The Article that I chose to read was about Anxiety disorders. Just as it is hard to detect anxiety disorders in children it was difficult to find many articles about this behavioral disorder. As mentioned in our book teachers tend to under-refer students with suspected internalizing behavior problems. Internalizing problems involve inwardly directing actions and teachers often have difficulty identifying them in classroom settings.
I have two children in our school who experience severe anxiety disorder. I also live with children with this disorder. With this personal experience I find it easier to notice the quite children who are holding all the anxiety inside. My children as young as preschool would have a "great day" according to teachers and get into the school and explode. They would say don't talk to me or start to act out or cry as soon as they got into the car. They had held it together for 3 hours and couldn't hold it in any more. After many evaluations we were able to put a name to this and it was several anxiety disorder. With this experience behind me I tend to seek out the children that are too quite and don't socialize in a classroom.
The article I chose deals with the idea of cognitive behavioral therapy for the treatment of pediatric anxiety in an elementary school setting. Anxiety disorders are among the most prevalent of psychiatry problems for youth it effects approximately 6-11% of school age children. Pediatric anxiety disorders can be described as a functional impairment which disrupts children's abilities to accomplish normal developmental tasks.
While Cognitive Behavioral Therapy appears to be effective in a controlled, clinical environment the effectiveness of these programs disseminate into real world settings, such as schools is still uncertain. At the time of this study they did not know of any other study done on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for anxiety study done in a school setting. The participants of this study were 24 children and their families. They used a program called Building Confidence to complete this task. The Building Confidence program contains several child modules, caregiver modules, one teacher module and one school nurse module. The main idea of the module was to teach the children coping skills in varies situations and how to develop their own coping thoughts. As the children went through the program treatment was discontinued as the child found that their anxiety levels of the children were reduced significantly. The children used this therapy at home as well as school. This study wanted to evaluate the efficacy of modularized CBT program for a childhood anxiety. After a 1 year follow up 71.4% of students demonstrated a positive treatment response and were free of any anxiety diagnosis.
This article provides hope that CBT can provide help for children with high levels of anxiety. The easy and fast answer for many people is medicine to deal with anxiety and this shows that with a good plan and work that medication can be avoided and the struggle with anxiety can be lessened or eliminated.
Our book discusses the characteristics of children with anxiety and how this creates struggles in the classroom and social behavior. This article was more on a solution to lessening the amount of anxiety a child has. If this method was followed it could help with the social and classroom struggles these children experience. If anxiety is lessened, modeling for social skills would be so much better received by students.
Galla, B. M., Wood, J. J., Chiu, A. W., Langer, D. A., Jacobs, J., Ifekwunigwe, M., & Larkins, C. (2012). One Year Follow-Up to Modular Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for the Treatment of Pediatric Anxiety Disorders in an Elementary School Setting. Child Psychiatry And Human Development, 43(2), 219-226.
I think you chose a great topic to read about. I often wondered if students with disabilities were bullied as much or more often as a student without a disability. I found the information interesting that the higher the functioning level, the more likely they were to be bullied. I wonder why this occurs. That is a topic for another study. I think bullying is a huge problem within the schools and the article really spot lights a prevalent issue that we, as educators, now need to decide how we will be part of the solution.
ReplyDeleteI loved reading this blog posting. Thanks for sharing about your personal and family experiences. I also personally experience this challenge, and I think it takes that type of acute awareness to recognize this in children. The program this study researched sounds fascinating. It has such a high (71.4%) follow-up rate; that is so encouraging!
ReplyDeleteIn the past two years, I have become increasingly interested in studying anxiety in children. In fact, I just had an article published about the unique role of anxiety in autism spectrum disorders, and I'm working on infusing mental health competencies in our undergraduate teacher preparation program at Trinity. There has been a recent call in the literature for more teachers to be trained on issues of mental health; since teachers spend so much time with children. I think if my elementary teachers had been trained or had the knowledge of anxiety, depression, etc., I would have been identified much sooner and could have benefited from early intervention and coping skill instruction.
Great article choice.