Meaner Than a Junkyard Dog

Academy MetroWest uses cooperative, non-competitive physical activity as a vehicle to help kids see themselves in a more positive light and to interact better with their peers. While there’s more to any improvements in social skills and self-image than playing a bunch of games with other kids, using games that bring the focus away from kids vs. kids competition is our foundation. When kids are playing cooperative games, they feel relaxed, have fun and attain consistent success. At any given time, we’ll have 100 – 150 different activities in our active rotation. For most of them, if there is competition, it involves kids working together against adults. Over the years, some of the games that we’ve done have gone in and out of our active repertoire but some of them will always be important parts of our groups. For me, our best game is Junkyard Dogs.

Like many of our activities, Junkyard Dogs is a cooperative tag game. In these activities, we construct a base or safe area for the kids’ team. All around it, we scatter lots of stuff – usually small plastic cones (Our stock in trade – just ask anyone who’s ever been here) or foam balls. The goal for the kids’ team is to leave the safe area, collect one object at a time, and bring it back. While they do that, counselors try to tag them or hit them with a foam ball. If  a kid gets tagged, rather than becoming “it” or being eliminated, he or she is frozen until another kid tags them to get them back into the game. Initially, kids may hear the message that once they’ve collected all the cones, they win. Then they become intently focused on collecting cones. If they forget to look out for their teammates, the adults are able to reduce the number of kids actively playing. Once the number of kids gets whittled down to 1 or 2, they figure out that the adults have a pretty good chance of winning but if they’re working together and saving each other, they’re going to win just about every time. The message we’re trying to emphasize is that being in a group involves more than just looking out for your own immediate self-interest. You also have to be aware of other people’s needs and then be able to take some risk or initiative to help them. The more that happens, the better the group does and the more an individual does that, the more likely it is that others will do likewise for him or her. Many of our games, including Junkyard Dogs, are variations on this theme.

In Junkyard Dogs, we create a safe zone for kids at one end of a large play space. Outside the safe zone, we scatter 4 different kinds of objects. We start, as always, with small plastic cones. Then we scatter some hula hoops, some cardboard cylinders (We get them from paper companies who use them as the cores for very large rolls of paper. Just think of the cardboard part of a roll of toilet paper big enough for the Jolly Green Giant to use) and a few folding mats all over the place.

 

Academy MetroWest participants working together during a game of Junkyard Dogs.

As in many of our games, the kids have to work together to collect all those objects while a counselor tries to tag them. In this game, however, there are a few complicating factors. For the 4 different types of objects that the kids have to collect, there are 4 different ways they have to do it. For the cones, it’s the same as always. Individual players leave the safe area, collect one cone at a time, and bring it back while a counselor tries to tag them. For the hula hoops, a player can leave the safe area and pick up a hoop but, by him or herself, cannot move with it. However, if another player joins in and holds on to the hula hoop simultaneously, the two of them can bring it back to the safe area together. Not only that, but as long as they’re both holding on to the hoop, they can’t be tagged by the counselor. With cylinders, it takes 3 kids working together to collect them and be safe. With mats, it takes 4. Once all the objects are collected, the kids win the game.

The part of Junkyard Dogs I like the most is that it’s impossible for kids to succeed  without talking to each other or working together. Many times, kids will focus on collecting cones first but when they’re all collected, they realize that they need to join in with other kids to get the bigger stuff. It’s a great game to use as an ice breaker when working with a group for the first time. Kids on the social periphery get drawn in and little sub-groups or cliques get disregarded. It gets the kids talking to each other and working and having fun together.

For me, working as a counselor, Junkyard Dogs and games like it provide kids with an avenue in which they can have fun and success. Over time, they come to view working together with other kids as something fun and positive and they develop more confidence in their ability to make connections. Kids feel less stressed than they might in more a more competitive context and often become less defensive. This often leaves them more receptive to social feedback. Instead of hearing my feedback as just more adult nagging about their behavior, they’re more likely hear it as helpful tips coming from an ally.

For kids, it’s just a really fun game.

Recently, I thought about Junkyard Dogs after reading an article I came across in The New York Times. The author, a professor at Northeastern University, describes a study he had recently published. He writes:

 “..the psychologist Piercarlo Valdesolo and I conducted an experiment ostensibly about music perception — but that actually investigated how feelings of compassion might be increased.

Our hunch was that compassion is easiest to feel when you have a sense of commonality with someone else. So we paired up participants in teams: one real participant and one confederate. First, they had to tap their hands on sensors to tones played over earphones. In some cases the tones led them to tap their hands in synchrony; in other cases, the tones led them to tap their hands in a random mismatching manner.

We next had the participants watch their tapping partner get cheated by another confederate, which resulted in the partner’s erroneously being assigned to complete a stack of onerous word problems. As our participants were leaving, they were informed by an automated message that if they desired, they could help complete some of the work assigned to their partners. If they did so, we timed how long they spent working on the task.

The results were striking: the simple act of tapping one’s hands in synchrony with another caused our participants to report feeling more similar to their partners and to have greater compassion for their plight: it increased the number of people who helped their partner by 31 percent and increased the average time spent helping from one minute to more than seven.”

Maybe this is a stretch, but after I read this article, I thought of Junkyard Dogs. I’ve played this game with some really contentious groups before. Kids who really couldn’t stand each other. Somehow, when we play Junkyard Dogs, they always seem to get it together. I’m not going to be so pompous as to say that playing this game made those kids more compassionate or led them to magically heal and become friends to the world. But, if the act of synchronous finger tapping can bring out the compassion in people, just think of the love they must feel after a game of Junkyard Dogs!

Reference:

DeSteno, David. (2012). Compassion Made Easy. New York Times. SR12. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/opinion/sunday/the-science-of-compassion.html

Because Then We Wouldn’t Be Playing Foosball – Thoughts on Gender Differences

In the 2 minutes each year in which I’m not working or with my family, my favorite thing to do is to play music with my band.  Since 1998, I’ve been writing music, singing, and playing guitar with 3 of my closest friends. If the rest of the world felt the same way about our music as we do, we’d be superstars by now. Even though all of us believe quite firmly and sensibly that we’re the next necessary step in the evolution of rock and roll, Flail Like Ed has not made it big….YET. Collectively, we’re 4 middle aged, suburban, professional dads who get together 2 or 3 times per month and try to convince ourselves that we’re still in our 20’s.  It keeps us sane. Or somewhere in the neighborhood.

We practice at my friend Al’s house. Our friend Kevin used to rent a room upstairs and when we finished jamming, Kevin would come down and join us for some foosball. Kevin and my wife get along really well and when I got home each week, we’d have a dialogue that was frighteningly consistent. Here’s how it went:

Sarah: How was band practice?

Me: Great!

Sarah: How are the boys?

Me: Everyone’s good.

Sarah: Did you see Kevin?

Me: Yup.

Sarah: How’s he doing?

Me: Good, I guess.

Sarah: What do you mean, “I guess?” Didn’t you talk?

Me: A little. Mostly we just played foosball

Sarah: Why didn’t you talk?

Me:  Because if we were talking, then we wouldn’t be playing foosball.

Foosball has been a big part of band night for a long time. This is our latest group portrait.

