Category: Health

Emotional Intelligence

Posted on by Suki
One year there was a boy in my son’s class who was always bugging the other kids. He would break into conversations, touch kids in ways they didn’t like, and generally ignore the usual social conventions that kids follow.
He was also a very large boy, which affects how people view him.
It occurs to me that in another school, with other teachers and in less controlled situations with other kids, this boy could easily have turned into what we call a bully. He was big, physically intrusive, and unable to listen when other kids told him to back off.
In the school his mother chose for him, however, his behavior was looked at from a whole different angle. Instead of saying, This boy is behaving badly, which is the traditional view, and then applying the traditional punishments, the teachers questioned, Why does he act this way? What does he need? They talked to his mother. They had class meetings. When clashes arose between him and other kids, there was always a caring adult there to mediate.
As the year progressed, the other kids came to understand him more. Instead of getting mad at him, they would gently explain what he’d done that was wrong. And because he wasn’t being punished and ostracized for the behavior, he listened to them. By the end of the year, he was integrated into the classroom, and though his behavior still wasn’t completely within the range we call “normal,” he was able to form good relationships with his classmates.
In a traditional school setting, this is the perfect situation to create what we call a “bully.” Here’s a boy who is very large. He doesn’t understand social cues the way that most kids do in the middle of their elementary school years. He’s not a verbally adept child. Other children misunderstand his actions.
In a large, chaotic classroom, the teacher probably doesn’t have time to notice him, except when he’s making trouble. Because she doesn’t have a lot of support, every time a kid complains about his behavior she just sends him to the office for discipline. It’s likely that not one adult takes responsbility for him and tries to figure out what’s at the root of his problems.
On the playground, kids don’t want to play with him, and he doesn’t understand why. With no adults to mediate, their clashes escalate. As the children try to push him further away, he gets more and more intrusive till his behavior starts to fit the definition of bullying.
His teacher might meet with his mother, but his mother’s concerns are dealt with outside of the classroom. The problem is his behavior, the school tells her. What are you going to do about it?
The mother is desperate for help, but no one seems to look at it from her point of view. Here’s a boy that she loves, who is so sweet and loving and really wants to have friends. But the more he is pushed away by the staff and students, the more upset and angry he gets. Because the point of view is punitive — what can we do to discourage the behavior? — instead of therapeutic — what does he need that he’s not getting? — the problems just increase.
Behaviorally different kids have always existed, and do exist in every society. How the society chooses to deal with them greatly influences whether those behaviors set into an anti-social adult, or whether they are channeled into an emotionally healthy adult. By blaming children for their behavior, rather than trying to figure out what the child is expressing with the behavior, we force the child to protect himself in whatever way he can.
The growing field of Emotional Intelligence is trying to figure out what we need to know in order to become emotionally healthy adults. From Wikipedia: One attempt toward a definition was made by Salovey and Mayer (1990) who defined EI as “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.”
Just like with any other pursuit — reading, basketball, knitting, math — some kids seem to come into the world better equipped than other kids to develop the skill of emotional intelligence. We don’t punish kids for having a hard time learning to read – why should we punish them for not getting social cues without being taught?
Of course, what I’m suggesting here is not cheap, it can’t be done on a computer, and its results can’t be boiled down into a score. In other words, it’s education.

