Child and Adolescent Development | Positive Parenting

This episode was pre recorded as part of a live continuing education webinar on demand. CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register@allceus.com Counselortoolbox you I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation on child and adolescent development. Now we're starting into a series on working with children, in particular adolescents a little bit, but in particular working with children with developmental disabilities. And we'll talk about, you know, how that really impacts the counselor because we don't do physical therapy or ot, but how do physical disabilities potentially impact a child's mental health, self esteem, all that kind of stuff. But today we're just going to get a really broad overview or review of child and adolescent development. We'll identify some of the thought leaders in developmental psychology and look at how everything really feeds into itself. All of these theories contributed something really useful. We'll identify the major psychosocial milestones for each age group, learn about things that may thwart development, protective factors for healthy development, and conceptualize behaviors as goal driven in order to better understand their purpose and provide appropriate redirection. We do things for a reason. When children act or act out, a lot of times they're trying to communicate something maybe because they don't have the words or because they don't even really know. They just they feel out of control. So we want to look at their behaviors, especially with younger children, to try to help them find the words and understand what's going on. So basically we're taking this from a biopsychosocial perspective, recognizing that feelings are accompanied by physiological responses and behavioral urges. So whenever we have a feeling, if it's anger, for example, you know, that's the feeling, that's the word label that we put on it. But along with that, we have a physiological response that we've identified as anger. You know, our heart rate goes up, we may flush, we may shake, you know, that whole fight or flight thing. And then we have behavioral urges that when we get angry, what do you want to do? Do you want to run? Do you want to fight? Do you want to scream? Do you want to fill in the blank? So we want to start looking at how all of these things come together. Because by looking at behavior responses, we can generally help children start developing that emotional vocabulary. Now, these feelings and responses and urges are moderated or mediated by parenting and getting their needs met. If they're getting their needs met, as defined by Maslow, think about his hierarchy and Erickson's stages of psychosocial development, then they're probably going to have more feelings of contentment and happiness and those sorts of things. Social learning teaches them, you know, and we're talking about things that they see at home, at school, and in the media. It teaches them how to handle emotions, what they're supposed to do when they feel angry or they feel scared. It teaches them, you know, things that they're supposed to like and things they're not supposed to supposed to like, and all of those sorts of things which they may or may not like. But social learning is they're seeing what other people do and enjoy, and they're like, oh, maybe I'm going to enjoy that. Cognitively, a child's reaction, an emotional reaction to any sort of situation is going to be partly dependent on their cognitive development. Younger children who haven't developed object permanence yet are going to react emotionally with fear or frustration when a parent goes out of sight, whereas an older child who's got that mastered may not react that way. And then the environment, how the environment is, whether it's calm, it's safe, it's secure, or it's chaotic and aggressive. And all that stuff is going to teach children a lot of things. And within this environment, we also have the social learning. So all these things kind of weave together and we need to consider all of them when we're working on a treatment plan with children. Because remember, children can't extract themselves from their home environment and go, well, that's not normal for them. That is normal. Whatever their home environment is, is all they've probably pretty much ever known. So we're going to look at their domains of development, because growth in one domain influences all the other. Dom, think about kids that you've worked with or kids that you know, or kids that you have. When children go through a physical growth spurt, how does it affect them cognitively? How does that affect them emotionally? A lot of times you're going to see children who are more emotional, more reactive, maybe have difficulty concentrating, be more in a fog. Their body is doing some amazing things and a lot of work. So energy is being devoted to physical growth. And the cognitive and social emotional may not be, but then once the growth spurt stops, then other things level back out. So we want to look at how the child's development is impacting them. I know with my children when they would start excelling even in different areas of cognitive development, they may start excelling in reading and language arts. Their math skills would almost seem to go backwards for a little while. And Then it would flip flop. My girlfriend noticed that when her son, right before he would get sick, usually a day or two ahead of time, he would start to become what she called disorganized and a little bit more oppositional or whiny or whatever you want to call it. And that was almost certainly an indication that he was getting ready to get sick. So when something in the physical domain happens, it impacts everything else. Now we'll start with behaviorism, because that's sort of the more basic one. It developed as a response to psychoanalytical theories and became the dominant view from the 1920s to the 1960s. If you remember, John Watson was the father of American behaviorist theory and did a lot of his work with Pavlov's dogs. You know, ring the bell, the dog salivates, yada, yada. But basically what came out of his work was that children are passive beings who can be molded by controlling the stimulus response associations. And, you know, you might be clutching the side of your chair right now going, they are so not. Well, yes and no. We are affected by stimulus response associations. Now, whether we're passive or not, you could argue that point, but we're not going to go there. Today we do want to focus on Watson and Skinner's work. And Skinner took it a step further and proposed that children operate on their environment. Now, operating on their environment means they seek out rewards and avoid punishment. So Skinner believed that behaviors are goal driven. They seek reward. Learning can be broken down into smaller tasks, which is great for shaping. If you want to teach a child how to tie their shoes, well, first you got to teach them how to put their sock on and then how to put their shoe on. And, you know, that's when Velcro comes in real handy. And then you move into teaching them how to tie their shoes. And with my children, I don't know, maybe I just wasn't good at teaching it, but. But it was difficult. And there were all these different rhymes and stories about, you know, the rabbit goes around the tree or whatever. But first we started out, can you get the first part tied? And then, okay, let's make a bow. And reinforcement would be provided for the completion of each segment of it. It's like, okay, that's it. Now what's the next step that you do? So Skinner really believed in what we're going to later refer to as scaffolding, building up components of the behavior and helping the child become more independent. He also believed that offering immediate rewards for accomplishments stimulates further learning. Well, you know, that Makes sense. Think about children. And children have such a smaller attention span that they need to experience rewards more frequently. So these immediate rewards are more important for your toddlers and your elementary school kids than necessarily high schoolers, who have a better