This dialogue occurred to me earlier this week after I read about a study posted by The Odd Bird, one of my favorite bloggers, on her Facebook page. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA, used a type of brain imaging called diffusion tensor imaging to examine the differences in neural connections among men and women. The authors found that women’s brains contained many more connections between the left and right hemispheres than men’s brains do. The connections in men’s brains were predominantly within the same hemisphere. The authors concluded that women’s brains were wired specifically for social skills and memory while men’s brains seem tailored for connections between perception and coordination. I’ve spoken to a few people about the study and got a bunch of reactions along the lines of “Well, duh….” To me, it’s a compelling study because it suggests that stereotypical personality differences between men and women stem from more than just socialization or environmental factors. They’re also partially rooted in distinct neurological differences.

So on a personal level, it’s not surprising that I choose to spend my free time on an activity that emphasizes the link between perception and coordination (playing guitar in a band) while one of my wife’s regular social outlets involves conversation and social connection (taking part in a book group).

The authors found that up until early adolescence, there weren’t that many differences in the connectivity patterns between boys and girls. Between the ages of 14-17, subjects’ brains start developing those differentiated connections. This came as a surprise to me based on some of the differences I’ve seen in my work.

At Academy MetroWest, we use cooperative, non-competitive physical activity as a means of helping kids improve the way they view themselves and interact with others. One of my favorite games we play is Tiger Pit. In it, we place a big crash pad a foot or two away from a wall. We position it so it’s standing on its long end so the top end is about 5 feet off the ground. A group of 6 kids or so starts off between the mat and the wall. Their goal is to get the entire group over the mat without knocking it over. It’s an open-ended task and there are a million different ways to go about solving the problem. Before I set the kids loose to start working on it, I usually do a bit of prep work with them. I tell them that there are lots of different ways to play this game and they need to make sure that everyone has a chance to voice their ideas. I emphasize that the challenge is not just getting one person over the mat – it’s getting everyone over. This usually requires a plan aimed at helping the kids who aren’t great at climbing.

When I’m doing this activity with a group of boys, it doesn’t seem to matter how much I prep them and make suggestions. Their initial approach never varies. They ignore my advice, blow each other off, fling themselves at the mat, and let the chips fall where they may. They get a little frustrated and in a series of successive approximations, they eventually solve the problem through trial and error.

Academy MetroWest counselor extraordinaire, Callie Ernst, in the Tiger Pit. In the game, there would be 5 or 6 kids all trying to get up and over the mat.

The last time I played this game with a group of girls was a couple of years ago with a very cohesive bunch of 13 year olds. To say that they took my suggestions to heart is a vast understatement. Once I finished my instructions, I let them go and they all sat down in the pit and started talking about it. And talking about it. And talking about it. They worked on finding a way of attacking the problem that was efficient and practical but they were also diligent in making sure that no one’s feelings got hurt. It was pretty impressive stuff but if I hadn’t stepped in to get them to stop planning and put their ideas into practice, I think they’d still be there today.

In thinking about the study, it became a little clearer to me just how hard it must be for girls who don’t have the level of social cognition or awareness that most of their peers do. Boys also have a social maze to navigate but many of them find it just as easy to make friends through mutual participation in an activity as they do through the more abstract means of conversation. For quirky girls, the differences between them and their peers can be very stark. Even the most rudimentary conversations require a certain level of processing speed, reciprocity, and social  sophistication that many quirky kids – boys or girls – don’t have. Particularly as girls approach adolescence, the social world can be brutal for kids who don’t fit in neatly with their peers. It’s one more reason for all of us to be more tuned in to the needs of this chronically under identified and under served population.

Oreo! Oreo! Oreo! – A Tale of Natural Consequences

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in my office with a group of 3rd grade boys. We were finishing up our session with a snack and a quiet activity – to the extent that doing anything with a group of hyperactive 3rd grade boys can be quiet. As I asked the boys what they wanted for snack, one of them saw the box of Oreos in my snack bin and got pretty excited about it. He expressed his excitement by blurting out “Oreo! Oreo! Oreo! Oreo! Oreo!….” After hearing him carry on for a little while I let him know that repeating “Oreo! Oreo! Oreo!” wouldn’t help him get snack any faster and then I asked him to stop. He stopped. For about 5 seconds. Then you’ll never guess what he did.  He said “Oreo! Oreo! Oreo! Oreo! Oreo!….”  At this point, a couple of the other kids looked at him and asked him to be quiet. So he did. About 5 seconds later, he shocked everyone (not really) and said “Oreo! Oreo! Oreo! Oreo! Oreo!…..” At that point, a few of the other kids looked at him and kindly and respectfully and with well-modulated volume (not really) told him, in no uncertain terms, to shut up!

After hearing this reaction, Oreo Boy looked at me and said “Did you hear that?!?!? They told me to shut up!!!”

My response was “Well, I asked you to stop saying ‘Oreo! Oreo! Oreo!’ The other kids asked you to stop saying ‘Oreo! Oreo! Oreo!’ That’s a pretty clear message. At some point, if you don’t respond, kids are going to get irritated with you and that’s what happened.”

Our friend just learned a valuable lesson about natural consequences.

Helping kids see the effects their actions have on others, right in the moment, is a powerful way of helping them improve their social skills. Kids with social skills delays come to Academy MetroWest with a range of cognitive, emotional, or psychological issues, but what most of them have in common is difficulty in recognizing and responding to social cues efficiently or intuitively. Using natural consequences as a teaching tool is a helpful way of showing kids the role they play in their own social difficulties. In the moment, the lessons can be painful. It’s not easy for people to hear that what they’re doing is rubbing others the wrong way. In the long run this new knowledge can be a big relief for kids as they learn that their problems don’t exist in a vacuum. Going through life believing that you’re being rejected or ignored for no reason or for unfathomable reasons can leave kids feeling helpless, depressed, or angry. Knowing the connection between what you do and the way others respond doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to change your behavior quickly or easily. But it can give you a handle on the situation and can be a great place to start the learning process.

Two of the most common issues associated with social skills delays are ADHD and Autism Spectrum Disorders. The presence of either one leaves people prone to missing social cues but the reasons for missing them vary.

Let’s look at a hypothetical boy with ADHD but who is otherwise functioning normally. We’ll say that he’s in a group that has just finished an activity. I ask the group to move to a different activity area and sit down, so we can start our next activity. If I have a group of 6 kids, I might actually get 1 or 2 of them to comply right away with that directive. There might be another 1 or 2 who got sidetracked but when they see me walk in they think “Ooh! He’s coming, I’d better sit down.” I repeat the instructions again and another 1 or 2 kids move over to the bench and sit down. That leaves 1 kid who might still be kicking a ball around or otherwise straying from the course. Pretty soon, that kid’s bound to hear it from his peers. When he does, he and I might have the following discussion:

Boy:”Did you hear what they called me?!?!”

Me: “Yes I did. It wasn’t very nice was it? Any idea why they might have said that?”

Boy: “I know why they said it! Because they’re jerks – that’s why!”

