The Squeaky Wheel (advocating for your child pt. 1) The school side

When your child, with special needs, goes to school it is hard to know what to expect, and how much support your child should get in the schools. There is a fine line between being a advocate for your child and making the school resent your attempts at helping.

First of all, I would like to say that, most, schools are, or can be, your friend. The schools often have their hands tied when it comes to providing support for children in general. when it comes to children in schools the district and government are playing math with your children. you see each child that may or may not need help gets classified by letter and then a grade inside that letter. I am basing these classes on a 2002 letter system so please excuse me if they made any minor changes. if your child does indeed have special needs they will fall into one of these categories:

• Level 1
  • Physically Dependent (A)
  • Deafblind (B)
• Level 2
  • Moderate to Profound Intellectual Disability (C)
  • Physical Disability or Chronic Health Impairment (D)
  • Visual Impairment (E)
  • Deaf or Hard of Hearing (F)
  • Autism Spectrum Disorder (G)

Again, please remember that these classifications are from the BC governments site, so there may be differences if you don’t live in Canada, or in BC.

inside these classes there are certain criteria your child needs to meet to require extra help. lets use children that have behavioral needs, or mental illness as an example of how little differences make or break the need for additional support. here are the critiria for getting extra support or not.

Students Requiring Moderate Behaviour Supports or
Students with Mental Illness

Assessment Criteria Related to Student

• Must have documentation of a behavioural, mental health
and/or psychological assessment which indicates needs
related to behaviour or mental illness
• Demonstrate aggression, hyperactivity, delinquency,
substance abuse, effects of child abuse or neglect, anxiety,
stress related disorders, depression, etc.
• Severity of the behaviour or condition has disruptive effect on
classroom learning, social relations, or personal adjustment
• Behaviour exists over extended time and in more than one
setting
• Regular in-class strategies not sufficient to support behaviour
needs of student; beyond common disciplinary interventions
• Rule out other conditions which may be contributing to the
behaviour (for example, side effects of medication, learning
disabilities)
• For Mental Illness, the diagnosis must be made by a qualified
mental health clinician

Criteria Related Planning and
Service

• Must develop IEP with goals that address student’s behaviour
or social/emotional needs and measures for student
achievement of the goals
• Must provide support services and adaptations/modifications
as indicated on the IEP
• No requirement for shared planning, implementation, or
funding with other service providers or agencies, but does not
preclude such arrangements

In other words, a child with these symptoms needs an independent education plan (IEP) that the teacher can use to modify their curriculum to meet the child’s individual needs. The teacher might need to give that child extra attention to keep him/her from distracting the class, but there is no other support that is needed (the “but does not preclude such arrangements” is, in my experience, in legal talk meaning the teacher can talk to an expert on their own time, if the expert is already in the school for someone else).

Now lets see what support looks like:

Students Requiring Intensive Behaviour Interventions or
Students with Serious Mental Illness
(Special Education Funding Supplement)

Assessment Criteria Related to Student

• Must have documentation of a behavioural, mental health and/or
psychological assessment which indicates the need for intensive
intervention beyond the normal capacity of the school to educate
• Demonstrate antisocial, extremely disruptive behaviour or
profound withdrawal or other internalizing conditions in school
• Behaviour or mental illness serious enough to be a risk to
themselves or others and/or significantly interfere with academic
progress of self and others
• Behaviour persistent over time in most other settings
• Behaviour or mental illness serious enough to warrant extensive
interventions beyond the school
• For Serious Mental Illness, the diagnosis must be made by a
qualified mental health clinician (psychologist with appropriate
training, psychiatrist or physician)