concept of time and can delay gratification. But these immediate rewards get that dopamine system going, which makes the child or organism want to do that behavior again. So immediate rewards reinforce the learning process. So how can parents use discriminative stimuli and reinforcement to help children grow? Well, your first question is, well, what are discriminative stimuli? They things that you put in the environment to prompt children. So, for example, if you're in a daycare center or even at home, and you want to teach your child how to brush their teeth, and so you put up little pictures, you know, first you get the toothbrush, and then you put on the toothpaste, and then you brush your teeth until the timer goes off. Whatever it is, you have step by step pictures. We're talking for children that don't read yet, and those are discriminative stimuli. Discriminative stimuli set the occasion for the behavior. So you can also have a timer that goes off and that the child knows when that timer goes off, it's time for them to stop watching TV or do whatever, stop doing what they're doing, and go get ready for bed. So what types of things? When we're working with kids, what types of things do parents generally want them to do? A lot of times when I worked with kids, I would hear parents say that they wanted their children to be less oppositional. Well, that's kind of broad. So give me an example or tell me about a particular time or occurrence when your child is regularly fighting what's going on. And a lot of times that may go around chores, homework, or going to bed. So we talk about, okay, what kind of discriminative stimuli can you put in the environment to prompt the child to do it? Because they often won't do it on their own. And it can be, you tell them to do it, ideally, you want them to start doing it on their own. So you can prompt them that when the alarm goes off, it's time to start your homework or it's time to go brush your teeth. But then there has to be some sort of reinforcement for that behavior if they do it. If they get up when the alarm goes off and start doing their homework, you know, ideally somebody's there to give them immediate reinforcement for doing that and saying, awesome, you got started on your homework. I'm so proud of you. And then make sure there's some sort of reward at the end for completion of that task, because, you know, they may be going, this really is awful. So we want to use reinforcement to more often than punishment in order to stimulate positive behaviors, because when they're doing the right thing, then they are by default not doing the wrong thing. So instead of taking away behaviors and punishing as much, try to reinforce the positive. What do I want you to do, and how can I try to make that happen? Sometimes we need to use scaffolding, too. And with children, you can start by giving them, you know, letting them get started. And then maybe they start getting frustrated doing their homework and they just quit or they start daydreaming. And so a parent may need to come in and bring them. Bring them back down and help them get refocused again. Well, okay, the next step, you got them started, but then they got frustrated. So the next step is to help them identify when they start feeling frustrated, what can they do? So scaffolding moves them to that next step. Once they've realized when they start feeling that way, they need to ask for help. Okay, that's great. So then help comes and, you know, helps them get whatever finished. And then what's the next step and what's the next step after that that we want you to accomplish? And in treatment planning, last week we talked about doing it, writing treatment plans like a recipe, and that's really what scaffolding is. What's the first step you need to do? But with scaffolding, there's assistance provided we realize where the youth is hitting their obstacle or their problem, and we say, okay, we're going to put in some assistance here. You know, eventually we'll take that assistance away because you'll be able to do it on your own. But for right now, let's give you some assistance to help you get through this point so you can get up to here, but then you need assistance getting the rest of the way. So we'll work on developing independence. When working with children, it's so important and, well, anybody to identify what reward works for them. You know, for my son, for example, when he was little, one of the greatest rewards you could give him was to let him go to the library once a week. He loved reading, loved going to the library. And so one of the rewards he would get is if he had a good day, good week at school, then he would get to go to the library on Friday afternoon. But you want to identify for that child what is rewarding? Because video games are not rewarding for every child. TV is not rewarding for every child. Outside play. What is it for that child? Bandura stressed how children learn by observation and imitation. And if you've had teenagers, you know good and well, and even younger children, they learn so much more from what they see you do than what you say. So, you know, this is evidence of Bandura's social learning. And yes, Jesse, I agree. When we use scaffolding, children develop an amount of self efficacy because they start seeing themselves being able to independently complete tasks. So instead of throwing them in the deep end and going, well, good luck, and if you don't do it, then I'll walk you through the whole thing. We give them a task and we say, okay, let's see, how far can you go without help? And then we'll provide some help and figure out how to inch you on further. So, yeah, it does develop a sense of self confidence. Okay, so back to Bandora. He believed that children gradually become more selective in what they imitate due to observational learning. What he meant was, children are going to look around and the things that they see rewarded in the environment, they're going to do. They're going to imitate. The things that they see punished in their environment, they're probably not going to do because they don't want to get punished. So we want to have the family look around the house and identify what, what types of things are being rewarded. If, you know, little Tommy has an older brother or sister that ultimately gets rewarded when they act out or sneak out of the house or, you know, that older brother or sister doesn't do what they're supposed to and there are no consequences. Well, then little Tommy's going to learn from that and go, well, big brother doesn't have to do it. I don't have to do it either. So what types of things are they learning? Because it's not just about that child. If you're consistent with that child, but then not consistent with other children or other people in the household, then they start trying to figure out, all right, what's the difference here and how can I get away with it? So we want to encourage parents to be aware of what children are observing both at home and when my son was in preschool, I remember one day I went to pick him up and the teacher said, oh, he might be a while. And I'm like, okay. She said, he's in the bathroom. I was like, oh. She said, no, no, no, no, he's washing his Hands. I looked at her and my son washing his hands voluntarily. She's like, oh, yeah, he'll stay in there all day if you let him. I was like, okay, well, that behavior was strongly rewarded at school. So that was something he did at school, at home. I kind of took it for granted that he was going to wash his hands. So it wasn't, you know, he didn't do it unless I prompted him to. So that's just a difference in the environment. And we all know we behave in certain ways in certain situations at the doctor's office, at the library, at a restaurant, and at home. We're probably going to behave differently. Children are learning this from the time they're old enough to really observe. So we want to make sure we're aware of what's going on at home. What kinds of behaviors are being rewarded at school, not only by teachers and adults, but by peers. And this is, you know, something that we need to especially pay attention to. And then on the TV and whatever media