Me: “Well you’re certainly entitled to see it that way but let me tell you what I saw. I made my expectations pretty clear. I asked everyone to come into this room and sit down so we could decide what we’re going to do next. What these guys were telling you – maybe not in the nicest way – is that they felt like you were wasting their time. Now you have a choice. You can keep doing what you were doing – knowing how they’re going to react and that there’s not much I can do about it or you can sit down and take part in helping us decide what to do next. That means you’re going to have to sit and focus, which can be hard, but it also means that they’re going to stop bugging you.”

Our hypothetical kid missed social cues because he was distracted and overstimulated. Had he been looking in the right place, he may have seen the other kids looking impatient, derived the meaning behind their facial expressions, and responded appropriately. For other kids, particularly those on the autism spectrum, they can  be looking in exactly the right place and still miss the message.

For instance, let’s take another hypothetical kid – this one on the autism spectrum. He walks in with a joke he’s just learned and tells it to the other kids in his group. The first time he tells it, he gets a laugh from his peers so he thinks to himself “Hey – if they laughed when they heard the joke once, they’re going to think it’s hysterical if I tell it 10 more times!” He gets a laugh one or two more times but before long, the other guys start rolling their eyes. He continues telling the joke until they all tell him to can it. When I talk to him about it, I might ask him if he noticed when the other boys began to roll their eyes. The response I’m likely to get is either that he didn’t notice their facial expressions at all or that he did but had no idea what it meant. My response would be to say “When you see people roll their eyes like that, they’re letting you know they’ve heard enough and they’d like you to stop. When you didn’t respond, they got irritated and told you to cut it out.” In explaining it that way, I’m using a strength shared by many kids on the spectrum (concrete language skills) to point out natural consequences related to one of their weaknesses (recognizing and responding to visual cues).

Using natural consequences can be a great way for parents, teachers, counselors, or anyone who interacts with kids on a regular basis to help sharpen up kids’ interaction skills. They’re most effective when they’re used immediately after the interaction in question so that the critical events are still fresh in everyone’s mind.

I Love Public Schools but….

Bashing the US Public Education system has become so popular that it seems to be giving baseball a run for national pastime. You’ll get no argument from me if you say the system has its faults. But taken as a whole, there’s a good deal more that’s right with our public schools than there is that’s wrong with them. In my work, I often act as a sounding board for parents as they consider the educational options available to them and their children. For the families I work with, most of these options fall within the domain of special education. Our discussions are pretty far ranging but most of them conclude with me pointing parents and children towards their local public school districts. Some of my reasoning is a matter of pragmatism. School districts are not that interested in picking up the tab for placing kids in private schools. Usually, when you seek funding from your district to pay for placement in a private school, you’re in for a long, unpleasant, expensive battle. Even putting pragmatism aside, our public schools often provide an educational experience that is comparable to or better than those found at most private schools.

School systems have good reason to be stingy when it comes to funding outside placements. Recently, I looked at a database of Chapter 766 approved private schools in Massachusetts. I found 10 schools that have been frequent destinations for kids I’ve worked with. Of those schools, the yearly tuition ranged from $35,097 to $87, 048 per student, with an average of $57, 086. According to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the average teacher’s salary during the 2010-2011 school year was $70,340. So do the math. For many districts, funding just one student in a private school means that the district can no longer use that money to hire another teacher and, in the process, lower their average classroom size.

During that same academic year, the statewide average in Massachusetts for per pupil expenditures in the public schools was $13,361.

My support of public schools is not limited to financial considerations. My favorite thing about them is that they’re legally required to provide a free and appropriate public education to every child in their district. In Hunter S. Thompson’s classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his attorney notes that in America “Even a werewolf is entitled to legal counsel.” Well guess what… In America, that werewolf’s offspring is also entitled to a free and appropriate public education. Though the quality of the work varies tremendously from school to school, districts are required to do whatever they can to maximize the odds of success for every student. Parents have rights designed to compel  their public schools to do right by their kids – a state of affairs not often found in private schools.

Most of the battles I’ve seen taking place between parents and school systems revolve around the Individualized Education Plan (IEP) process. Parents often feel that their children are entitled to more services than the district is willing to provide. Special education administrators have to balance a legal mandate to provide services to all qualifying students with the constraints of an unyielding budget. There’s never enough money to provide services to everyone who needs or wants them. One of the main functions performed by every SPED director is saying “no” to a lot of unhappy parents, which goes a long way in explaining the high turnover rates for that position. When it’s your own child who you feel is being unjustly denied the opportunity to thrive in school, it’s easy to become angry or frustrated during this process. But overall, schools are doing an admirable job of managing a demanding, underfunded, and often contentious process.

But…

There are a few aspects of special education in which our public schools are clearly falling short. I’m not talking about specific services or procedures that are being over or underemphasized. I’m thinking about mindset issues that affect the lens through which schools view our kids and families.

In my experience, the area in which our public school special education system falls short most often is in the tendency to ignore the role that a child’s experience in school has on his or her family dynamics and relationships. I’ve seen this take shape most often in battles over homework and in overall mood and behavior when kids get home from school. To this end, there’s an image that forms in my head when I think about a typical school day for many kids with learning issues. The image starts out with that kid approaching the entrance to his or her school in the morning. They pause before the door, take in one massive breath and  hold it all day. Through classes, recess, lunch, transitions, and the ride home, they don’t exhale. Only when they get home to the safety of mom or dad (usually mom), do they exhale and when it happens it’s not pretty. All the anger, frustration, sadness, self-doubt, and crankiness that have been building up at school all day come down the track like a steam train heading for that child’s family. When parents tell teachers or other school professionals about this, the reaction is often “Hmmm…he’s never like that at school.” While the school professionals don’t come out and say it, it’s hard for parents to hear that message as anything other than “You’re not doing a good job of parenting.” The truth is that their child’s emotional reactions at home are often the direct result of good parenting. Kids know that the consequences for losing it at school are much more socially and behaviorally penalizing than they are for losing it at home. They figure that home is a safe place and it’s mom and dad’s job to like them even when they’ve lost control.  On top of this, add the imperative for parents to bug their exhausted kids about homework and you find some badly frayed relationships. Schools may feel that what happens outside of their doors is somebody else’s problem but it’s hard to see how a damaged parent/child relationship is not a potentially mortal threat to that child’s school performance.

Another problem that needs to be faced is the tendency in many schools to allow a child to “crash and burn” before they are willing to provide services. I’ve seen this over and over again with elementary school kids who have problems with executive function. Many of these kids can do fairly well in the early grades when school work tends to focus on the acquisition of facts. However, around 4th or 5th grade, things  change. The kids who succeeded in 2nd or 3rd grade when they could tell the teacher the capitals of every African nation now get overwhelmed when they’re required to write 3 paragraphs about just one of them. I just spoke to one parent who described how her son’s anxiety level in the early grades increased with every open ended task he faced. As he entered 5th grade and those tasks became a regular part of the school day, he shut down. He became aggressive, tried to run away from school, fell asleep in class repeatedly and was eventually hospitalized. The school system eventually offered him an outside placement that his family accepted and he’s doing much better this year. The frustrating thing is that with a little foresight, the district could have predicted this outcome and mitigated it with much less expense to their district and anguish to this family. Certainly, it’s not always possible to predict which kids are going to react this way, but in some cases, that conclusion is impossible to miss and schools need to be proactive rather than reactive.