Criteria Related Planning and
Service

• Must develop IEP with goals that address student’s behaviour or
conditions of the mental illness and measures for student
achievement of the goals
• Must provide support services and adaptations/modifications
related to the behaviour or mental illness as indicated on the IEP
• Documentation to show that school district has already exhausted
resources normally used for moderate behaviour interventions
• Requirement that both plan and delivery of service is coordinated
with community service provider or agency (i.e. mental health
clinician, Ministry of Children and Family Development, Mental
Health, First Nations Social Worker). Not enough that another
agency or ministry is “involved”

these hoops take forever to jump through, and in the meantime, the teacher is the one that does most of the work. based on that one example I hope you see that there are a lot of kids that need help, that just don’t get it, or it takes a long time to work things out (I have seen it take half a year to two years to cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s)

So, how does this affect you? especially since most of my posts about education have focused on the Autism Spectrum. I want you to see just how much your child’s school needs to do to get the money for each kid in that school that may need help. Your child is no exception. There are a lot of schools that have teacher aids (each district calls them something else like: Educational assistant, special educational assistant, child ambassadors, and so on. basically they are the extra body in the class to give those kids that need consistent one on one time, for one reason or another, the attention the deserve, without eating up all the teachers time for the other children. That does not mean that these children are ignored by the teacher, they in fact get just as much attention as the rest of the class from the teacher. For 8 years, before my brain tumor, that was my job, and my passion), but there is not enough to serve every child that needs that extra attention.

As a parent, it is your job to find out what kind of funding your child has. Do they get Physiotherapy, and, or, occupational therapy? Do they get speech therapy? Do they have a youth and child care worker working with your child (usually used for children with extreme behaviors and mental illness)? How much extra aid and resource time do they get? Then, find out what all those peoples goals are. You might think that, that is the schools job, and you would be right, but it is your job to be educated on your child’s education and physical goals that the experts and school has. You also have to have goals you want. You might want your child to have the maximum amount of interaction time as possible, or keep up with all the others kid’s educational goals, but be realistic with those goals.’

On of the positions I had was with a boy, that had a sever case of cerebral palsy. He couldn’t move, but he could smile and frown even cry at points. we had myself, the teacher, a resource teacher, physiotherapist (PT), occupational therapist (OT), visual therapist, nurse and the parents working on his IEP (individual Education Plan). The visual therapist wanted me to take my student into a dark room and try and get him to tack an LED light with his eyes. the process would take 30 min out of the class and the class room, but it was important. The physio wanted me to take him to a room and do stretches, otherwise his muscles would seize up on him and he would be in extreme pain. That was to be done twice a day for at least 60 min. The OT wanted me to stretch out his fingers, get him to attempt to move his hand and feet to press a button (something I am proud to say he improved to be able to do it 2/5 times. small steps, led to big steps), and walk in his walker. That process would take about an 90 min out of the day. Then we had lunch break, recess and the point of integration, keeping the child interacting and learning from his/her peers. and then there was the hour or two that I would have to help do some 1/2 time with another child that needed extra time, that just wasn’t available. That again would take an 60 min out of the class. he also needed bathroom breaks, 20 min to get all the equipment (lift bed, wipes, diaper) and feed him(he was G-tube so we needed to be in a kitchen, just for him, and prep, clean and start feeding, then stop when it was done clean everything, dry and put it away, marking it all in a book for liability)taking 20 min each  . Lets add that up. 30+60+60+90+60+15+60+15+15+20+20= 7 hours out of class. Of course in the school we want all of our children in the class for as long as possible, but for my little man. Being that school is not 7 hours my job became impossible. I also could not transport him while he was eating, so he would have missed out on field trips with his class, if not for the fact that his mother knew when to be that squeaky wheel.

 

Now you know what the school’s have to put up with. my next post will be about what you can do to help your child be properly integrated into a their school.

my info came from:

https://www.bctf.ca/issues/resources.aspx?id=10812

Click to access special_ed_policy_manual.pdf

http://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/topic.page?id=539034EA83554537AEE3444F3A8279B0

if you don’t live in BC, look for your government website on special needs designations.