they're watching, because they see things on TV and they're like, oh, you know, that's how you get popular. That's how you get, get what you want. And then they start may start trying to imitate that. So the question is, and parents ask this a lot, how can we monitor the youth's environment? There's just so much. We can't be everywhere all the time. One of the things that we can do is monitor their television watching. And you don't have to sit there and watch dora the explorer 17 times with them. You know, if you get an idea that Dora the Explorer is, you know, producing some pro social values or whatever, you know, that might be fine, but, you know, you want to be aware of what, what they're seeing. And you can monitor television stations and block television stations if you need to. On mobile devices, you can put limits on the phone, TV and Internet usage. You can also put firewalls up. And, you know, I'm blessed to have a husband who is extremely tech savvy. So he's able to go in and put firewalls and block, you know, the gambling sites, the adult sites, the anything I wouldn't want them looking at. And you can put apps on your children's mobile devices with the parental setting so they can't get in there and turn them off. That can block those same things when they're on other networks, when they're on open networks, at the library or at school or whatever. So it is possible you just have to do a little Research to figure out how. And then we want to make sure we're teaching through observational learning. And sometimes we're not going to behave the way we want our children to behave. You know, let's just, let's, let's face it, we all make mistakes. But it's important to use that as a teaching moment and say, you know what, I shouldn't have lost my temper, I shouldn't have yelled. That was a poor decision. And then talk it out with them so they can learn from that. Number one, to learn that it's okay to make mistakes, to learn how to admit mistakes, but also to identify the fact that you realize that it was something you weren't supposed to do and how to correct it. So those are all observational learning things. We want to start early on. And even when they're sitting in the back of the car in the car seat, they're learning. Just leave it at that. Piaget said children construct their understanding of the world through their active involvement and interactions. So they're looking around, they're learning, they're seeing the things that get rewarded and the things that don't. They're figuring out kind of what, what they like, but they're also trying to make sense of the world. And there's a lot of stuff to make sense of when you're a kid. So they use schemas which are those, you know, quick guides, if you will, to life. When they see a four legged fuzzy animal, if the only four legged fuzzy animal they've ever seen before has been a dog, they might call it a dog. When or, you know, if they have a large dog or if they have a horse at home and they see a large dog, they may call it a horse because they've never seen a dog that big. So they think it's a horse. And we had a dog like that at one point. So that's assimilation. They're taking what they know and they're taking what they see and they're like, okay, I know a horse looks like this and that kind of looks like a horse, so must be a horse. So learner fits the knowledge into what they already know. Another example would be going to visit grandma at the nursing home versus going to the hospital. Because a lot of times hospitals may seem like nursing homes. So when they walk in there, they're looking around, they're seeing nurses, they're seeing medical staff, and they might go, okay, I know how I'm supposed to behave here because this is kind of like a hospital accommodation on the Other hand, the learner changes knowledge to fit new information. So think about when a kid goes to McDonald's and they have that play area and you can be loud in the play area and run around and you take your shoes off and do all that kind of stuff versus a sit down restaurant. You know those, they're both places you go out to eat. So in the generalized schema they should be the same, but in reality not so much. So we need to help them change their schema to, to fit new information. So how do you know what type of restaurant it is? How do you know whether it's okay to run around and be crazy or you have to stay in your seat and be quiet? Another example of accommodation would I have a cat that plays fetch. And that's what a dog does. So that can be really confusing to children. They can be like, well, is it a dog or a cat? And I haven't quite come to that conclusion yet myself, but you know, anatomically he is a cat. So children would need to change their schema from cats don't do anything but lay around to some cats play fetch. And we want to use this to help children with overgeneralization, stereotypes, all that kind of stuff to help them make sense of their world. And then Piaget also said that children make sense of their world based on their cognitive development. Birth through two. The infant uses their senses and motor abilities to understand the world. So if the infant is regularly hearing loud noises and getting startled and because there's fighting going on or something in their household, if they're frequently hungry or uncomfortable or wet it, you know, that's, that's kind of scary. So they're understanding their world as a scary, painful, unpleasant place. Whereas if they're regularly getting their needs met, you know, bada bing, they're probably going to understand the world as a safer place, which is where you have your Ericksonian trust versus mistrust. Pre operational. This is age two through the beginning of elementary school. The child uses mental representations of objects and is able to use symbolic thought and language. Okay, that's garbledygook to most parents. They're like, okay, and that's useful to me how I help them understand. And you can help them understand that. Children at this age have difficulty thinking abstractly. They problem solve using pictures and drawings and objects. Sometimes they can't articulate exactly what's going on. So if they're feeling upset, you know, have them draw you a picture about what's going on or you know, use toys And. Or watch them play and see what they're doing in their play in order to understand a little bit better what's going on. If you're getting ready to, maybe mom has a baby and you're getting ready to go visit mom in the hospital, you can get little characters, you know, little play people and act out, okay, what's it going to be like when we go to the hospital? Or if you're getting ready to go on a plane? This helps children with their anxiety because they know what to expect. So they feel calmer, they feel more in control. They're like, okay, I got this. I may not like it, but I got it. But you want to make it concrete for them. Which brings us to concrete operations. The child thinks the world is logical. And for parents at this stage, it is so frustrating because children think that A plus B should equal C, and that's just the way it is. But, you know, sometimes A plus B equals purple, and there's just no explanation for it. So we need to help them understand that the world is not always logical. But at this stage, we want them to start connecting. Instead of using manipulatives or drawings, we want them to start connecting it to things that they know. So relating it to a similar time in the past when something similar happened or something that they saw on TV that they can relate to, it gives them something concrete, something they've either been through or they've seen before or even read a book about. And then formal operations, this is your high school age, they start using logical operations in a systematic fashion with the ability to use abstract. So when they're asking you things, you know, my son is still trying to figure out his career path, and he came down and he started talking to me last night, and he's like, well, what do you think if I. If I did this? And I said, you know, well, let's talk about it. You know, what would happen if you pursued that career path? What do you think