That child’s story brings up another problem. That is the pervasive tendency in our schools to let learning issues go unaddressed until or unless behavioral issues enter the picture. The kids who sit quietly in class and don’t bother anyone tend to fall through the cracks while the squeaky (or deafening) wheel gets the grease. This happens all the time to girls with learning issues and is one of the reasons they are so chronically underserved. When parents ask “What should I do about it?” I’m always tempted to have them instruct their daughters to start throwing stuff at teachers just to see how fast the wheels start turning. If you’re wondering, I haven’t actually said that to anyone (yet) but the temptation is always there.

In mentioning these problems, I’m not trying to be that guy who opens a conversation by saying “You know what your problem is?” and then goes on to list about a million of them. Many of our schools already have the tools necessary to provide support to the kids that need it. All I’m suggesting are a few small changes to the mindset that goes into special education and the IEP process. But these small changes could have big, long lasting effects on some of our kids’ school performance and maybe even bigger positive effects on the relationships between kids, parents, and schools. And, (particularly given this week’s Red Sox victory), baseball seems to be working out just fine as our national pastime anyway.

Evidence Based?

Once I start reading a book, it has to be utterly abysmal before I decide to give up on it. The book I’m reading now is putting my resolve to the test.

The book is called The Optimistic Child. It’s written by an eminent psychologist named Martin Seligman. Those of you who took Intro. to Psychology in college may be familiar with him as the man who first described the phenomenon of learned helplessness, which is an insightful and immensely helpful model of depression. As psychological theories go, it’s pretty great.

So when I read that Dr. Seligman has been at the forefront of a school of psychology called Positive Psychology, I was intrigued and wanted to learn more. I looked over the list of books he’s written, read the reviews, and decided to buy The Optimistic Child. I work with kids. I’m the father of a kid. It would be great if they were all optimistic. I want to help them become more optimistic. What could be bad?

Well… the book. The book could be bad.

Because it’s Martin Seligman doing the writing, I have to assume that the studies he used as the basis of the book were impeccably designed and implemented. But some of the techniques he recommends for parents to use with their kids left me scratching my head. I found them way too mechanistic and contrived to be practical. Besides, if I tried getting any of the kids I work with to react to stories featuring characters named “Gloomy Greg” or “Hopeful Heather,” they’d never want to talk to me again.

There’s a distinct possibility that my negative reaction to the book has less to do with it being a bad book (though it is) than it does with the fact that it so perfectly embodies our current societal fixation with all things evidence based. This fascination with quantitative research in the realm of human learning, emotions, interactions, and overall development is rooted in well-intended quests for “best practices” for our kids. But in striving to quantify everything, we’ve lost sight of the big picture.

I wasn’t always like this. When I was in graduate school, I was a believer. Why should anyone pay money or place their child’s mental health in the hands of someone who provides untested treatments? If there’s no valid, reliable research on an intervention, how can we know it’s effective? All we have to go on is the word of the practitioner and their self-interest has to leave them irretrievably biased.

In many respects, I still stand by those concerns. Psychological and educational research has greatly expanded our knowledge and has led to the creation and implementation of all kinds of new tools we can use to help our kids learn and grow. What concerns me now is that quantitative research has become the be-all and end-all in determining what services we’re going to collectively support and which ones we’re not. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it weren’t for some of the shortcomings inherent in conducting research in these domains. Here’s an example:

As a requirement for earning my master’s degree, I had a choice between doing a thesis or taking comprehensive exams, which were widely considered to be a joke. When I was in grad school, most of my behavior reflected one of two possible conclusions about my psyche: 1) I wanted to push myself as hard as I could to show myself exactly what my capabilities were or 2) I kept giving in to a relentless masochistic streak that pushed me in new directions, each one more labor intensive and torturous than the last. It was probably a combination of the two. At any rate, I did a thesis. It involved recruiting and administering surveys to over 120 subjects, re-learning statistical analysis, teaching myself a computer language to analyze said statistics, and making countless revisions based partly on my own perfectionism and partly on an indecisive and forgetful thesis advisor. Shortly after I turned it in, I asked that same professor, who I greatly admired despite his quirks, about another research idea I had. At the time, I had just started working at The Academy of Physical and Social Development, a program that was the seed for what became my current practice, Academy MetroWest. I thought it would make for an interesting study if I could look at outcomes of kids’ participation in the program. My professor agreed that it was a good idea but cautioned that intervention research is really difficult to pull off successfully. You have to develop detailed protocols that dictate exactly how counselors should respond in any number of different circumstances. Then you have to take steps to assure that the counselors you’re observing actually follow the protocols. If you don’t, there’s no way to prove that what you’re measuring is the intervention you want to measure, rather than just the effectiveness of particular counselors who are all responding to kids in different ways.

I never pursued the idea. The challenge was too daunting. However, that conversation I had with my professor stayed with me and led me to think more skeptically about research in my field. Even if I had written up that protocol and had the authority to get our staff to follow it, would I have been measuring what I claimed to be measuring? I don’t think so.

One of my counseling heroes is Carl Rogers. He was the psychologist behind Client-Centered Therapy, one of the most widely used and accepted models of counseling. Rogers’ ideas went a long way in describing and mapping out the mechanisms at work within the counseling relationship. In his 1961 classic On Becoming a Person, Rogers writes:

“It has been found that personal change is facilitated when the psychotherapist is what he is, when in the relationship with his client he is genuine and without ‘front,’ openly being the feelings and attitudes which at that moment are flowing in him. We have coined the term ‘congruence’ to try to describe this condition.” 1

With Rogers’ model in mind, it’s difficult to imagine how a counselor who is following a  research protocol is being congruent, which Rogers described as one of the most important aspects of counseling. So, my study would have measured something reliably but I’m not really sure what.

But there’s another problem with this type of research and this is really where the heart of the problem is: Some things just don’t lend themselves to being quantified or measured. If I were to have undertaken that study, I would have examined just how big an impact the services delivered had on the two stated goals of the program – enhancing self-image and social skills. Social skills are comparatively discrete and, to some extent, lend themselves to being quantified and measured. Skill based programs like Social Thinking are frequently studied because, with some reliability and validity, you can measure the frequency with which program participants use the specific skills being taught. But what about self-image? There are questionnaires out there that purport to measure self-image. They’ve been through reliability and validity research and the people conducting those studies claim that they’re a credible way of measuring a person’s sense of self-worth. I just don’t buy it. For one thing, self-image is such an abstract concept that, on its surface, it seems crazy to try to attach numbers to it. Even if you accept the notion that a questionnaire could measure self-image in the moment, it doesn’t account for a phenomenon that I, and many other clinicians, have experienced on more than one occasion. I’ve worked with plenty of kids over the years who left the program without appearing to have internalized anything that we were working on. Then, a few years later, I’ll get a visit, a phone call, or an email from that kid saying that he kept having a hard time through his teenage years but then, at some point, he remembered something I used to tell him during groups and it occurred to him that I was right. He then used that realization to help him get his act together and have success. That type of outcome is no less important than any other but it’s not likely to be reflected in any quantitative outcomes.

