their seat so much. Okay, that's a negative. What's a positive I want them to stay in their seat. All right, how can we make that workable for students because again, sitting in a chair is get gets really boring really quickly. Ask the teacher or the parent, why aren't those behaviors occurring now, you know, why are the children not staying seated. Why are the children not putting their toys away. What behaviors are occurring and why you know if they're not putting their toys away. Maybe it's because there's been no reward for putting toys away. And it takes effort to put toys away so path of least resistance. What changes can the parent or teacher make in their use of positive feedback and encouragement to increase the behaviors they identified in that action plan. So again, we're focusing on the positive. What are we adding? Why aren't those behaviors occurring. The final thing, you know, we said positive encouragement, you can put the notes in their lunchbox, etc. You can also give them sample certificates. You know, if they've been a really good friend to somebody, then you can give them a certificate that explains why they did such a good thing. And they can feel happy about that and they can display that at home. The first and most important thing that we can do is to build positive relationships with every child. Children are curious. Children want to connect. Sometimes they don't know how if they're not connecting with you, it's more likely that they don't know how. We want to focus on prevention and teaching appropriate skills. So if a child is shy, for example, you know, we want to respect their boundaries and slowly teach them how to be more confident. We want to promote social and emotional development. But remember that there are no quick fixes to challenging behavior. If the behavior is occurring, it's occurring for a reason because the child doesn't have an alternative that they know of. So they have to learn that alternative. If you learn to play the piano, you don't become Mozart overnight. So changing behaviors takes a while and children are not going to be perfect. Heck, we're not perfect. So we can't expect children to be. So we need to encourage parents to have patience and chart a baseline so they can see the positive behaviors increasing. It requires a comprehensive approach to building relationships that includes evaluating the home environment and behaviors and teaching the children what to do instead. A couple other comments that y'all made. And yes, Heather pointed out, we want to focus on the positives and acknowledge these because we typically not only do we comment on the negatives more often, but sometimes we can bring out the negatives more often. So we do want to focus on, you know, ourselves, what can I do to bring out the positive behavior in my child? What is what's going to make it rewarding for my child to, you know, sit still through church or whatever. We do want to provide direction for the right behavior rather than just telling the child what not to do. I think I shared with you in the last class that a place that I just went and did a thing. It was a church and they had these little bags at the beginning at the entrance to the sanctuary that had coloring books and crayons. It had something for the kids to do during the sermon so they wouldn't get bored and they wouldn't get up and wander around. So instead of saying, don't get up, they were saying, here, you know, why don't you color? Because then you're not going to want to get up. Are there any other questions? You guys had a lot of great things, I think. And Pat, yes, I have to say I'm guilty. I've gone through the list of names and the dog's names have gotten in there too sometimes if I'm just that flummoxed. That's usually when it's really noisy and I'm just like trying to figure out who to tell to quit making noise. Yes, feed the flowers and pick the weeds. We want to feed the flowers, which means reward positive behavior. And then the weeds are the unhelpful behaviors. We want to pull those out and put flowers in their place because when you pull out weeds, then the flowers can go in its place. All right, everybody have an awesome day and I will see you on Thursday. Use coupon code COUNSELOR TOOLBOX to get a 20% discount off your order this month.