More about “bad” kids

Posted on by Suki
A cool thing about a blog is that it’s not supposed to be polished writing. You can just dump your thoughts of the moment into it, whether or not they’ll be your thoughts of the next moment!
One of my readers took offense at my blog entry, “In Defense of Bad Kids.” She said: The “bad kids” who made you cry are not necessarily fine adults, now. There are plenty of adults who continue to act like bullies and I really don’t agree with you justifying their mistreatment of you by saying that you learned something from them worthy.
I totally agree with this comment. On the other hand, I still totally agree with what I wrote before. I don’t think this is a contradiction, however. Just an expression of how contradictory the whole subject of humans, their behaviors, and their intents is!
The reader’s comment is slightly wrong: she seems to imply that I meant physically violent behavior should be tolerated or even supported. I didn’t mean that at all, of course. No school should allow its students to be in physical danger. That’s obvious and absolute.
But I wasn’t just writing about bullies who hurt other children, rather about “different” and negative behaviors in general. My experience with my kids and working in their schools has led me to believe that the popular image of a kid who “is” a bully is overly simplistic. Bullying is often a behavior that means something else, and few kids always act that way.
Yes, I’ve known kids who seem to “be” bullies: they invariably pick on the less powerful, whether doing that through physical force or emotional coercion.
But I’ve seen more situations in which kids who are acting in a negative way have something else going on, and their behavior is the only way they know to express it. I’m not saying their behavior should be tolerated; I’m saying that it’s better to face problems than to push them away.
I’m also concerned that in trying to make things easy for our kids, we might end up making things harder. Part of the function of a school is to teach kids to get along in a society. And all societies contain people who bully others, as well as people who are likely targets for bullies. Teachers can provide a good role model for kids on all sides of the conflict, by showing them how to work on their differences in a rational, fair manner.
This is definitely not the easy way to go, especially for a school that doesn’t have to accept any student that walks in their doors. It’s easier just to make your problem someone else’s problem, then forget about it. But if you’re an educator, that’s a lousy lesson to teach your students.
I’m guessing that the most incorrigible bullies in my school probably never changed that much. No one ever taught them any differently; teachers were in general indifferent to what was causing the behavior. And if the cause was a violent home life, that’s probably more than a single teacher can take on anyway.
But my point is that it’s always worth a try to help kids, no matter how they behave, and to view their behavior in context. Our public schools are responding to budget cuts by cutting “non-essential” personnel like counselors, who are an essential piece of helping kids to work out their problems at school. And fewer personnel means fewer eyes and ears, more freedom for the bullies to get firmly entrenched in their role and the bullied to learn to accept their role as the victim.
I’ve never seen a “zero tolerance” policy have much positive effect, but I have seen skilled teachers help kids understand themselves and others in a constructive, positive way. And I hope that those kids, whatever their role was in the conflict, turn into adults who have more tools to resolve conflicts they and their children face. The words are easy to write, but the lessons are hard to learn and teach. That’s life!

Asynchronicity

Posted on by Suki
It was one of those days.
We were in the midst of a thoroughly normal, peaceful morning. My husband had dropped our son at the bus stop, our daughter had eaten a great breakfast, and we seemed poised for a lovely homeschooling day.
Then came the topknot. I can’t really explain to you, except that sometimes when things go wrong for my daughter, they go really wrong. She wanted me to do a “topknot” in her hair, but apparently I didn’t do it right, so she decided to do it herself. The problem is, she does hair just about as well as you’d expect six-year-old fingers to do.
But in her brain she saw perfection. As she worked harder and harder to realize her desires, she got more and more frustrated.
I have learned to leave her to her own devices in this situation. Generally she gets angry, then she finds some way to give in to imperfection and goes on with her day as if nothing had happened. But today she got more and more frustrated, more and more angry. I went back to try to help her but she was too furious to deal with me.
It was one of those homeschooling days where I was just going to have to give up. She finally calmed herself and listened to stories on Tumblebooks for much of the morning. Then we went and spent a Gayle’s gift card we had had hanging around, and then used a Cost Plus coupon that was going to expire. Then we went to the beach and she sang and made a sand castle. We found two heart-shaped rocks. Art class, pick up brother from the bus, and the day was over before it began. I had very little to show for our homeschooling day. What had we learned?
Cut to dinnertime. Her daddy was talking about something that would take four days. “That would be about a hundred hours,” she said. I asked her how many exactly. “Ninety-six,” she said, not missing a beat.
She’s six. She spent her morning listening to picture books, though she can read chapter books. She would go nuts trying to finish one page of her first grade math book, yet she can compute 24×4 by working backwards from 25×4.
It’s hard to know what to do with a kid like this. Everyone tells me not to worry, but it’s hard to know how to plan a day, much less plan a lesson. I’m so envious of other homeschooling moms who know what their children need to learn next. I don’t even know what my child knows, much less what she needs to learn.
As the day progressed, she came up with ideas for the next subject we should study. Microbiology, she said. Knights and castles. All of this is equally possible and impossible. Possible because in this wonderful networked world we live in, we don’t even have to go to the library to pursue our fancies. I just typed “knights” in the searchbox on Cosmeo.com and came up with a story about knights doing fractions. She’ll love it.
Whether or not she could do fractions on a page, and sit still long enough to fill in bubbles on a standardized test, I don’t know.
Asynchronous development is the fancy word for what’s going on. She’s a six-year-old who has an hourlong meltdown about a hairdo. She’s a six-year-old who can do fourth-grade math in her head. She is perfectly happy sitting alone on a beach digging sand and watching water fill up the hole. She can read anything she wants, yet chooses to read preschool picture books. Her favorite place in the library is at the board books.
Inexplicable things cause her to fritz out. “Why did she do that?” another parent or teacher will ask. If I knew, I’d deserve a Nobel Prize for cracking the mystery of the human brain. No one can tell you why some children’s brains just don’t go the way that other kids’ brains do. But lots of people can tell you that it usually works out OK.
Asynchronous development doesn’t mean non-development. Her emotions, her ability to handle transitions and frustrations, her interactions with other kids — all that is developing…slowly.
Her ability to do math in her head, her reading comprehension, her quick and exact ability to sum up the meaning of an event — all this is running full steam ahead. Sometimes it slows down and the child grows into an adult who is relatively in balance. Sometimes…
We won’t worry about that. We’ll think about knights and microbiology and Tai Kwon Do. It’s all we can do.