It’s this same dynamic that makes me cringe when I think of how obsessed we’ve become with standardized testing as THE way to measure learning and achievement and when I see the zealotry in our society attached to pursuing anything that claims to be evidence based. So when you read about some intervention that did not stand up to empirical examination, it’s important to ask if that finding has more to do with the nature of the intervention or the nature of research itself. Or maybe I’m just being “Gloomy Greg.”

1) Rogers, Carl R. (1961). On Becoming A Person, Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin Company.

ADHD Anonymous

“ADHD?…they used to think I had that. Now they know I have Mad Cow Disease!”                -11 y.o. Academy MetroWest participant

When new kids enroll in our program, the first step in the process is undergoing an initial interview. We run through some activities in our gym with them to help us get a sense of their physical skills, overall developmental level, and personality. Then we spend some time in the office with their parents. Part of that process involves collecting background information on their child to help us make an appropriate group placement and to give his or her counselor some context to work with. One of the last things we do is to ask the parents what goals they’d like to see us address with their child.

Given that this is a social skills program, most of the goals revolve around issues such as developing greater awareness of social cues, becoming less rigid, focusing on how their behavior impacts other children and the like. In most cases, the goals that parents set are realistic and appropriate. However, there are instances in which we need to help parents develop a fuller understanding of what is and what isn’t realistic.

One of the most frequent misunderstandings arises with parents of children with ADHD. ADHD is a neurologically based disorder in which the primary symptoms are impulsiveness, distractibility, and hyperactivity. So when we ask parents of children with ADHD what they’d like to see us address with their kids, it’s not surprising that we often hear “Well, I’d like to see him become less impulsive.”

I have both an internal and external response to parents in those instances. Internally, my response is usually “Well, so would I but I can’t do anything to help you there.” So far, MY impulse control has been sufficient to squelch that response before it gets anywhere near enough to my mouth to create problems for me. My verbalized response is usually a much more respectful and responsible explanation about  realistic expectations with kids who have ADHD.

First off, let me say that the primary symptoms of ADHD can often be addressed quite well through a number of different types of interventions. Medication, usually but not always stimulant medication, as well as alternatives like neurofeedback can offer effective ways of managing impulsiveness, distractibility, and hyperactivity. There are plenty of other treatments out there, with varying levels of empirical support behind them, that purport to help people get a handle on the core symptoms of ADHD.

When working on the formulation of realistic goals, in the context of a social skills group,  with parents of kids with ADHD,  I like to use the Alcoholics Anonymous Serenity Prayer as a guide:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,         the courage to change the things I can,                                                      and the wisdom to know the difference.

Aside from the comedic potential of an “ADHD Anonymous” meeting –

“Hello, my name is Bob and I have ADHD”

“Hi Bob”

“I’d like to talk to you all about my experiences with distractibility and impulsiveness but I got so wrapped up in what I was doing that I forgot to bring my notes and…Oh look! A bird just flew by the window!”

– there is good reason to focus on what’s realistic and what’s not realistic when dealing with kids who have ADHD and it all comes down to a focus on self-image.  A parent who focuses efforts on pushing their child to unattainable levels of performance is going to engender a good deal of resentment, frustration, and conflict with that child. For children with ADHD, even if they find the proper medication and work diligently at improving their behavior, it’s inevitable that they’re going to do some impulsive things and get distracted at inopportune moments. These issues need to be addressed but with the proper understanding of the underlying issues and challenges they entail, along with a realistic set of expectations for continued improvement.

So if one of the tenets of the serenity prayer is the quest for courage to change the things you can, what should you focus on when it comes to working with children who have ADHD? For me, the most important, realistic goal to work on with ADHD kids is helping them take responsibility for their actions. Again, we’ll start with a given: Kids with ADHD are inevitably going to behave impulsively, get distracted, and most of them are going to become overstimulated as well. The question is, once that happens, what do they do next? Do they deny responsibility? Do they blow off the incident entirely? Do they try to shift responsibility to another child? Or, do they own their behavior and make an honest effort to make amends? The answer to that question goes a long way in determining how other kids will come to view that child. If a child cannot or does not take responsibility for his or her behavior, it is likely that they will come to be viewed by peers as being untrustworthy, mean, or irresponsible. It’s going to be hard for that child to form anything other than superficial relationships as his or her peers are likely to shy away. On the other hand, when a child can own up to their actions, apologize when necessary, and then figure out what to do in order to make things right, that child will find that peers are much more likely to cut him or her a good deal of slack. Other kids are likely to focus on the good things that an ADHD child can bring to the table and are more apt to take the time to cultivate the relationship.

Incidentally, the process of apologizing has to be more than just lip service. I’ve known many kids over the years who seem to define “sorry” as the word that makes people go away and get off my back. When I talk to kids about this process, I stress to them that taking responsibility usually involves more than a cursory apology. It involves taking the time to figure out how to make things right and then going about doing just that.

Taking responsibility for mistakes can involve threats to self-image. Many ADHD kids face a continuing cycle of frustration and failure in their lives. They struggle with their parents and siblings to get out the door on time and prepared in the morning and face similar battles at night. Their issues around organization and behavior often lead to problems in school. Their attentional issues can often leave them isolated, scapegoated, or rejected socially. They are often faced with the consistent message – no matter how unintentionally it’s presented – that they’re not good enough or that something is wrong with them. With that experience behind them, it can be difficult for them to take the initiative and own up to their shortcomings before others point them out. It involves taking a step back with the faith that it will lead to two steps forward. For some kids, that’s a leap they’re not ready to make.

Helping kids get to a point at which they’re ready to take responsibility for their behavior can involve walking a fine line between balancing the need to teach them new skills with the imperative of helping them maintain a healthy self-image. Kids need to be challenged but if you find that they’re often falling short in meeting those challenges, there’s a good chance the bar is being set too high. If it’s set high enough to be challenging but low enough so that kids rise usually rise to that challenge, they’re likely to learn new skills and to view themselves as capable people worthy of others’ acceptance and friendship.

An Instructive But Possibly Patronizing Story About Yelling

The Wall Street Journal just ran an article about a study on disciplinary strategies out of the Universities of Pittsburgh and Michigan. The authors found that parents can inflict similar harm on their kids by yelling at them as they can through hitting or other forms of physical punishment.  “Harsh, verbal discipline” used on 13 year old children was found to be associated with increased levels of depression, behavior problems including fighting, lying, and problems at school when the kids were 14.

The article reminded me of an independent study on child abuse I did in graduate school. I looked at the research that examined factors involved in physical abuse and, not surprisingly, harsh disciplinary tactics were the biggest contributors. The dynamic behind abuse often begins with yelling. At first, it can lead to quick, temporary behavior change in kids, and parents find their behavior reinforced. The problems begin when kids grow accustomed to their parents’ yelling. They get used to it pretty quickly and parents have to ratchet up the volume and intensity in order to continue making the same impression. Eventually, the kids get used to that too and the cycle continues becoming more intense and punitive until it culminates in physical abuse. The study covered in the Wall Street Journal also found that the increase in children’s behavior problems stemming from the previous harsh discipline led to further increases in the use of harsh disciplinary strategies…and so it goes.

Research focusing on disciplinary strategies and their outcomes consistently points to positive reinforcement for good behavior as being more effective than punishment for negative behavior. When you present expectations clearly, comprehensibly, and confidently and apply logical consequences in a calm, consistent way, you usually go a long way in helping kids manage their behavior and maximize their success.