Educating Autism (Part 2: Therapies)

The key to helping children with Autism is early diagnosis, and implementing therapies that best fit your child. I have to admit there are a lot of good therapies out there and a few bad ones (my opinion only. All kids are different, and what therapies I think are bad could, in fact, help your child). So research is key to choosing what method your child needs. As for me, I don’t have a child with Autism. My experience is professional. I spent over 10 years working with children with children and have been exposed to a large diversity of therapies.

I have a confession to make. I am not a fan of ABA (applied behavior analysis), or at least not the ABA that I have been exposed to most of the time. I started off learning about a system of treatment started by Ivar Lovaas and Robert Koegel in 1970. They developed a method of ABA called Discrete trial training (DTT). DTT is a method that is focused mainly on a reward system. if a single task was rewarded than it was more likely to be repeated. It was a simple theory, but when practiced it felt more like training a dog to me. I mean no offence, to those that practice this type of ABA. The system is sound. Society today is based on the same model. Lets, for an example, take marketing. A company will have a benefits program where if you spend money you get something in return. The biggest rewards you can get is for buying multiple items, weather you need them or not. Lovaas and Koegel reported a 47% success rate, of getting children to equal intellect and social behaviors by the end of grade 1 with 40hrs a week of therapy, however those stellar results were not able to be reproduced with other therapists. a very simple example of DTT is to train a child to come when called. To get the child to listen you would send him to play, and you would watch for a while, then call his/her name. If the child did come they would get a reward, such as food, if they didn’t come they would be made to come, and shown what they would have got if they had come on their own. This would repeat until the child would come 100% of the time, then you would move on to the next task, or portion of a task and repeat these steps. Later Lovaas and Koegel criticized their initial method on the grounds that the method was to rigid, and didn’t help the child generalize their skills (a child would be able to come when called, but unable to do more than one task, or do the same task in a different environment.). Those are the reasons that originally turned me off ABA.

DTT is not something to be thrown out entirely from therapy however. As I said before, it works on adults without us knowing it, and it does work on kids as well. When a child is young (under 6) is is hard, if not impossible to us more abstract motivation to increase or decrease a behavior. DTT uses repetition and concrete rewards (often starting with food, and moving to other rewards as quickly as possible) It does work, but it isn’t good for generalizing abilities (feel like a broken record on that one).  There are potentially confusing terms when you read about DTT, or any other therapies for that matter, based on today’s perception of what the word means, not what it has been associated with. reward and punishment are often the biggest definition questions I have ever got from families that I have worked with. The term reward is a simple one for us to understand. a Reward is something positive given at the end of a desirable action. As I mentioned before if a child comes when called, a child correctly identifies others emotion, or any other correct response to a prompt they get something they desire (you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours). Rewards, or positive reinforcement start out concrete, food, a favorite toy, and then move on to something abstract, verbal praise, high fives, and finally, we hope, move to an intrinsic reward, they are proud of themselves for doing a good thing.

Punishment, today, is often associated with a spank, time outs, smacking hands, or other very negative things. Punishment doesn’t mean any of those things in educational terms. In the simplest terms Punishment is withholding a reward, verbal correction (not to be mistaken with verbal abuse, or anger). Another form of punishment is a negative reinforcement. Usually a negative reinforcement will happen before a desired reaction. Again, using a simple example, Think of yourself in the car. You turn on the car and hear beeping. You know exactly what the beeping is about…you haven’t put on your seat belt yet, so you do and the beeping stops. The beeping is the negative reinforcement. A negative reinforcement can be as simple as repeating a command, “look at my eyes…look at my eyes…” and then followed up with a Reward/positive reinforcement if needed to further motivate.

To fully explain all the different parts of ABA in full detail would take pages…and I might just do that one day, but not today. I wanted this to be more of an overall explanation than a detailed comparison, but I felt I would be remiss to leave out the history of ABA, since most people in learning about ABA, get the original DDT descriptions, first made famous by Lovaas, and “throw the baby out with the bath water”, so to speak.

