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Child behavior expert shares info on working with challenging students

Ablon

For teachers, parents and other adults who care for children, poor behavior can be all too familiar – child behavior expert Dr. Stuart Ablon believes there is a way to work through such issues with teamwork.

He shared strategies for helping build skills in kids with challenging behaviors Monday afternoon with hundreds of school staff, parents and community members at the Marshalltown High School-Community Auditorium. Ablon is the director of the Think:Kids, a Massachusetts General Hospital psychiatry program.

“Kids do well if they can,” Ablon said of his general philosophy on children with challenging behavior, such as not listening to adults, getting out of control and more. “If that sounds like common sense, it is – unfortunately, we don’t tend to apply common sense that often when it comes to challenging kids.”

Instead, he said teachers, parents and other adults often fall back on “conventional wisdom” that says a child is making a choice not to behave. That way of thinking, Ablon said, leads to adults misusing motivational strategies to improve child behavior, such giving rewards or punishments.

“Conventional wisdom is wrong,” Ablon said. While rewards and punishments can be effective in teaching a child basic “right versus wrong” lessons, the strategy was never meant to help them build “complicated thinking skills.”

For kids who lack complicated thinking skills appropriate for their age, certain activities can be stressful and cause challenging behavior. Ablon said such lacking skills areas can include language and communication, attention and working memory, emotional and self-regulation, cognitive flexibility and social thinking.

He said a collaborative approach between adult and child is the most effective way to both build a child’s skills while also solving behavior issues. Out of three ways of approaching challenging behavior, he called the collaborative approach “Plan B.”

That model allows the child to express their concern about a behavior, then has the adult share their concerns. The two then brainstorm, assess and decide on a solution to the behavior issue.

Plan B was contrasted with Plan A, which seeks to impose an adult’s will on a child, and Plan C, which sees an adult “drop” an issue to stop a behavior. Ablon said Plans A and C are not as effective as Plan B in seeing change in a challenging child’s behavior.

“It’s hard. There’s no such thing as easy living in Plan B,” Ablon said. He said it can be difficult to get a child to express their concerns. It can also be hard for an adult to offer concerns without imposing a solution on the child.

Ablon said organizations looking to use the Plan B model need good leadership, patience, persistence and to keep an open mind.

Marshalltown Schools Director of Special Services Matt Cretsinger said Ablon’s message is playing a role in district plans.

“We have already invested in training our administrators, our social workers, our school counselors in this (Plan B) model,” he said. Cretsinger said implementation is set to take place over the next “two to four” years.

He said he was impressed with Ablon’s message, prompting the speaking engagement at the school Monday.

“As I came across (Ablon’s) message of ‘kids will do well if they can,’ that made a lot of sense,” Cretsinger said.

For more information on Think:Kids, visit www.thinkkids.org

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Contact Adam Sodders at

(641) 753-6611 or asodders@timesrepublican.com

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