But not always.

In a small set of very specific circumstances, raising your voice can be an effective strategy in helping to redirect children who are in the process of spiraling out of control.

There are a number of different cognitive, neurological, or mental health issues in which social skills delays figure prominently. In my practice, the three we see most often are ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorders, and Non-verbal Learning Disorder. While these issues can be very different from each other, they all involve delays in the set of skills that comprise executive function. According to Wikipedia (the wellspring from which all knowledge flows), executive function is

“an umbrella term for cognitive processes that regulate, control, and manage other cognitive processes, such as planning, working memory, attention, problem solving, verbal reasoning, inhibition, mental flexibility, task switching, and initiation and monitoring of actions.”

One way these delays get expressed is through the process of “getting stuck.” When kids with executive function delays become upset or frustrated, their difficulty with the process of inhibition affects their ability to regulate their emotions. The challenges they face with cognitive flexibility can keep them hyperfocused, stuck, and upset for long stretches of time.  This can be enormously penalizing on a social level. Anyone looking for a good read on this topic is well advised to pick up a copy of Ross Greene’s book, The Explosive Child. Even though the title of the book always makes me snicker – taken on a literal level, being explosive could be an unfortunate trait for any child – it presents a thorough, insightful description of this process. Dr. Greene calls this state of anger and frustration “vapor lock” and suggests that the best way of responding to it is to 1) prevent its occurrence in the first place by looking for and responding to warning signs before kids become unraveled and 2) failing that, waiting for a child to regain some control prior to engaging them in discussion or any other type of intervention.

In general, once a child starts heading down the path towards vapor lock, I’m in agreement with Dr. Greene that the best approach is to give him or her some space before trying to engage in any discussion. For the most part, there’s little you can say to a child when he or she is melting down that will do anything besides escalate things even more. However, if it’s possible to respond at the very outset of the vapor lock, a well placed, well considered raised voice can be effective at disrupting that cycle. Among kids with ADHD and executive function delays, the world wages a competition for their limited attention but once a salient stimulus reaches their awareness, it can be a major endeavor to draw their attention away from it. Raising your voice by calling their name or saying something like “Hey!” can sometimes be enough to draw their focus away from what they’ve become stuck on. If you do raise your voice, make sure it’s because there’s a good reason for doing it, not just because you’re getting frustrated. It’s also vital that you keep things concise and respectful and, most importantly, that you stay in control. If you find that it doesn’t work right away, stop. That’s the time to back off and give that child some space. Whether the strategy is effective or not in any given situation, it’s also important to have a conciliatory conversation with the child afterwards.

A counselor I know used a story about two farmers and a mule to illustrate the concept of a well-placed raised voice. It can sound patronizing but once you get past the condescension, it’s a helpful parable. So…here goes…

One day, a farmer – let’s call him Farmer Ed – sells a mule to Farmer Bob. When making his sales pitch, Farmer Ed tells Farmer Bob that all he needs to do is to whisper sweet nothings in the mule’s ear and the mule will plow the fields for him all day. An excited Farmer Bob brings the mule back to his farm, anxious to put the mule to work. Once he gets the mule out to the field, Farmer Bob whispers sweet nothings in its ear and stands back to watch as the mule does…nothing. It just stands there. He tries again and again to no avail. He calls Farmer Ed and complains about the raw deal he thinks he’s received. Farmer Ed hurries over to Farmer Bob’s to check things out. Farmer Ed approaches the mule and whispers sweet nothings in its ear and again, the mule just stands there, completely unresponsive. He tries a few more times with no change. Then, Farmer Ed notices a 2 x 4 lying on the ground. He picks it up and hits the mule on the head with it a few times. Then he whispers sweet nothings in its ear and the mule sets out to plow the fields all day long. Afterwards, Farmer Bob asked Farmer Ed why hit the mule in the head with a piece of wood and Farmer Ed says “I just needed to get his attention first.”

I want to emphasize that a positive approach to discipline involving consistency, clarity, and as much positive reinforcement as possible is by far the best approach to behavior management that I know of. Fostering healthy relationships with your children or students will go miles in your ability to help them regulate their actions and I certainly am not advocating the use of  2 x 4’s as a behavior management tool. However, there are times when the only way to get to those positive strategies is to penetrate the sound barrier, raise your voice, and “get their attention first.”

Bully Pulpit

NPR just ran a story about a study published by researchers from Duke University and University of Warwick in England. It looked at what happens over a long period to people who were bullied as kids. According to the authors of the study, the results suggested that

“Being bullied is not a harmless rite of passage but throws a long shadow over affected people’s lives.”

The study found that children who had been involved with bullying developed more problems with physical, mental, and financial health, than those who had not. They also had more trouble holding on to a job, were more likely to develop problems with substance abuse and to be involved with the criminal justice system. The authors controlled for variables such as family background and childhood psychiatric issues, suggesting that bullying in and of itself is a major contributor to all those unfortunate outcomes. While subjects who had been involved in both the giving and receiving end of bullying showed elevated risks of problems, it was those people who had been the victims of bullying who had the worst time of it.

Being bullied can be an agonizing experience. As someone who leads social skills groups, it’s my role to help children become aware of the behavior patterns they fall into that can serve to set them up as victims. On the other hand, some of our kids are seen by their peers as being bullies but they have no idea why they’re being seen that way. One of the strengths of working with kids in groups is that it affords many opportunities to help point out the natural consequences of their actions, in the moment, and then to suggest new strategies when it’s possible.

My feelings and experiences with bullying are not limited to my work as a counselor though. From the beginning of middle school through the middle of high school, I became intimately acquainted with the receiving end of bullying. My personal experience with it left me with some ideas that are not always consistent with conventional human service wisdom.

The bullying that I went through started in sixth grade. It stemmed from some health problems I had that had started back in second grade. Until then I had been developing along a pretty normal path, both physically and psychologically. When I was 7, I just stopped growing. From the time I was 7 to the time I was 11, I grew less than an inch and blimped up pretty substantially. Up until sixth grade, I had been able to manage things and compensate pretty well. I was a good student without having to try very hard, an accomplished piano player, and I made friends pretty easily. Early on in sixth grade, my doctors started to think that maybe – just maybe – there was some medical reason that my growth had stopped. Before long, they figured out that my thyroid gland had stopped working and they started me on medication. The medication started working right away but it took me a good 5 years or so to catch up.

So, despite finishing 5th grade feeling successful and accepted, 6th grade was very different. I had a much harder time making friends. Some of my friends turned on me and other kids felt like they were entitled to just run me ragged. I never really got beaten up but I was stuffed into garbage cans and I caught a steady stream of verbal abuse that didn’t let up until about midway through high school. It was a miserable experience that made me feel helpless, weak, and insignificant. It changed my perceptions of my peers and shaped my development and attitudes for a long time to come. My experiences were certainly not as bad as others’ but I’m not at all surprised that the study that NPR reported on this week found such pronounced long term effects.

The medication I take for my thyroid problem created some changes in my ability to focus when I first started taking it- there’s a reason I feel so comfortable with kids who have ADHD – but by and large, I was the same kid in sixth grade that I’d been the year before. So why did things change so dramatically?