The Therapy I spent most of my career drawn toward was a model called, “Floortime”, developed by Dr. Stanley Greenspan. Looking in on a session with a child and one of their therapists, it will probably just look like two people just playing on the floor, or where ever the child likes to play.  The joy of this method, is that’s what lies at the heart of the therapy. Every Child is different, they have different likes, dislikes, things that excite them, and things that turn them off.  Take me for example. If you put me in front of a computer and turn on a game, I could play for hours. I could talk to you about the poly count of the characters and what it is that the developer made the focus of your attention, and what they put in there to draw your eye away from the things that they cheated on, to save on memory, and performance. A good chunk of my friends don’t even know what half of that last few sentences mean. We are all different. Its what makes us human. Its whats makes us…..Us. So why wouldn’t we try to engage a child that just happens to have autism on a plane that they don’t even have any interest in. At the end of the day your, of someone you knows, child is just that, a child, and children learn to interact through play. My job was to find the educational , social, emotional, and tactile merit to what ever the child wanted to do.

Sorry there is less history here, but the floortime model was brought together in the 1980s. It all started with Dr Greenspan’s  Developmental, Individual Difference, Relationship-based (DIR®) system, developed for children of all special needs. From there, there has been multiple independent studies proving its value for children, specifically, with the autism spectrum disorder. See not much of a history to be had.

I firmly believe that all children learn in similar ways. someone who has a disorder, in anyway, just learns in a different order than the rest of us. A Child starts to learn with play. Imitation, is usually the first thing a “normal child” (I always joke that normal is just a setting on some dishwashers, not a describer of people) uses to learn emotions, communication, exploration, and other complex tasks, so that is the first step with the DIR Floortime model. Get down on the ground, or where ever the child is, and work at injecting yourself into their play. Eventually the child will start letting you into their play on their own. Once your in, the sky is the limit….sorta. If you push to hard, the child will push right back and shut down. I like to teach communications by gently cheating, or in someway breaking the rules of play (called an anticident) and quickly help the child come up with the proper response (the behavior), then the child gets the reward of their hard work, the game gets back on Their track (consequence).

There is one more, enjoyable, step that this could be taken. At one of the schools I was allowed to start a student playgroup. I got all the kids together before the playgroup began I would round up the friends of the “target child” and teach them about Autism, and their friend. I talk about the challenges the other child has with play, or interacting  with them in a social setting (kids, when allowed, have far fewer hangups than we do as adults, and be quite understanding if given a chance). I talk to them about what rules, how often and when, I want broken, and how to help their friend deal with these complex social situations. At first I keep close in case something goes wrong, but the longer the playgroup lasts, the less I have to step in to help. Eventually, that playgroup spills out into the playground (not with my direction, it just happens. The kids connection with the “target child” and start seeing them as a person instead of a disturbance, or risk.). Those kids that we trained, now start helping others learn what the triggers, behaviors, and consequences of actions, and how to steer things toward a positive track before the behavior gets bad.

The best Therapy for your child is the one that works. I wish I could just say “do ….. and it will help all children with autism”, but since each child learns different, each child needs a different therapy/combination.  Just remember, you don’t have to, nor should you be, a one person army with your child. There needs to be a support group both for yourself, and for your child, you can’t take care of your child if you aren’t taking care of yourself too. Remember, if we didn’t have differences we wouldn’t have computers, the internet, music, plays, physics.

 

Here are my references so you can look into it yourself if I didn’t make enough sense.

http://www.autism.net.au/Autism_ABA.htm%5B/embed%5D

http://www.autismspeaks.org/what-autism/treatment/applied-behavior-analysis-aba

http://www.autismcanada.org/treatments/behav/analysisibi.html

http://www.autismspeaks.org/what-autism/treatment/floortime

http://www.stanleygreenspan.com/what-is-floortime

http://www.icdl.com/DIR

 

Educating About Autism

Autism is a hard issue to write about. There is so much information out there, and Autism, being a spectrum, has a wide variety of needs. The Autism Spectrum can go from high functioning, all the way down to an introvert that seems to live in their own world and has no interest in “joining the rest of us” in reality. I also find it hard to talk about Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) without talking about other people with special needs.