it would be like, where you know, and what do you want to have when. When you grow up? You know, what is a good life for you? You can ask children, you know, what would happen if. If they're having difficulties with somebody at school? What would happen if you told a teacher what would happen if you ignored them? What would happen if you beat them up? You know, let's look at all options and have the student or the child take it all the way through so they can start figuring out logical consequences of the different options. Because there's always options. There's inaction and then there's positive action and then there's generally negative action. There's generally at least three options. Sociocultural. I know we're just building layer on layer here. Sociocultural is Vygotsky and he agreed that children are active learners but their knowledge is socially constructed. So Vygotsky and Bandura kind of working together, their cultural values and customs dictate what's important to learn. And they get all this information from what Vygotsky called the zone of proximal development, which means the kids microsystem and mesosystem basically, which is what we're going to learn about in a minute. But the places the child interacts with regularly and the things the child sees regularly, that's their zone of proximal development. That's where learning occurs. So we need to encourage parents to enrich their child's environment with models of the behaviors and values they prize. You know, if you want them to be caring, loving, empathetic little beings, then you're probably not going to be letting them watch movies about serial killers when they're four years old. You know, you want them to see the types of behaviors that you want them to a spouse. You want them to be able to see that and learn from it. So what types of things? You know, sometimes that means taking the child to a religious organization, sometimes that means boy scouts or girl Scouts or you know, whatever it is. But we want to encourage parents to enrich the child's environment with things we want them to learn. We want them to focus on what they want children to gain more than what they want them to avoid. Because you're not going to be able to avoid discrimination everywhere and always. It's just unfortunate, but it's the way it is. So if we don't, if we can't help them completely avoid that, we can help them develop advocacy. So that was the only opposite I could think of for discrimination. So they can learn to advocate for others who are being discriminated against and advocate for themselves when they feel discriminated against. So we're giving them a tool. We don't want them to have low self esteem. Okay, well that's great. So what do we want them to have? We want to create an environment that helps them develop a sense of self efficacy and self assuredness so low self esteem doesn't happen. So focusing on, just like with behavior modification, focusing on adding the positive less than eliminating the negative. And then Broffen Brenner, he had the ecological systems theory and he feeds on or folds in. On Vygotsky and Bandura, he said the varied systems of the environment and interrelationships among the systems shape a child's development. So the child, his family, his school, his neighborhood, and then his community and those sorts of things, they all shape child development. They all control what kinds of resources the child has access to. They control the types of things the child finds enjoyable and rewarding. Both the environment and biology influence the child's development. So some children are just not going to find some things rewarding. They're just biologically, that's not their thing. Temperamentally, they may not find some things rewarding. My children, my two children are very, very different. My son is an extrovert like I am. My daughter is an introvert like her dad is. And, you know, she was talking with me this morning about her friends on Instagram and how they went to this banquet and before she even had gotten home, that her friends had posted pictures of all of them on. On Instagram. And she's like, I hadn't even gotten home and gotten changed yet. She's like, y' all have issues. And I'm like, that's just the difference between, you know, extroverts and wanting to share and introverts and not really caring. But temperamentally, that's just the way she is. She's not about that. And so we talked sort of about the differences, but that's the way she's wired. And it not better or worse, it just is. And the environment affects the child, and the child affects the environment. So thinking about an environment where a child is feeling loved and cared for and nurtured, they're probably going to be able to develop cognitively, emotionally, all that stuff quite efficiently. Well, as they do that, they're going to reciprocally impact that environment. They're going to want enrichment activities, they're going to be calmer and yada. Then maybe a child who grew up in a chaotic, scary environment, who has difficulty with emotional regulation, who becomes demanding and emotionally dysregulated, that has a much different effect on the environment. That can be much more frustrating to parents to try to figure out how to deal with teachers. So in the systems theory, Rafen Brenner said, the individual has his or her inherent traits, their temperament, their biology, you know, whether they're morning people or evening people, structured or not. So. And then the microsystem, which is the immediate family, the child care center or the school and the neighborhood play area, these are places the child interacts regularly and so that child is learning, this is their zone of proximal development. They're learning what they're supposed to do, how they're supposed to act, how they're supposed to dress. All those things that culture and our society kind of communicate to us. And we have to choose whether or not to accept it. And then. But the individual, for example, if the individual is a night person and the family is a morning family, you know, that can cause some conflict. And yes, you can alter children's schedules a little bit, but think about it. I mean, most of us, we just have these inherent times where we're more productive. My best friend is more productive in the evening and she stays up till 12, 1 o' clock in the morning doing stuff, painting over, helping her sister or whatever. And I'm in bed by 8, I'm up at 4 o', clock, but I'm in bed by 8. And I do my best work from 4am until about 11am so that's just, that's how we're different. But we want to recognize that I don't do, wouldn't do well as a second shift worker. You know, by the end of second shift I'm just like kind of groggy. Now can I do it? Yes. But my better times, even when I adjust my schedule, my better times are in the morning. So we want to look at how that works with the child's rhythms. The mesosystem is the relationship among the entities involved in the child's microsystem. The exosystem is the social institutions which affect the children indirectly, such as the parents, work settings and policies. Can children come to work? For example, when my son was little, I was teaching at the University of Florida and I was blessed enough to be able to bring him, you know, when I would go and teach, I would just strap on my Baby Bjorn and, you know, teach. And that was fine. That was not a problem in my workplace. Now in other workplaces that is a huge issue for safety reasons or whatever, you know, you wouldn't want a correctional officer walking around with a baby strapped to their chest. Also, workplaces that have mandatory overtime can stress parents and that can filter down and impact the child. So we want to look at how, you know, how is the parents work and the work schedule and their happiness for work, for example, and how much they're getting paid. How do all of those things impact the home environment and impact the child? Because we may need to refer out for some case management or vocational counseling services or something. The macro system is the broader cultural values, laws, and resources. And the chronosystem refers to changes that occur during the child's