Empowering Children To Cope With Difficulty And Build Muscles For Mental health

Eric L. Dlugokinksi, Sandra F. Allen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135058852
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book provides mental health professionals and counselors with a conceptual understanding and practical suggestions for educating children in skills that can promote their mental health. It focuses on preventive intervention with a science- and research-based conceptualization for children in the school. The authors also provide principles for effective delivery of suggested intervention techniques. Chapters in the first section focus on helping children deal with problem situations. The second section provides information to promote emotional health in children, including a knowledge of self, respect for self and others, healthy habit strength, and a balance between work and play. The final section includes suggestions for enhancing intervention efforts and principles proven effective in mental health education.

SECTION I
COPING SKILLS

Chapter 1

COPING

Mental health professionals and educators often believe that a part of their role in helping children is teaching them strategies for coping. They assert that children need to learn to cope with their emotions, adverse life situations, and various demands placed upon them. Yet, the word coping is used so frequently and in such a variety of contexts that it might be helpful to examine the meaning of coping more closely to achieve a common understanding.

In Webster’s 21st Century Dictionary (1993, p. 66), coping is defined as “attacking or overcoming a problem or emergency.” Synonyms for coping include “striving, dealing with, managing, handling, and facing” (Morehead, 1985, p. 106).

Lewis, Dlugokinski, Caputo, and Griffin (1988) believed that coping occurs when a person’s resources for meeting demands exceed the demands placed upon them. When speaking of the ability to cope with one’s personal emotional state, Irving Janis (1971) spoke of coping as the process of putting steps between what one feels and the resulting expression or action step taken. In this sense, then, coping is a process of incorporating a personal reaction to a difficult situation and subsequently expressing the feeling with constructive action.

Most individuals, then, view coping as successfully managing or handling difficulties. This fits with Caplan (1980) who spoke of coping as being related to the concept of competence. Caplan stated that

Most researchers define competence as a system of learned attitudes and aptitudes, manifested as capacities for confronting, actively struggling with, and mastering life problems through the use of cognitive and social skills, and involving a capacity for resilience and perseverance in the face of emotional frustration and cognitive confusion. (p. 671)

An idea closely related to competency or the capacity to cope effectively is the concept of invulnerability. Rutter (1979) studied protective factors in children’s responses to stress and environmentally disadvantaged situations. He discovered that, despite extremely adverse living conditions and social disadvantage, children can be well adjusted and even can develop an outstanding ability. These children, he said, were invulnerable to the stressors that might have caused other children to succumb to dysfunction or emotional disorder. Rutter’s conclusions included the notion that invulnerability is a function of

… compensating experiences outside the home, the development of self esteem, the scope and range of available opportunities, an appropriate degree of environmental structure and control, the availability of personal bonds and intimate relationships, and the acquisition of coping skills. (p. 70)

Therefore, children, who are viewed as competent or invulnerable, apparently have external or internal resources that mediate between the adverse conditions in their lives and their abilities or skills to moderate the impact of these conditions. By having the skills to cope effectively, these children are able to reduce their risk for developing disorders.

In an inclusive definition of coping skills, Hancock, Gager, and Elias (1993) incorporated the following attributes:

Self-Control Skills, which include the ability to listen carefully and accurately, follow directions, calm oneself down when under stress, and talk to others in a socially appropriate manner;

Social Awareness and Group Participation Skills, which focus on how to recognize and elicit trust, help, and praise from others, how to recognize others’ perspectives, how to choose friends wisely, how to share, wait, and participate in groups, how to give and receive help and criticism, and how to understand others’ perspectives; and

Social Decision Making and Problem Solving Skills, which involve an eight-step strategy to guide one in thoughtful decision making when facing health related and other personal and interpersonal choices or problematic situations, particularly when one is under stress.