Autism comes from the Greek work autos which mean “self”. So it makes sense to use if for a disorder that is most commonly known for a group of people so withdrawn that they seem to be totally, emotionally, cut of from anyone else. Autism was first used to describe a symptom of schizophrenia, a link some researchers still hung on to until the 1960’s. It wasn’t until the 1940’s that Autism and Schizophrenia were separated from each other, by a doctor named Leo Kanner from Johns Hopkins University and was used to describe a condition in children that had social or emotional problems. At about the same time a researcher named Hans Asperger, in Germany, identified a similar condition he called Asperger’s syndrome. Sadly, from the 1960’s, through the 1970’s, Autism was primarily treated with “medications”, like LSD, electric shock and, finally, behavior change techniques that relied on pain and punishment.

The treatment of people, usually children, with autism was horrifying, but the parents didn’t get off any easier. Around the 1950’s parents with children with autism were labeled with the term, Refrigerator Mother, or Refrigerator Parents. When Leo Kanner first identified autism, he noticed a lack of warmth among the parents and the child. Dr. Kanner often blamed the mothers for their children’s atypical behavior, such as needing a rigid routine, speech difficulties, and self isolation. I can only imagine the pain and guilt that must have caused for these poor parents, being told that everything they were struggling with was entirely their fault.

Kenner may have started the theory,  but it was believed that a Professor in Chicago that gained the phrase widespread popularity within the public and medical community. So there it was. Autism was the fault of the parents, mostly the mothers that, obviously, gave their children no chance at life. The only chance the children would have was a “parentectomy” (I had to look that one up, and found out that, according to medterms.com, it meant the removal of a parent, or both, from the child). The frigid mother theory went unchallenged until the mid 60’s when a psychologist, who had a son with autism, wrote a book about autism attacking the refrigerator theory directly (1964), but the refrigerator parent theory had effects that lingered until today. It is sad, but in my time working with children of all special needs, I have had to try to convince parents all the time that it wasn’t their fault.

It is obvious that those theory’s and treatments were emotionally traumatic on all involved. We aren’t that much smarter nowadays. Millions of people were convinced, by a doctor named Andrew Wakefield, that the cause of autism was vaccines. His research was a breakthrough in autism treatment, but in 2004 questioned were raised by The General Medical Council. It took years for the results of the investigation to come to a close. The Medical Council found that Wakefields research wasn’t ethically done, and information was either added or changed to prove his hypothesis. If that wasn’t bad enough the study was funded by lawyers of parents wanting to sue vaccine makers. Since Wakefield first published his work diseases that were preventable with vaccines have made a large comeback. Things like Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Polio, Whooping Cough and others have made a comeback across the world.

Enough about that depressing stuff. Now that we have a history on Autism lets talk about what Autism actually is. you may notice that I use the term “people with autism” instead of “autistic people”. The reason for that is simple. people with autism are people first and foremost, they just happen to have a disability. I wouldn’t call someone with cancer, a “cancer person”, or a person with liver damage “liver damage person”, so I won’t call someone with autism an “autistic person”. we should try to remember that everyone is a person, no matter what they lack.

General symptoms of autism are, communication, social skills, and self stimulation. A child with autism can also have difficulty with touch and other sensory information. There are people that will have a total melt down if you try to hug them, put scratchy material on, pat them on the back. Yet others need quiet, loud noises seem to amplify inside their head. In some people the opposite is true. there are some children that think clearer when they have pressure, such as laying under two mattresses.  The majority of the time, people with autism have a hard time understanding abstract things, like social cues, facial expressions, and sarcasm. People with autism, also, tend to focus on one thing at the detriment of everything else. there is also self stimulation, that can be as innocent as flapping their hand, all the way to biting themselves or smacking their heads into things.