The easy answer is what I’ll call the Trey Parker answer. He’s one of the creators of the Comedy Central show South Park. In an interview, he explained the series’ occasionally dark portrayal of kids by saying

“There’s this whole thing out there about how kids are so innocent and pure. That’s Bulls**t, man. Kids are malicious little f****ers. They totally jump on any bandwagon and rip the weak guy at any chance.”

“There’s this whole thing out there about how kids are so innocent and pure”

Perhaps that’s a bit extreme, but back in sixth grade, I would have agreed with that sentiment wholeheartedly. I try to take a more nuanced approach to things now. Wearing my counselor hat, I often come back to Erik Erikson. For those unfamiliar with him, Erikson was a post-Freudian psychoanalyst, whose psychosocial theory of development has been hugely influential in the field. Unlike Freud, who wrote that almost all of our important psychological development takes place before age 5, Erikson viewed psychological development as a process that continues throughout the course of our lifetimes. The field of psychology is lousy with stage theories but Erikson’s is one of the best. His theory divides the lifespan into 8 stages, each of which is defined by an internal conflict that needs to be resolved before one advances to the next stage. The stage that is most applicable to bullying is the identity versus role confusion stage that most often occurs during adolescence. Erikson stated that the primary psychological task of adolescence is the development of an individual identity. Our existence centers on figuring out who we are – creating and presenting our own unique, independent, personalities to the world. This striving often centers on teenagers’ eternal quests to distinguish and separate themselves from their parents but it has a number of different social ramifications as well.

Teenagers often define themselves, at least in part, by the crowd they hang out with. Identification with a group is one way adolescents determine who they are. Bullying and victimization can be seen as the flip side of that observation. Identifying with a peer group or clique is not only a way of showing yourself and everyone else who you ARE, it’s also a way of showing yourself and everyone else who you’re NOT. What better way to demonstrate just who you’re not than by finding others to belittle and victimize? Even when kids are not bullied, this is one of those dynamics that make middle school and high school so challenging.

Quirky kids are particularly prone to this type of victimization. Children who have trouble reading social cues or who act in ways that are seen as strange or unexpected are frequent targets of bullying and social ostracism. There are skills that kids can learn to help them respond to bullying with a sense of assuredness and competence that can help to take a lot of pressure off. Services like Stand Up to Bullying can help with those skills and can help parents and teachers help their kids respond to bullying more effectively. It’s also important to help kids develop the resilience they need to make it through the experience of bullying with their self-image intact. This can be pursued through counseling as well as encouraging kids to become involved in activities and relationships in which they feel successful and happy. What I’ve found is that often, when kids are about midway through with high school, bullying can diminish as they begin to find their niche and those who have done the bullying move on and lose interest.

Manners 101

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I went to college. Hofstra University, located in scenic (not really) Hempstead, NY, is my alma mater. I was a liberal arts guy but Hofstra was primarily a business school. Far be it from me to come across as anti-business or even anti-business student but you could always tell the business majors in liberal arts classes. Particularly in subjects like English Lit., History, and, especially Philosophy, the business students were the ones who were there because of those nagging liberal arts requirements they had to deal with in order to graduate. In general, they could present themselves in one of three different ways in class. In fairness, a good number of business students got really into the classes. They were genuinely interested and engaged in the subject matter. Another group of business students was engaged in the subject matter but they thought the subject was stupid and expressed that sentiment as directly and often as possible. These were the folks who were put off by the fact that in many of the liberal arts, there were no concrete, black and white answers to questions. In English Lit classes, they would demand that the professor explain exactly HOW that poem means what you say it means. WHERE does it say that? I don’t see where it says that! Is it going to be on the test? The third group were the ones who made no bones about their lack of interest in the subject and would put their heads down on their desks and snooze the minute the lecture started.

During my freshman year, I was taking Introduction to Philosophy with Dr. Leon Pearl. Dr. Pearl looked exactly like you’d expect a philosophy professor named Dr. Leon Pearl to look. He was a short, old man with a long grey beard who very patiently tried to explain Bertrand Russell and other deep thinkers to a class consisting in large part of business majors. One day, a bigger chunk of the class than usual was drifting off to sleep and Dr. Pearl couldn’t take it. He stopped his lecture and said “Class, manners are more important than anything I’m going to teach you this semester!” I’m guessing that most of the students resented what they saw as a professor’s patronizing attitude. In fact, I probably resented it too. But he was right.

Mind your manners, kids!

Most kids cringe when you bring up the subject of manners. I’ll confess that when I hear the word, I think of my mother nagging me about them or I just form an image in my head of a person roughly resembling Dana Carvey’s Church Lady, casting a disapproving eye on my behavior. But cringeworthy or not, developing manners that ascend at least to the level of “adequate” is vital to all kinds of success, not the least of which is social success with your peers.

One reason most kids react so negatively to the topic of manners, aside from the fact that manners are something they’re compelled by adults to use – which adds one strike against them right away – is that adults don’t often explain why they’re so important.  To me, when people use manners, not in a slavish or obsequious, or overly formalized way, but in a genuine way, they express a certain level of respect and consideration for others as well as an acknowledgement of other people’s autonomy. When you say “please,” you’re acknowledging that the person you’re asking has the option of saying “no” and that you appreciate that. Even when that’s not necessarily true (i.e. “Johnny, please take the trash out now”) it carries a less dictatorial tone that takes the edge off the prospect of doing something unpleasant.

For all kids, quirky and otherwise, I think it’s important not only to teach manners but also to explain to them why each particular instance of common courtesy is important. It’s one of those areas that might not yield immediate positive feedback from kids. For example, you’re probably not going to hear little Johnny say “Geez, thanks for explaining the concept of ‘thank you’ to me, Mom. I really appreciate it.” But it’s going to pay dividends in the long run if the explanation they get goes further than “Because I’m your dad and I told you to.”

I’ve been harping on this topic with the kids I work with this summer. In the summertime, we run a small day camp. We use vans to bring the kids on excursions everyday and many of my orations about manners come down to ways of  making the van rides and transitions less of an ordeal for everyone. I’ve had three rules that I’ve tried to drum into my kids’ heads all summer. They are 1) When walking in or out of a door with a group of people, hold the door open for the person behind you so it doesn’t smash into their face, 2) when getting into the van, slide into the seat as far as you can so people don’t have to climb over you and 3) use deodorant! I work with the teenagers and it’s summertime so #3 is a biggie! Maybe they think it’s funny that I put using deodorant on the same level as the other two rules, but they haven’t  minded my harping on these issues. In fact, many of the kids have begun reminding others of them as well.