life, both personally, like the birth of a sibling, and culturally, like war. So as time goes by, the child is going to change. And the chronic system, you know, can also refer to different stages in the child's life. So what do we do with all this? We want to help parents assess all of the factors that may be impacting the child and how the child is impacting the environment. So if you have a parent bring their young child in and say, you know, he's been doing fine in daycare until three months ago, and all of a sudden he started biting and back talking and being oppositional. You know, you want to start saying, what change has happened? And not just focusing on the child because you're missing so much of the picture. What changed in the classroom? What changed with the teacher? What changed at home? Did the child's schedule change? Is the child going through a growth spurt right now? Not saying that that forgives and forgets everything, but those are areas that we want to look for intervention, you know, so we can figure out exactly what's going on. So we want to have the parent look at home, what's going on at school, in the neighborhood? Have there been changes? You know, maybe their best friend moved away or, you know, who knows? Or another child moved into the neighborhood that models those behaviors? What's going on in the community? Has there been some chaos in the community that has been disruptive? What is the child seeing on media? Have they started watching a new television program that, you know, has upset them or has been modeling inappropriate or unhelpful behaviors? You know, these are all things that we kind of want to think about, and we want to identify how these messages that the child is getting from all these places impact the child's sense of belonging, efficacy, safety, and hope. So, for example, a child whose parent went to jail. You know, sometimes kids start feeling very angry at the system. They feel very abandoned by the parents, and then they start being disrespectful because they're like, well, you're just gonna go away again anyway. So it may be due to something like that, and they could be angry. We want to figure out where they're angry at or what they don't understand. If a child has a parent who's unhappy at work, how does that impact the child's sense of efficacy, safety, and hope? Well, they see parent go to work and then come home, and they're just miserable. And they sit on the couch and they just have this shell shocked look on their face all night long. And then they go to bed. They're not emotionally able to engage with the child if they are that drained when they come home from work. So that could make them feel rejected if mom or dad comes home and they're just like, you know what, kid? I just ain't got it in in me for to play with you today. And then that just happens repeatedly. Occasionally it's going to happen, but if that happens repeatedly, the child might start going, well, that feels like a rejection. Remember, children think dichotomously. So, you know, and, and they think egocentrically. So if mom's in a bad mood or dad's in a bad mood, what did I do? Or it's my fault or I should fix it. So moving on now we're gonna kind of try to wrap this up in a big bow. Erikson believed that development is lifelong. He emphasized that at each stage of development, psychosocial development, the child acquires attitudes and skills resulting from the successful negotiation of a psychological conflict. So the first one is hope, the hope for outcome is hope, and they develop. Sorry. The conflict is trust versus mistrust, and the hope for outcome is hope. So if they develop a sense of trust, they will theoretically develop a sense of hope. This is infancy through about one year. So this is before the child can talk. The child does not can't get their own needs met. They can't change their own diaper. So we want to figure out how to make sure that the child feels safe and secure and loved. I found a really great resource today that was put out. I don't remember who it was put out by anyway. It helped parents learn how to be responsive because not all parents, and you know, most of us actually the first child, we're not really in tune with that whole five different cries and how to identify when they're starting to get overstimulated and all that stuff we learn on the job. So this helps parents start to identify what's going on with the child so they can help meet their needs and be more responsive. So what do we want to do? We want to help the parent establish consistency in their caregiving. So when the child uncomfortable and they cry, whatever that need is is getting met. What can get in the way? Well, we want to screen for postpartum depression. And please remember that postpartum depression can happen in dads as well as moms. So we want to make sure that both parents are emotionally healthy and not being impacted by ppd. And I have another video on postpartum depression on our YouTube channel if you want to learn more about that. We can use parent child interaction therapy which basically takes videos or has a therapist sitting there observing the parent child interaction in a natural environment to identify what the parents are picking up on and maybe some of the strengths that they may be missing and providing some coaching to help them start enhancing the positive in their children and focusing on what the good things and the strengths. And we want parents to be mindful aware of their actions so they can be consistent. Because if you're not really aware of the fact that you give in three out of every seven times, then you may think you're being consistent when you're really not. So parents need to be aware of what they're doing now. Infancy to one year. You know, there's not a lot of things you're giving in on because we're not having temper tantrums yet. But we want parents to start very early being aware of their actions. Sometimes simple changes like changes in schedules can be very disruptive to a child. My son, you know, the extrovert is also very rigid and you could set your watch by when he would lay down to take a nap when he was little. My daughter, on the other hand, pretty much didn't sleep. But we can, if I changed Sean's schedule at all, you know, we couldn't get him home for his 10am nap. Things would go south pretty quick when he was that young. We also want to help, help them establish compassion and care. Help the child's the parent meet the child's needs. So we want to provide them, if needed, education about parenting skills and positive discipline. Some parents don't need it, some parents don't feel they need it, some parents don't want it. So we don't want to force it on them. But we do want to help them know where resources are available so they can access them if needed. Encourage physical exchanges such as holding, hugging, kissing, caressing and feeding. Just plopping the kid in the, in the swing and giving them a bottle propped up with a pillow doesn't do the same thing as holding a child and holding their bottle. Provide case management services as necessary if we need to refer out for social services types of help, you know, food stamps or medical care or whatever. And encourage parents to be mindful of themselves. Children are extremely perceptive little critters and so when parents start to get stressed, they babies will often sense that stress and also start to get fussy. So we do want to check in with parents. If they're reporting that their baby is just high needs and cries all the time and they've ruled out all the physical causes. We want to look at the parents stress level and what's going on and what are they picking up from the parents vibes, if you will. Then we move on to toddlerhood. When parents are overly permissive or overly strict, it keeps the toddler from developing a sense of autonomy. At this age, they're starting to dress themselves or at least try their toilet training, they're doing all that kind of stuff where they're starting to try to develop a sense of agency over their own body. So we want to try to encourage that. And one of the challenges a lot of parents have is finding the happy medium between being