Archive for October, 2016

SUNDAY STRATEGY: Listening & Building Self-Regulation in Kids

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8 years
by in Uncategorized

Last week, I had the joy of bringing LSCI Certification training to the staff at my “home” school–Circle of Seasons Charter School in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania.  We spent four days learning about, talking about, watching videos about, and role playing various situations about how to effectively reach and teach challenging children and youth.

One of the things that makes LSCI so powerful of a strategy with students is that it gives adults very specific skills with which they can learn to LOOK BEYOND SURFACE BEHAVIOR and understand the unique beliefs, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings that drive disruptive or disrespectful behavior.  LSCI teaches that effective listening is the path to self-regulation in students and show adults the importance of how to listen in order to:

  1. de-escalate
  2. understand a child’s perspective
  3. build insight and understanding
  4. cultivate trusting relationships
  5. teach new skills
  6. create long-term changes in behavior
  7. and so much more!

If you’d like to learn more about this powerful training experience, I invite you to visit www.lsci.org, contact someone who has recently attended an LSCI training, or email me at swhitson@lsci.org.

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How to Listen so that Kids Will Talk About Bullying

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8 years
by in Uncategorized

In the last several years of working as a School Counselor and speaking with professionals, parents and students across the United States on the topic of Bullying Prevention, one of the observations that stands out to me the most is that parents, in general, are very eager to talk about bullying while their kids, on the other hand, seem to want to do anything but talk to their parents about this topic. The more parents pry, the more kids withdraw. The more parents push, the harder kids pushback—with excuses, minimizations, abrupt subject changes, stonewalling, silence, and sometimes even complete denial that a peer problem exists.

Why is it that so many young people are so loathe to talk to their caregivers about bullying? The more I ask students this question, the more often they tell me some version of this frustrated rationale:

“If I tell my parents, they are going to make a big deal out of it and tell everyone what’s happening to me.”

Or

“If I tell my parents, they’ll rush into school to try to meet with the Principal, which will definitely make things way worse for me.”

What can parents, caregivers, educators, and other trustworthy adults do to help a young person feel safe enough to confide in them about a bullying situation? How can you make your child feel supported—instead of embarrassed or endangered—enough to tell you when they really need your help?

When I ask school-aged kids how they would like their parents to respond when they tell them about a bullying situation, again the responses are nearly universal. Most commonly, kids tell me, “I just wish they’d listen.” This is frequently followed by, “I wish they’d give me some advice but let me try to handle it on my own first.”

What follows are five guidelines for parents and professionals on how to listen well and respond in helpful ways when a young person reports an incident of bullying:

1. Stay Calm
First and foremost, when a young person takes the leap of faith to talk to you about a bullying situation, stay calm. Avoid freaking out. The dynamics they describe may be very run-of-the-mill or they may be entirely appalling, but either way, your role as a helpful adult is to listen well and respond as if the situation is completely manageable. The steadfastness of your response will go a long way in shaping the child’s attitude as the two of you begin to move forward toward solutions.

 

To read the remaining five guidelines about how to listen well to young people so that they will talk honestly about bullying, please visit the original posting at Psychology Today.

Why Mental Health Training is Essential for Classroom Teachers

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8 years
by in Uncategorized

“The Failing First Line of Defense” is a fantastic, important, insightful article by Jessica Lahey in The Atlantic that shines a light on the gap in mental health training traditionally offered to classroom teachers–who are so often a student’s first line of defense when it comes to revealing mental health issues.

Certification in the skills of LSCI is an excellent way to bridge the gap and help educators gain understanding of and competence in brain-based, trauma-informed, mental-health intervention strategies. Find out more at www.lsci.org or email swhitson@lsci.org to plan training for your staff.

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/10/the-failing-first-line-of-defense/504485/

 

Look beyond behavior

How to Recognize & Respond to Passive-Aggressive Behavior

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8 years
by in Uncategorized

Through my work as a child and adolescent therapist and a school counselor, I have seen how destructive of a force anger can be—both when it is expressed in uncontrolled, aggressive ways, but also when it is acted out in highly controlled but hidden behaviors, such as passive-aggression.  Passive aggressive behavior as a deliberate but covert way of expressing feelings of anger (Long, Long & Whitson, 2009) and is most often motivated by a person’s fear of expressing anger directly. The pa coffeepassive-aggressive person believes life will only get worse if other people know of his anger, so he expresses his feelings indirectly, using a variety of behaviors to subtly “get back” at another person.  While anger itself is generally experienced as an uncomfortable emotion, the passive-aggressive person derives genuine pleasure out of frustrating others, hence our label of the behavior as “the angry smile.”

If your interactions with a child, a parent, a teacher, a student, a spouse, a co-worker, a boss, or even an online acquaintance leave you feeling like you have been on an emotional roller coaster, chances are good you may be dealing with a passive aggressive person.  Some of the most common red flags of this behavior include things like:

  • Withdrawing and sulking, rather than stating opinions or needs.
  • Using words like “Fine” and “Whatever” to shut down a discussion.
  • Procrastinating or carrying out tasks inefficiently
  • Giving lip service to doing things differently in the future, while knowing they don’t plan to change their behavior.

The ultimate red flag is that passive-aggressive people cause others to eventually blow up and in a very real sense, act out the anger that the passive-aggressive person had been silently harboring.

There are many reasons why people choose to sugarcoat their anger but what most passive-aggressive people have in common is that they grew up with developmental conditions that made hidden expression of anger feel like their only tenable choice.  For the purposes of this post, let me lay out two distinctions:

  1. First, we know that some young people are raised in families where they know they will be met with harsh physical punishment or retribution if they express dissatisfaction or unhappiness.  Kids walk on eggshells around angry, aggressive, authoritarian adults, and learn quickly that their only safe option is to hide their true feelings.
  2. At a different extreme, there are kids who grow up in families in which appearances means everything. The normal, human emotion of anger must be subordinated to family facades.  In this type of outwardly perfect family, kids are socialized to believe that anger = bad and that good kids never show anger.

In both type of upbringings, kids learn that open, honest, direct expression of anger would be unacceptable.  And yet these feelings don’t just disappear.  Rather, they tend to re-surface through patterned, but covert misbehaviors such as carrying out chores incorrectly or pretending not to hear their name when they are called—things that create minor but chronic frustration for the authority figures in their lives.

There are five distinct and increasingly pathological levels of passive aggressive behavior, ranging from the everyday to the truly troublesome.  Learning to readily recognize the behavior at any level is your first step toward avoiding being drawn into a passive-aggressive conflict cycle—a power struggle with no winners.

To learn more about the 5 levels of passive aggressive behavior, please read the remainder of this post on its original site on Psychology Today:

 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/passive-aggressive-diaries/201610/understanding-passive-aggressive-behavior

 

PA Facebook

What Kids Can Do to Stop Bullying

0
8 years
by in Uncategorized
It’s National Bully Prevention Month! Please join me as we work to teach kids the skills they need to stand up for themselves and others, to show compassion always, and to be known for being kind.
 
bystander

Signe Whitson is an author and educator on bullying, crisis intervention, and child and adolescent emotional and behavioral health. In her articles, books, and training workshops, Signe provides down-to-earth, practical advice for professionals and parents on navigating the daily challenges of living and working with children, tweens and teens.

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