Growing up in a Jewish household as I did, I became very accustomed to hearing my mom urge me to “be a mensch.” Mensch is a Yiddish word and, according to Wikipedia (so it must be true, right?), it means “a person of integrity and honor.” That may be true in a literal sense but in our house, being a mensch usually referred to behaving in a way that demonstrated concern or respect for others. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. If you’re watching TV with your family and you go into the kitchen to get a snack, and you bring snacks in for everyone else without being told to do so, that’s being a mensch. The hard part for some kids is that when you’re trying to be a mensch, you have to do it without the expectation of immediate reward.  I think the idea of being a mensch, or using manners, can be explained to kids as being similar to the idea of opening a savings account. If you put your money in a bank account that pays interest, you’re not going to see dramatic, tangible results in a hurry – particularly with the rates banks are paying now. However, over time, it adds up and makes a difference.  It’s an investment. Same thing with using manners. It’s important to explain to kids that when they use manners or treat others with respect or consideration, it creates a perception in others of a kind, trustworthy person. Eventually, those perceptions can lead to positive changes in the way people treat you. It’s asking a lot of quirky kids to respond positively to this idea right away. It involves nuanced, abstract ideas, some theory of mind skills,  and (horrors!) the idea that gratification might not be immediate. But for those reasons, it becomes even more important to stress these ideas and their explanations.

Cooperative Play Rules! (Not That I’m At All Biased)

In the work that we do at Academy MetroWest, we run gym-based groups that center on  cooperative, non-competitive physical activity, aimed at helping kids feel better about themselves and improve the way they interact with others. Groups of up to 6 kids participate in weekly 75 minute groups. In basing our groups around cooperative activities, we create a low stress environment in which kids can relax, have fun and success, and be themselves. In this setting, they tend to be less defensive and, in turn, more receptive to social feedback they hear from their counselors and their peers.

Cooperative games come in lots of different shapes and sizes but they share some important characteristics. The most important idea is that one child’s success is rarely, if ever, dependent on another child’s failure. If there is competition, it tends to be with kids pitted against adults. While victory for the kids’ team is not guaranteed, adults are able to control the action so that if kids are showing an inclination towards teamwork, they’re going to meet with success.

Another common thread in cooperative games is the elimination of elimination. In cooperative activities, kids can be frozen or made temporarily out but there is always a way for their teammates to save them and return them to action. To give an illustration of just why this is important, let’s take a look at a traditional game of dodge ball – played the old fashioned way – and what a quirky kid’s experience might be in such a game. In traditional dodge ball, once you get hit (usually by a big, heavy, stinging playground ball), you’re out. Many neurotypical kids quickly and intuitively grasp the strategy needed to survive for any length of time (i.e. don’t stand right at the middle for any length of time, have a ball with you to deflect incoming shots, etc…) but for quirky kids, this understanding can come more slowly. What this means is that they’re often the first ones to get eliminated. So, right off the bat, they’ve experienced failure and frustration. Then, they need to stand on the side, doing nothing but staying focused, managing their behavior, and looking on as other kids have fun and success. It’s a boring, unstructured slog until the next round starts. Anyone who works with impulsive, distractible kids knows what happens when things stay boring and unstructured for too long. Bad things. Very bad things.

In a cooperative version of dodge ball, there is always a way for a person’s teammates to get that person back into the game. Even if a participant has been temporarily eliminated from the game, there’s an incentive for him or her to stay focused and root teammates on so that s/he can be quickly brought back to the action.

In many of the cooperative games we create, we add a strong fantasy component to go along with the game. For kids who are not that into sports and are interested in more creative or expressive pursuits, these stories are often just the thing needed to help them engage with an activity or with a group of kids. It’s much more compelling for some kids to imagine themselves as, say, an archaeologist battling an Egyptian mummy as they try to overcome an ancient curse, than it is to tell them we’re going to be playing a tag game in which they have to collect a bunch of stuff while the adults chase them around. Not surprisingly, I’ve found that adding a Star Wars theme to any game still works just about every time. I’ve teased some of the adolescents I work with and predicted that they’d be totally willing to play Darth Vader Hopscotch if we offered it. Usually, they respond “What’s Darth Vader hopscotch?” When I tell them “It’s regular hopscotch but you pretend you’re Darth Vader while you’re playing,” they nod and say “Yeah, we’d play that.”

Despite our non-competitive approach, our staff is almost always made up of big team sports fans. I enjoy watching sports and playing them and for many kids, sports can be an excellent outlet for their energy and talents. For many other kids though, that’s just not the case. Some of the difficulties that quirky kids have with competitive sports come down to predictable factors. Take soccer as an example. I like to pick on soccer because it’s become THE sport for young kids to play and because certain aspects of the game make it particularly challenging for kids with learning issues. The obvious difficulty with soccer is that there is one ball to be battled over by two competing hordes of 11 kids each. Like all competitive sports, it is structured so that one team will win and one team will lose, which builds confrontation into the fabric of the game. In addition, soccer, like hockey or basketball, is a largely unscripted game, which can cause added problems for kids who, in general, do not process information quickly or efficiently. In soccer, hockey, and basketball, there are set, scripted plays but they often break down, forcing teams to improvise in order to succeed.

Let’s revisit that same sweet, quirky and slightly spacey kid from our dodge ball game -this time playing defenseman in a game of soccer. For much of the game, the action has been down at the other end of the field and our pal has struggled valiantly to maintain a decent level of concentration on the proceedings, even though the temptation to stare at the clouds, or pick the clover on the fields has been very strong. All of a sudden, the ball comes racing towards him. As it does, his teammates start yelling at him to pass them the ball. He kicks the ball and, alas, it goes to someone on the opposing team. In that next split second, our boy has a lot of calculations to make. For one thing, he has to recognize that the ball has, in fact, gone to someone on the other team. Then he has to figure out where he needs to go. Where is the guy he’s supposed to be guarding? Where on the field is the action now? Should he follow the ball or his guy? What’s the score in the game and does that influence his response? That’s a lot of quick thinking that needs to be done almost instantaneously and it probably has to be done with his teammates getting on his case about making a bad pass.

I don’t know if there have been a lot of studies done about processing speed and working memory and what affect they have on someone’s ability to play team sports but I have to imagine that the relationship is significant. Working memory and processing speed pertain to assimilating information and adjusting to changes in the environment, and they are going to be taxed to their limits in games like soccer.

While there are many different types of cooperative games, the format we employ most  avoids some of those issues around processing speed and working memory. In cooperative, tag-oriented games, we start by constructing a base or a safe area for kids. All around the safe area, we scatter lots of stuff – usually small objects like plastic cones or foam balls. When the game starts, the kids have to leave their safe area, collect one object at a time, and bring it back to the base. While they do so, a counselor tries to stop them by tagging them or throwing a foam ball at them. If they’re tagged or hit, rather than being eliminated from the game or becoming “it,” they’re frozen where they got tagged until another teammate saves them by tagging them back into the game. Again, the adult can control the action so that the group can feel challenged but not overwhelmed. And, the problem I described with soccer is not there at all. The options in these games are limited. Kids can either collect cones, stay in the safe area, or save teammates and as the games progress, the appropriate options become more and more obvious.

While some cooperative games have therapeutic value woven into their structure, their ultimate importance as part of a social skills group lies in the fact that conflicts among participants is reduced and kids can attain plenty of concrete success playing them. This enables counselors to do the real work of providing social feedback and direction with some hope that kids will hear that feedback in its proper context, rather than just as more nagging from another adult bugging them about their behavior. Cooperative games can also be used in purely recreational settings and some schools have begun to run cooperative games programs during recess periods. For more information about cooperative play or the programs we run at Academy MetroWest, please contact us at info@academymetrowest.com.