Children in Difficulty

A Guide to Understanding and Helping

Julian Elliott, Maurice Place

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000406412
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This fully updated fourth edition of Children in Difficulty explores some of the most common, yet incapacitating, difficulties often encountered by young children and adolescents. Drawing on the latest research and with case studies throughout, chapters cover topics such as challenging behaviour and school refusal, eating disorders, anxiety and depression, substance misuse, neurodevelopmental disorders, dyslexia and dyspraxia.

The book provides a deeper understanding of each difficulty, considering the complexities of each problem at depth and analysing the best forms of intervention. It includes insights from the fields of genetics and neuroscience, and ensures that claims for the effectiveness of specific interventions are supported by rigorous scientific evidence.

Features of this new edition include:

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• Up-to-date insights from the fields of psychology, genetics and neuroscience

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• Recognition of the increasing impact of social media and the internet on children and young people.

Written by experts in the field, this book distils high level scientific and clinical knowledge in a way that is accessible to professionals from a range of child-care disciplines. It will be of significant value to those working in education, health or social care, and anyone who needs to be able to recognise and help children in difficulty.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Seeing a child in distress prompts a desire to rush to their aid in most people. This natural human reaction is prompted by feelings of concern and care. What type of help to offer is often guided by the perceived problem; usually this means that the delinquent needs more punishment, or the hurt child needs more care. While such emotional responses are very understandable, they are not always the correct way to intervene to ensure that matters will be improved. A child’s functioning and development are influenced by many, at times, competing influences, and any efforts to help must be informed by an understanding of these.

Influences upon development

Genetics

The genetic make-up that children inherit from their parents is increasingly seen as a significant influence on many diverse aspects of the child’s growth, development and ultimate functioning. The belief that problems located within the parents can be passed on to their children has been persuasive since ancient times. The advent of scientific study, and the work of George Mendel, the Augustinian monk, gave a clear understanding of the principles of heredity, and prompted research into DNA and the chromosomes that are made from it.

Each strand of DNA is approximately two metres long and stores the biological information necessary for the nucleus to know what type of cell it is and what is its function. Every cell in the body with a nucleus contains the same DNA, and, surprisingly, 99 per cent of that DNA is identical to that found in a chimpanzee. A particular cell remains unique because only the elements it needs for its own functioning are active, with about 98 per cent of the DNA in a particular cell remaining dormant. Variations to these activated sections of the DNA can lead to profound changes in functioning. The changes can actually be structural, such as a third copy of chromosome 21 presenting as Down syndrome (known as a copy number variant), or changes in the sequence of the elements that make up the strands (nucleotides). Finding such single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) has been associated with disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (Vorstman et al. 2017), and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (Zayats and Neale 2019). The completion of the task to map the sequences that make up the human genome has sparked a huge amount of work in this area, allowing the assessment of human genetic variation to be carried out using genome-wide association studies (GWAS). These studies usually are looking for common gene variants that could be associated with specific diseases and are beginning to generate useful information (Horwitz et al. 2019).

Epigenetics

The focus on genetic influence has identified that while many genetic variations are dormant, they can still be passed from one generation to the next (Janusek et al. 2019), and can be activated by changes in the person’s environment or by life experiences. Trying to understand this process is the science of epigenetics.

At its most fundamental, the mechanism is one in which experience modifies the gene’s actions, and this in turn alters behaviour by changing the mechanisms that translate the DNA information into the cell’s activity. There are several mechanisms by which this is achieved, from the way the DNA is folded to changing the chemical make-up of the surface of the DNA (Cavalli and Heard 2019). These dormant patterns appear to be particularly vulnerable to being activated at a number of key developmental points in the infant’s early development (Safi-Stibler and Gabory 2020). For instance, early in life diet is important in order to provide sufficient nutrients to permit the usual epigenetic processes to proceed. Of p...