Nature Therapy

Posted on by Suki
I just finished writing an article for Growing Up in Santa Cruz about non-drug alternatives for treating behavioral problems in kids. It was a fascinating subject to read about. I have a personal stake, given that we have chosen to work with our daughter’s problems by trying to find the root of them rather than masking them.
This is not to say that I blame the families who have knowingly chosen to use drugs to calm their children. I know that families are facing situations far worse than ours. But I do think that the majority of families whose children are prescribed drugs don’t know that there are alternatives. That’s why I wrote the articles, and I hope they offer food for thought to families who are facing a hard decision.
One of the interesting things about doing the research was how many well-designed scientific studies I found that corroborated what my husband and I have learned through trial and error, talking with other parents, and watching our children and how they react to things.
Something we noticed since our son was a baby was the calming effect of nature. Many parents of colicky babies know this: your baby is fussy and you bring him outside — no matter what the weather — and he calms. Our son was born during a rainstorm that didn’t seem to end for six weeks. I remember those painful six weeks very well, stuck inside with a very fussy baby, in pain for much of the time due to a very difficult birth.
The cool thing is, what we have noticed is now validated in studies, and the study of Nature Therapy has a physical home at the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory. Their studies not only confirm what many parents instinctively sensed, but more: Not only do kids diagnosed with ADHD do better outside, they actually improve in a lasting way when their unstructured time in nature is increased.
The key here is unstructured. Almost everyone who studies the root causes of behavioral problems in children admits that lifestyle is a huge factor. So many of us have scheduled our children into days that resemble an office job more than the life of a child. I remember the first family I knew like this: my parents had neighbors in Berkeley whose children they saw twice a day: early in the morning on the way to daycare and early in the evening on their way back. These children never played in their yard. In fact, they were never outside, even though they were preschoolers in one of the best climates in the world. And, not surprisingly, they were always crying.
I feel that keeping my children’s access to unstructured play time is paramount in our lives, and is a constant struggle. There are so many cool things to DO! Today, point in fact: my son’s school has a short mid-winter break, so he was home. I was doing some school stuff with my daughter (we were charting the number of days seeds took to sprout against the time to germination listed on their packets). My son was sulking and had refused to play a game with us. My daughter was getting frustrated and suddenly without warning tossed a pencil at my face.
Time to do an about-face! I ordered them outside. “I want to go to Blue Balls Park!” my daughter protested. “I want to stay inside,” my son grumbled. “Out!” I commanded. Amazingly, they went. We have the great fortune to be able to walk into Nisene Marks State Park from our backyard, so I herded them down toward the creek. We were out in the dripping wet of the newly rained-upon redwood forest about 30 seconds before their bodies relaxed. Then their voices. Then their faces.
They raced down the hill! They ran up and down a muddy embankment and pretended to fall down a steep hillside. When we got down to the stream, they balanced on rocks and logs. My son, in sneakers, got a soaker. My daughter, in rain boots, waded into water to her knees. Laughter, silliness. They found half a hollowed-out log that tipped back and forth and created waves outward across the stream.
They were happy again. They loved each other again. I loved them again! After we got back, my son worked on his newspaper story for class, and my daughter picked up the pretend “computer” she and her dad made and talked about how it ran MacOSX AND MacOS2 AND Windows.
Nature Therapy. I can’t recommend it more than that.