too permissive and too strict. And you know, please share if you have tips that you give parents for, you know, how much discipline do we give and how much structure we do want to make sure we provide praise for exploration and experimentation. You know, they may do something, it may not be the way you would have done it, but if they did it and they got the job done, then, you know, there you go. We want to encourage the children to become independent by allowing them to make limited choices and decisions. You don't want to say, you know, it's really cold outside. Do you think you need to put on a sweater that if you know it's cold and you know they need a sweater, you don't want to give them the option to say no, so instead you want to say it's cold outside. You know you're going to need a sweater today. I'm wondering which sweater would you like to put on? Or you know, I'm getting ready to make dinner and I need to figure out what vegetable to choose from. Can you go in the, in the refrigerator and pick a vegetable for me? That gives children a little bit more sense of control over their lives and their bodies. We want to model and teach skills that are going to help them successfully complete the jobs of their age. So thinking about children that you work with and you know, what are appropriate jobs for 2 to 3 year olds, you know, they're not going to probably be old enough to take the trash out, but what can they do? They can potentially pick up their toys, they can potentially clear their plate at the end of dinner. So there's things they can do, they can feed the dog, anything that the child can do, you want to show them how to do it. You know, make sure that they know how to do it and then let them try it. And this manageable job allows them to develop a sense of competence in what they're doing and trust and be proud of themselves that you trusted them to take on this task. One of the things that can really help is clearly communicating expectations. So what does it mean when you say to clean your room? Take a picture of a clean room. What does it mean when you say to put your toys away? And, you know, if you have shelves in a certain way, take a picture so the child can look at the picture and look at the shelf and go, did I do it or did I not? If you have bins, clearly label the bins with pictures. Maybe you have one for balls and then one for action figures and then one for Legos. You know, clearly label the bin so the child knows what goes in there. And then let them have at it and then praise them even if they fail, even if they put something in the wrong bin. You know, give them kudos for at least trying to then shape the behavior from there or scaffold, as we've talked about. Reassure the child that you love him for who he is. You know, he's going to make mistakes, but I love you as a little person. Pay attention to the child when he's trying to communicate with you, even through play. So sometimes they may be engaging in some really ruckus behaviors, but we want to pay attention to what are they trying to communicate. You know, are we seeing a lot of angry play or are we seeing happy play or what's going on. Teach children that it's okay to feel how they feel, but they need to control what they do. If they're angry, that's okay. Anger is an okay emotion, but it's not okay to bite somebody. So we're teaching them psychological flexibility. They're becoming aware of how they feel, and then they're learning to identify what is the best step. You know, if I do this, there's going to be a punishment. If I do this, no punishment. So you're helping them, you know, put practice, the pause, so to speak. One of the ways you can start doing this is teaching emotional vocabulary. And this is a really short little clip. How do you do angry? How do you sad? How do you do happy? Happy. How do you do bored? How do you do scared? How do you do surprised? Good job. Yay, game. Again, surprise. How do you do anger? Okay, so we want to help children start learning what. You know, we talked earlier about the fact that feelings have with them Behavioral reactions and urges as well as physiological reactions. Asking a 2 year old, how do you feel inside? When that happens, they may not be able to identify it unless they're in the heat of the moment, but they can start identifying behaviors like when you're surprised, you go. So they can start using those words a little bit more. During the preschool years, the child starts to develop initiative. They start to want to fledge from the nest a little bit. But we don't want them to feel guilty about doing that. We don't want them to feel guilty for using their creativity. And this is the age when they start, you know, trying things and often, you know, using things for, in ways they're not necessarily designed to be used. I remember there was one time my daughter created, used tinker toys to create a rotating spit and pretended that she was roasting meat. I was like, okay. So parents who are overly strict can sort of thwart some of that creativity. Another issue at this age, and you see this, if you watch dance moms or any of those, parents sometimes live vicariously through the child. The child may not even want to be doing pageants or dancing or music or whatever it is, but the parents always dreamed of being a figure skater or something. So they're pushing the child in that direction. So we do want, and the child's not allowed to explore or take initiative and do what they want to do. And that's a sticky thing to negotiate with parents. But ideally we want to help parents allow the child to lead the way on what's exciting. What do we want to do? We want to have parents encourage self awareness and authenticity. So what do you want to do? What do you feel? What do you think about this? And even at 4 years old, children have opinions. And we also want to model it, you know, have our opinions, talk about our opinions. You know, age appropriate, of course, but that helps children recognize that you can have two different opinions or two different likes and you can still be lovable. Be clear and consistent with rules and discipline. At this age, they're going to start trying to try things out and push boundaries a little bit. That's what they're supposed to do. So we want to be consistent. We want to make sure the walls of that house are steady and that the child knows how far that they can go. Focus on the positive. What did they do right today? Too often we just focus on what they did wrong. So we want to encourage parents to focus, make a concerted effort to focus on what they did right today. So when they pick them up from school, what were three things that went really well today? And have the child identify those model and role play social skills. So for children at this age, they may not be used to meeting adults. You know, when my daughter was really little, she used to try to hide behind my leg. So we want to model. How do you meet people? What do you do? If you're going to start at a new church or a new school, what do you do that first day? So they learn how to introduce themselves to people and carry on conversations and encourage and model calculated risks. So getting outside that comfort zone. When my son took gymnastics for the first time, he wasn't too sure about it. He thought he wanted to do it, but he wasn't too sure about it. So I encouraged him, you know, go try it out for a session if you hate it, you know, no harm, no foul. At least you tried. And you know, so I encouraged him to go try things out, see how it went. Same thing with soccer, you know, try it for a season. If you don't like it, you don't have to do it next season. And then praise the child for trying even when they fail, because that helps them learn about what they're good at and what they like, but also the fact that they're good as human beings regardless of what they are good at. We want to reassure them that their love for who they are encourage them to start developing friendships with a variety of people. That way they start learning about different points of view and perspectives. Now remember that zone of proximal development. You know, you may not want to encourage