Researchers, recently, found that there are variations in a particular gene, that has a key role in Aspergers Syndrome. They found that certain sequence variation  nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) in a gene known as GABRB3 is more common in people with Aspergers. They also discovered that the more genetic variations in the same gene were linked to scores on an empathy measure.In simpler terms (I had to un-scramble my brain from all the technical data to get to this conclusion) people with Aspergers Syndrome tend to have more empathy than most of us, they just have a hard time understanding the social cues to know what another person feels. Once they do understand they tend to empathize in a way we couldn’t. these same gene variations also showed a relationship to tactile sensitivity, so its no wonder some people who have AS have a hard time with touch. This study specifically looked at people with AS but there are many other studies, to determine empathy levels, for people across the Autism Spectrum Disorder.  Just like the study I just talked about, they found that these people tended to empathize more than others, and in a completely different way. People with autism tend to feel everything they understand others feel. a good example is if a child gets yelled at in class, the child with autism will get really upset as if the teacher had just yelled at them. We used to think that was because the child was so internalized that they failed to realize there was anyone else in the room, so the teacher must be yelling at them.  What new study suggests, is that the child feels such empathy they feel what they think the other person feels. its a “funny” thought. We, educators, work hard at helping children understand body language and what feelings each facial expression, and body language means. Once they know all of that, they start getting overwhelmed by all the emotions in any given room. its like they are experiencing what they think we all are feeling.

In order to not make this a 5000 word post, I figure I will end here and talk about the teaching tools we have now. (guess what. we don’t use LSD anymore. lol) oh and my information came from:

http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/study-confirms-a-gene-linked-to-asperger-syndrome-and-empathy

http://autism.about.com/od/SymptomsofAutism/f/Do-People-With-Autism-Lack-Empathy.htm

http://www.autism-society.org/about-autism/facts-and-statistics/

http://www.asha.org/public/speech/disorders/autism/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerator_mother_theory

http://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/history-of-autism

facilitating, self worth, and self improvement in our kids

Raising kids is hard work. We parents scour the internet looking for advice on how to best raise our kids in order for them to be kind, self confident, hard working, generous children. We look for confirmation that what we are doing is right, but with so many ‘expert’ opinions out there, all with very different views on what is the ‘right’ way to raise our kids, who do we believe?

The thing is, no matter what advice we listen to. No matter how much we make mistakes. No matter what we do, our kids will turn out to be them. I have seen many children come through the schools that I have worked in, all with different parents and different parenting styles, and the kids, are their own people. Sometimes they follow in their parents footprints, good or bad, and sometimes they forge their own way through life, despite mistakes that are made by parents or other situations in their life. We as parents have to take a step back. Breath. tell ourselves that we are doing our best, and get on with being with our kids.

We try to not permanently damage our kids by making sure they never fail. Taking the winning and losing out of games, because we are afraid our children’s lives will be damaged by the slightest blow to their ego. I can tell you with 100% certainty that left to do their own games in the playground, winners and losers will be a fact of life, (races, tag, 4 square, tether ball…) and why shouldn’t it be? When we grow up, do we have jobs that make sure everyone gets that promotion? does everyone get that high paying job? Can everyone be a basketball player in the NBA? No! Of course not! People work hard to get those things, and other people work hard and don’t get them. How is a child going to deal with life as they grow up if they cant learn from mistakes, learn to work hard and get rewarded for that effort. We aren’t helping our children by sparing their feelings, we are actually allowing them to grow into teens, or even adults that don’t know how to deal with failure or loss. They don’t know that they should work to better themselves, or that they even need to better themselves.