Capoeira, Whole Body Learning

Posted on by Suki
My daughter’s homeschool program brings in artists through the Spectra program. Usually they are visual artists, but occasionally there’s something different. Papiba and his Capoeira class is definitely Something Different.
The class starts with a little Portuguese lesson, introducing the kids to a few basic words and numbers. Then they stretch, and Papiba introduces more terms as they go. From stretching, he builds up the basic moves that the kids need to know, many of which have colorful Portuguese names that they learn. Once they can do the moves broken down, he starts to put them together. He adds rhythm, the kids partner off, and the dance begins. At the end the children join in a circle, sing a song, and celebrate the little community they formed over an hour.
It’s real whole child education.
My daughter loves it, of course. Well, most of it. Sometimes she gets confused about what is expected of her in social situations, and she starts to pull back. But for the most part, she’s happily yelling out Portuguese words, doing cartwheels, and kicking over her partner’s head, holding hands in the circle, listening intently to this man whose whole attention is focused on a circle of children.
I think there’s a name for Capoeira class in the No Child Left Behind law… It’s called, “Unncessary.” The thing is, it’s the sort of thing that many kids go to school for. Last summer I wrote an article about school funding. One of the people I interviewed was Aptos High choir teacher Meri Pezzoni. She’d just lost her job because they were consolidating more and more of the music positions into one. If Papiba worked at Aptos High, he’d be teaching Capoeira, band, and Physics!
One of the things that Meri told me is that she had students who literally came to school to sing. They didn’t care about any of their other classes, but at least the singing got them onto campus. Once there, it might be possible to get them interested in more. Without the singing, they probably wouldn’t bother to come.
The other thing is that whole body education — things like Capoeira, singing, dance — develops important parts of kids’ brains. One time my choral group, Ariose Singers, did a Meredith Monk piece where we had to do dance movements while singing. I could feel my brain stretching…I swear it was creaking and groaning with the effort! Focusing on three different things at once makes your brain develop the capability of not focusing — being able to feel what comes next rather than having to count and consider. This is something that is part of life in Brasil. In the States, at least amongst those of us brought up in white middle America, it’s something we need to be taught.
And for kids, whether they need to be taught integrating body and mind or not, it’s nothing but good. It helps their brains take in more and different information. At the beginning of the second class today, Papiba asked what the Portuguese word was for a certain move, and a child just yelled it out with no hesitation. The no hesitation part is what’s key: that Portuguese word was right there – no struggling to find it amidst the jumble of information that we have to work to access.
My son laughs at me that sometimes when I know that I need to do something that I will probably forget to do (as I suffer an acute case of “Mommy brain”), I make up a song about it and sing it until I get to the point where I can take care of it. He thinks this is very funny.
But it works! And sometimes I hear him doing it, too. Given that he’s just about ten and starting into that dreamy pre-teen forgetful phase, perhaps he could use it more often. Probably we all could, and just think how much more fun life (and parenting) would be if we just sang and danced through our days.

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