them to be going hither and yon, but within that zone, they're going to meet different kinds of people. Talk about what's happening and encourage your child to talk. Find out answers for questions together. At this age, they're really curious. So instead of telling them how to think, ask them, well, what do you think about that? Or instead of telling them the answer to something, say, how do you think we can find the answer to that? So encourage them to start developing problem solving skills. Encourage them to play. Children learn through play and even make suggestions about imaginary play. For example, you know, what would it be like if you were a small mouse? Let's get down on the floor and pretend like we're a small mouse. Or you can provide props to use for play, like dressing up and pretending you're a chef or a firefighter or something. Keep routines, but don't over schedule children too often. At any age, but especially at this young age, parents are very good Intentioned and they want children to be enriched. So children have things to do from sun up to sundown, seven days a week and the kids just going, please let me rest. So we want to not over schedule children, you know, try to give them a break, allow them to have some downtime, make sure to spend time together at this age, you know, they're in school all day long, they come home, you've been at work all day long, you're exhausted. But it's important to be able to carve out time each evening to spend time with the child and connecting. Help parents identify warning signs to ward off temper tantrums. Identify those signs that your child is about to melt down so you can help the child learn to identify those and take appropriate action. Identify the child's distinct preferences and limits. What kind of structure do they prefer? Do they prefer a lot of structure or do they prefer kind of loosey goosey? When my son was in preschool, there was one day they had a birthday party and you know, I said he was structured. And they had this Birthday party at 8 o' clock in the morning. 8 o' clock in the morning was circle time. And he just couldn't wrap his head around the fact that we were not doing circle time. And the teacher called him over there, she said, you know, come join the party, we're having a lot of fun over here. He said, no, Ms. Jessica, eight o' clock is circle time. And he just sat right there on a circle and waited for circle time to happen. And deviating from that routine was really stressful to him. So it was important as he grew to help him learn how to become a little bit more flexible learning styles, you know, auditory learning styles versus visual reason and making meaning. Helping children learn, you know, how do they decide what's good and what's bad and how do they manage time 7 to 12? We want to help them feel like they've got consistent support and encouragement because they're starting to feel like they're industrious, they're starting to develop a sense of competence and they're developing those skills they're going to build on in high school and later on. So we want to help them figure out how to handle unsupportive peers. We want to help them excel in areas that they're good at. So we want to encourage them to pursue interests and hobbies. And for children it can be short lived. You know, my daughter will be focused on something for six months, like intensely, and then she'll switch to something else. She may Come back to it later or she may not, but you know, giving them a little bit of room to explore. We want to help children develop hardiness by helping them identify the good things in life. You know, sometimes life's gonna hand you lemons and that's not good. But what else is going on in your life right now that is good? So if a beloved pet passes away, that's devastating. But if they get stuck in that, you know, we want to identify you've got the good memories from what's going on. You know, let them go through the grieving process. We don't want to invalidate their grief, but hardiness helps them eventually turn their attention to the fact that, all right, that thing not going so well, but there are other good things in life. Help them identify what they can and cannot control. They can control themselves. They can't control the weather, they can't control other people. They can control how they react. They can't necessarily control how they initially feel. Feelings are pretty natural and automatic, but they can control what they do with those feelings. And then we want to help them view adversity as a challenge. So encourage children to look at problems if they have a bully they're dealing with at school, it's unfortunate. All right, this is a challenge. How can you handle this? How can we problem solve together? And what options are there? So encouraging them to see that, see it as not an end, but an opportunity. Continue to encourage the child to separate failure at a task from failure as a person. Maybe they didn't make the football team. Okay, you know, that can be very devastating, but it doesn't mean you're a bad person. It just means you didn't make the football team this year. Help children learn to meaningfully conceptualize hypotheticals and learn how to organize and solve multivariate problems. This is when they're getting into math and you know, you've got three friends that are coming over on Friday and all that kind of stuff. So there's multivariate social problems, there's multivariate math problems. Help them take other people's perspectives instead of just telling them how the other person felt or thought. Obviously this is more towards the seven year old stage. Help them appreciate their physical characteristics. The average age that the first that the girls go on their first diet is eight in this country. So, you know, seven years old. We want to start encouraging them to appreciate their physical characteristics. Support them in exploring their values and reactions to things. You know, ask them why did it make you mad when that happened? And Help them start learning to articulate that. Help them define a realistic and healthy set of standards and expectations for themselves as well as for other people. Identify in yourself what standards and expectations you model for your child. So if you hold everybody else to this unreasonably high standard, you can't really expect them to do something different. So you want to look at what am I modeling versus what am I expecting? And for every rule you have, have an explanation and pick your battles. Because it's hard to be consistent if you have a rule book that is 7 inches thick. So pick your battles. What things do I have to enforce for the safety and consistency of the home environment? In adolescence, there can be the child is developing identity, they're trying to figure out who they are, but they may not have support for their individual wants, needs or goals, either from parents or from school or from both. You know, and this can be My daughter wanted to dye her hair blue and her dad was really not down with that. That was an individual want that she had. And she was trying to figure out. She was kind of going through this experimental phase, so figuring out how to negotiate that was challenge for her. They're heavily influenced by peers at this stage, so peers are probably going to be influencing them a lot. And if you don't like their peers as a parent, then there's going to be some clashing. So trying to figure out how to support the child, even if they're experimenting with things that you don't agree with as much, they need stable, consistent relationships. Adolescent relationships, just like adolescent hormones, are all over the place. So we need to help them develop a consistent relationship with themselves and with some good solid adult figures. And they're going to have their best friends, but we need to make sure that they've got some stable relationships that just aren't going anywhere because sometimes BFFs go away. Encourage children to develop skills in areas they can excel. Provide support when the child's world seems chaotic. And this can be starting middle school. This can be changes in friends or just bullies or something