The focus in this book is on coping as it relates to young children ages 5 through 11. Although Rutter’s notion of invulnerability included both internal and external resources (1979), in this book, coping will be viewed as an internal resource that children can be taught in order to deal competently with the world. This internal resource includes the ability to recognize and deal with feelings and to develop constructive action tendencies in difficult life situations. This working definition of coping emphasizes the ability to persevere with constructive action toward healthy adjustment when emotionally aroused.

Coping, then, is a process. In this process the individual does not necessarily experience complete satisfaction or objective success. For example, coping effectively with emotional upheavals as a result of death or divorce means that individuals guide their own behavior in a series of constructive steps to adjust to difficulties that they face. It does not mean that their coping efforts objectively or subjectively negate the loss that they experience. Coping with an event, such as death or divorce, does not mean that the event or its impact is erased. Coping is the process of adjusting to that event in a healthy way.

Because coping with personal emotional arousal has been defined as the foundation of coping skills in young children, it may be helpful to look briefly at the nature of human emotions and their significance to our personal survival.

EMOTIONAL AROUSAL AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE IN COPING

Emotions ebb and flow in our lives because some events do matter to us. As long as we remain alive and responsive to the world in which we live, some of our experiences will carry a personal impact. When they do, we become emotional. Everyone of us has a uniqueness to our emotional life that is all our own. In this respect our emotions are unlike those of any other person; yet, at the same time, we experience similarities in our emotions. Some of those similarities (Dlugokinski, 1987) are described below.

Emotions Are Personal Adjustments to Change

When we become emotional, something about us is stirred up or changed. The word emotion originates from the Latin words emovere and movere and suggests a movement in our personal experience and approach. When we are frightened, our senses alert us to dangers and the need for flight. As we become angry, we mobilize reserve energy to fight or defend ourselves. In happiness or sadness we experience personal gains or losses and adjust our attitude accordingly. In an emotional state we are moved out of neutral.

Emotions Are Arousals of Mind and Body

Our mind and body work together in emotional arousal. Our body adapts through a series of changes in heart rate, muscle tension, breathing, and other physical adjustments. Our mind also adjusts by modifying thoughts and feelings to meet the changes as we perceive them. For example, when we are frightened, our body typically is in a state of vigilant response while we feel and think frightening thoughts. Furthermore, as we become angry, our mind and body work together to prime us to act in an assertive manner. If our anger is satisfactorily released, both our physical arousal and our angry thoughts and feelings will subside. If we only partially release it or express it in a way that magnifies the anger, then our tension continues.

Emotions Typically Are Aroused Involuntarily

In many circumstances, we become emotional instinctively. Our body changes and our thoughts and feelings shift involuntarily. The substance of these emotional adjustments is influenced by our association of past memories with current conditions. If we are mistreated by a bearded man with a cap, we may develop an intense fear reaction to beards or men who wear caps. Our initial emotional response to many situations is involuntary. In many instances, we do not have a choice of becoming emotional—our choice begins with what we do with those emotions.

While most authorities agree that emotions are involuntarily aroused, a multitude of popular misconceptions make recognition of our own emotional arousal difficult. Perhaps we learned that anger was a sign of disrespect, that fear was a sign of weakness, or that sadness was a sign of self-pity. Sexual and cultural stereotypes also can create problems. Thus, although our emotional arousal indeed may be involuntary, we may block out recognition for a variety of reasons. In doing so, we also are blocking our capacity to cope effectively.

Emotions Prepare Us to Act

When we are aroused emotionally, tension develops to release the arousal. When we are angry, we have urges within us to act in an angry manner. When we are happy, we also are aroused to express our happiness. Intense emotions commonly elicit some type of action. If we are sad, we may cry. If we are happy, we may smile or express our joy to others. If we are angry at others, we may act aggressively towards them or displace our anger, for example, by kicking a dog.

Although emotional arousal prepares us to act, it does not always result in action that is thoughtfully directed. Our tension may be released in a random activity or hyperactivity. Habits also may become automatic or thoughtless. For example, when we are angry we may habitually shout or throw objects. We do not think ab...