going further with that thought…who in their right mind thought the zero tolerance policy was a good idea in schools?  I grew up in schools with that philosophy, and it backfired on me in a big way. I will admit that the majority of the time it takes two to fight. I will also admit that the zero tolerance policy is a quick and easy way to make sure that everything is the least disruptive to the classes. The teachers, principals, parents don’t have to take sides, all they have to do is believe both children and case solved. The problem is that this theory doesn’t always hold water. Take me for example. When I was in grade 7 I was in a new school. Within a month of school starting two other kids came up to me and tried to pick a fight (they didn’t like that I was playing on some equipment they wanted and, in their opinion, didn’t get off fast enough). I followed the rules to a T, but the system didn’t work. I walked away, the two boys followed. I tried to get a teacher to help, the boys cornered me and started beating me. with nowhere to go I had two choices…I could fight, or I could let them pound on me until they got board, I passed out or someone in charge just happened to come by (all the other kids on the playground, save 1, came to see the show (my 1 hero went against the grain and tried to get an adult for me). I took my beating, after all we were told time and time again that there was NO excuse for fighting. When the principal finally did come out, I got reprimanded, just like the other boys, because, after all, it takes two to fight. doesn’t it?

From then till my graduating day I was tormented by a group of boys and girls (as was my older brother). I had my hair set on fire, curb stomped until I passed out, stabbed, beat up weekly, had desks dropped on my head, after being tripped, and that was just grade 7. Things got much worse after that. Syringes, throwing stars, cars, death threats, were just a few of the things that plagued my youth. Every time I was told ‘if I defended myself I would get in just as much trouble as those tormenting me’. Any idea how that affected me? well…. because of that system I began to think, ‘if I am not allowed to defend myself, that must mean I am not worth defending’. Depression and self doubt plagued me for the majority of my life (I still struggle with it today).

Now that I have kids I still hear about the same things happening in schools. I want to scream at the TV every time I see a so called ‘expert’ talking about those same coping methods when confronted with a bully. Walk away, tell an adult, stay away from that child. No one mentions, what should be, the final strategy (possible they are afraid of legal ramifications, or they just don’t think kids are smart enough figure out when to use that final step). If all else fails, DEFEND yourself, using EQUAL force, and just until you can get away again. Then start the check list all over again. The solution isn’t as simple as the zero tolerance policy’s, ‘a fight takes two kids’. In reality a fight does take two kids, but a beating can be done with only one side, and that isn’t taken into account. The solution to the problem of who is at fault, and who needs to learn what equal force means, is one that takes time to talk, teach, and get to know both children and why they have done, or are doing, the things they do. That the law itself allows for self defense, with the condition that you do not exceed the force put on you (don’t bring a gun to a fist fight), and you do not seek revenge. So why don’t we teach our kids something that even the law allows for. Are we that afraid that our children won’t need to learn these life skills, and they will suddenly know what to do when something really bad happens (attempted kidnappings, rape, or other events that the need to know to fight for their life).

I know from personal experience that being bullied feels like you have lost at the game of life.  There were two things that saved me from ending it all. first of all, I knew what it was like to lose at little things. I also wasn’t a coward.

follow my train of thought here for a second. I was allowed to lose, and pick myself up and try to do better next time. I was allowed to cope with things that were unpleasant on my own. I was also encouraged and supported when I didn’t know how to cope. that allowed me to deal with suicidal thoughts for longer than I thought I would be able to, but it was that final ingredient that kept me going for years later. I knew that there were people out there that I would hurt as more than those kids hurt me, and I wasn’t them. I didn’t want to irreparably hurt others.

I am truly sad for those who have lost someone to suicide. I lost family to it, and I know the pain it caused us all. I saw the ripple effect that one little, but final, action drastically affected more people then you would think it would. I begged for death for years, and to be honest I still struggle with it. Like an addiction, I have become so accustom to the feeling that it feels weird without it.  I, and many others out there, remember that you can’t just think about how hard things are just for you. That is the definition selfish. Before you act, think about how your actions will affect those around you. Life isn’t easy. It isn’t meant to be. If life was easy we would never learn. We would never grow as people, and reach our full potential.

( Here is where it ties together) This is what we need to teach our kids. We need to stop making life so easy for our kids. they need to help them understand that they are important, as is everyone else out there. They need to learn that everything they do have consequences. They need to learn how to work through things even if it is hard, or seems impossible.