else happening. Reassure the child that they're loved for who they are and help them learn to validate themselves just for being I am good because I'm me, not because can throw a football or not because I'm the head cheerleader or whatever, but just because I am a good person. Have parents make themselves available and continue special time and other family involvement. But let the children come to you with or their adolescents with their problems. Around our house, we have mandatory family time every Friday night we watch a movie. So you know, we're not sitting down and having these deep heart to heart discussions, but we're still connecting and we end up talking after the movies and it's a non threatening sort of thing. And we go hiking and stuff as a family, occasionally be a sideline cheerleader and ally. Remember to continue to provide love, limits, structure and consequences and all that other good positive parenting stuff. Just because they are 16 years old doesn't mean they don't need a little bit of structure. It's important for parents to remember to listen and know that they don't and won't have answers to some of the things that are bugging the adolescent. Nobody has all the answers, but it's important to encourage adolescents to think about them and help the adolescent develop critical thinking skills by talking and expressing opinions and feelings. So encourage them to tell you their points of view and the points of view of other people and then talk about the pros and cons and maybe even have them take that other person's point of view and argue it for a while to try to get into their shoes and understand where they're coming from. So there's a lot of stuff that goes along with development and we want to pay attention to the zone of proximal development. We want to pay attention to what children are learning through observation as well as through direct reward. We want to pay attention to our interactions with them so they feel like they've got a safe, secure home base. As parents we do. Preventative and protective factors in child development include parental involvement. So parents don't have to be rich, they don't have to be, you know, PhDs. They just have to be loving and involved and consistent. You know, children thrive on consistency. So if something is this way on Monday, they need to understand that it's also that way on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. There need to be connection to positive adults and peers. So there's some outlets for them, people to talk about stuff with that are their own age, but also people to talk about stuff with that may have a little bit more wisdom and connection involvement in an organized community because that community serves the foundation where that youth is going to fledge, if you will, when they leave the nest of the home and they go to school or then they're going to start interacting with, you know, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and they start interacting more with the community. So you want them to feel like they've got a connection to that. Behaviors represent the person's best attempt to meet a need so we need to make sure that we help youth start learning how to articulate what they need. And we need to help parents identify the need and alternatives that the child is expressing through inappropriate behaviors in order to help them identify, in order to help them eliminate them. So if the child, when they get angry, they throw a temper tantrum and get really loud and hit things, well, that's not okay. It's okay to get angry. What is a more appropriate way of meeting this need and what is the need the child's trying to fulfill? You know, they may need structure after school. A lot of times kids are just so good. All day long they, you know, they've been trying to follow the rules and they just have all this pent up energy. And so they get home and they melt down and they are just doing one poor choice after another. So then you want to look and say, what's the need that's being missed here? What's the need the child is trying to fulfill? They're trying to get rid of all that pent up energy. You know, they've got to decompress a little bit. So what's a more appropriate way they could do it? Maybe stopping at the park on the way home or encouraging playtime for 30 minutes after they get home? All right, there are some additional places you can go challenging behavior and positive behavior support. You can find resources for positive behavioral interventions and supports, the U.S. department of Education and the statewide parent advocacy Network, Learning about learning and disabilities in depth. And then there are some resources for autism and fetal alcohol spectrum disorders that you can click on if you're interested in those. Those aren't on your quiz, obviously, but those are just additional readings. So we're going to move on to the question and answer portion of class, so to speak. So if you don't have any questions, then you can go ahead and go take your quiz. But Jesse did ask, how can we help unsupportive peers? Because there's a lot of kids out there that are dealing with bullying. So they're in this environment, you know, 30 hours a week where they feel afraid or they feel unsupported or they feel like a fish out of water. So how do we help them with that? How do we help them connect to other people? And I don't know the answer to that. You know, I'm kind of putting that out there to you guys. And what is it that you think we can do to help them when they feel like their peers don't have their back and everybody else is against them. When you're working with families, you can certainly encourage the families to get involved and make sure that the child feels welcomed, loved and respected at home. But that doesn't solve the problem the other, you know, 30 hours when they're at school. And. Yes, okay, good point, Cassandra. You can teach children about being a bystander and that it's important to not just be a bystander and watch bad things happen. Bystanders have power to stop things. You have the ability to intervene. So you want to look at that bystander effect as well and not just assume that somebody else is going to step in. If you see something, you need to say something or do something, and then the kid looks at you and goes, well, what's that something? What do I do? And that depends on the school. But that's where that scaffolding comes in, where, you know, you see there's a problem. Alright, then report it to an adult. An adult will help you figure out how to handle this situation henceforth and forevermore. Or maybe the adult will need to intervene. And children do point out that if they step in, they may be bullied more. And that's potentially something that can happen, which is why it's so important to have a network between the family, the school, the teachers, you know, where the children do have a place where they can go and feel safe, where there is truly a zero tolerance policy. Now, bullying doesn't just happen at school, it happens on the Internet. It happens on Instagram and Snapchat and all those other place. So we need to talk with children about what can you do to limit being bullied. And sometimes you got to close your Instagram account or block people from your account or, you know, do other things. And can they go say stuff about you on other Instagram accounts? Yes, they can. However, how does that impact you? Because you can't control them. What can you control? For some kids, it's a matter of just having them step away from the computer for a little while. Doesn't make the problem go away. But if the bullies are not being fed, then a lot of times they'll get bored and quit picking on that person. So we want to help them look and problem solve. And there's no correct, one correct solution for any bully situation. You have to look at what's the bully getting out of it, what's this environment like, what stop gaps can we put in place, etc. So it's definitely a problem solving situation for youth. All right, everybody, thank you. And we're going to start on Thursday with the Infant Toddler Development Series. 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