I wan’t my kids to be kids, and that means they need to play. Kids learn how to interact with each other, overcome differences, accept people, and deal with life all through self guided play. We need to step back and give them the chance to deal with life on their own, but remain available to help talk it out when they need it, NOT bail them out of uncomfortable situations. They won’t learn if we always tell them what to do anytime a problem comes around.

I 100% think we need to take time to talk out the problems, and ask them what They Think potential solutions are, and then follow up with asking Them what they think the consequences would be if they do any of those solutions. It takes time to engage our kids like that, but it is important that we make the time (more important than almost all other things we adults put importance on). Kids won’t need this much attention everyday, but when they do, it is important to make time, somehow.

Will that stop suicides in children, teens and adults? Probably not. It will, however, give them the skills to stop and think about the consequences of whatever they are going to do, and hopefully make smarter, less lazy decisions about their life.

Raising our kids in an age of Technology

 there has been some talk, for a while now, about the negatives of letting our children handling computer. I agree that sometimes tech gets used as babysitters, but sometimes that can’t be helped. when I am having a hard time coping, you bet, I let the kids play on the ipad, phone, or watch tv. 

Back in “my day” we didn’t have computers. In fact, in 1986 only 10% of the population had home computers, according to Stats Canada, so we did spend more time outside. In saying that, the workforce also had a low need for computer literacy. since the home computer was only introduced to the market in 1977 and became popular in the mid 80’s, computer literacy was mostly thought of something that you would learn in post secondary education, or on the job training. Truthfully, in the 80’s home computers were mostly used for video games, and business computers were a beast of a different nature. back then we didn’t have the internet to research, we used real books, or we bought a digital version to play on our computers, but those were very limited due to space. The closest thing to internet we had was a bulletin board system that was run by individuals, and in my experience was mostly a chat function.

things started to change in the late 90’s, were computers were becoming common place in the work force. in fact in 1997, 74.9% of collage graduates used computers, where as, only 34.6% of high school graduates used computers. The statistics gathered also stated that the wage of people that knew how to use computers were significantly higher in jobs were people were able to use a computer. Simple things like being able to use e-mail got people more money than those that didn’t know how to do that. Even people that used an computer cash register tended to make more money than there electric counterparts (e.g., Krueger, 1993)

in today’s world, the elderly and the under educated tend to be unemployed because of the high demand of computer skills, in virtually every job market (according to NBC News, in 2010). Microsoft projects that by 2020 there will almost be double the IT work than there will be workers if the present statistics hold their pattern.

the use of computers and smart phones in the work market are ever growing, and the need for our children to understand this tech at a young age is growing too. School systems are struggling to keep up. today The ratio of students to instructional computers with Internet access in public schools is 3.8 to 1, and virtually 100% of schools, these days, have computers and internet (education.com).

The arguments against children using tech tend to be a little extremest for me. they argue that in order for children to be children they need to get off the computer, or gaming system, and out into the world like we did. The problem with those arguments is….Children are still children, no matter were they spend their time, and just because they don’t do it like we did, before computers became a necessary tool in all aspects of our education and work, doesn’t mean that it is wrong. There are too many arguments, on both sides, that are black or white, when in fact we live in a world of grey. Balance is a key skill that everyone needs to learn. they need to know how to live in a virtual world, but also experience the real world in a meaningful way. There are different social norms in the virtual world than there are in the real world and kids, and adults need to know both.

Should children play on the computers and video game systems? you bet they should. If we want our children to be succeed in this world, they need to be comfortable with tech. Besides, not all programs, or games are bad. Chosen properly, kids can not only become comfortable with tech, they can learn other skills, that will serve them well as they grow up, as well.

statistics found from: NBC news, stats Canada, education.com, National Center For Education Statistics, Microsoft IT Academy Program, Research Center for Education and the Labour Market, Bureau of Labour Statistics, and the United States Department of Labour