How Can I Help?

A Teacher's Guide to Early Childhood Behavioral Health

Ginger Welch

• Publisher: Gryphon House Inc.
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780876598337
• eBook ISBN:
  9780876598344
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Sometimes misbehavior isn’t what it seems. Many children come to care with early signs of mental- or behavioral-health issues. Early childhood professionals are often the first to notice that something is different.

How Can I Help? is a practical guide that helps educators first identify issues and then create nurturing, safe, and successful learning environments to set up all children for success.

Learn how to:

• Promote mental health for all children in your care
• Identify signs of behavioral-health issues in children and family members
• Support children who have specific behavioral-health difficulties
• Work with the families of children with behavioral-health challenges

Chapter 1:

Three Lenses for Understanding Children’s Mental Health

When we reflect on children’s overall well-being, the popular term mental health can actually be a little misleading. We often think of skills such as coping, regulating emotions, paying attention, and relating to others as being solely part of mental health, but this perspective artificially restricts the connections between mind and body. In reality, mental and physical health are intertwined. An infant requires nurturing touch to grow. Cognitive techniques can assist patients in managing physical pain. Toxic stress—or severe, chronic stress without the benefit of a nurturing attachment figure—can lead to physical problems in the body. What we perceive as the separate domains of mental health and physical health are really one interrelated system of well-being, and developing a healthy child means paying attention to the whole child. To truly understand a child as a whole, it can be valuable for adults to conceptualize that child through three lenses: the biological, the environmental, and the relational.

The Biological Lens

The biological lens focuses on the physical and genetic attributes of the child and invites us to look at elements such as these:

• Existing medical diagnoses
• Allergies
• Prenatal or birth history, such as prenatal drug or alcohol exposure or premature delivery
• Past problems with growth, such as failure to thrive
• Significant injuries
• Family medical history
• Any history of medical procedures or hospitalizations

Some of these factors, such as allergies, affect a caregiver’s ability to keep a young child safe, so this information is usually collected at the time a child enrolls in a program. By remembering that mental and physical health are intertwined, however, we can see the need for even greater depth of information. For example, consider the following scenarios:

• Jackie has difficulty paying attention during teacher-led activities.
• Marco frequently argues with his peers.
• Seo-yun struggles to manage her emotions.
• Zion shows significant and unusual distress at drop-off time.

Adults often attribute problematic behaviors such as these to willful “acting out” that needs correction. Sometimes that is indeed the case. When we look beyond a behavior itself, however, we can often find biological factors that play significant roles in the situation. To continue the examples from before, consider this additional information:

• Jackie was born eight weeks preterm.
• Marco struggles with obesity.
• Seo-yun suffered a brain injury in a car accident when she was fourteen months old.
• Zion has a life-threatening peanut allergy.

As these examples show, the biological lens enables us to understand the potential contributions of a child’s medical and physical status to her overall well-being. A child cannot control biological factors, but they affect her brain and body and therefore her behavior. This information, in turn, helps us better select our intervention strategies for challenging behaviors.

Guidelines for Maintaining Privacy

The biological lens requires teachers to gather some medical information on children. How do we get this vital data while maintaining children’s and families’ privacy? Consider these guidelines.

First, decide what information you need to gather for all children in your care. This includes two categories of medical data: general and individual. General information includes items such as a child’s birth and developmental history, immunizations, and physician information. Individual information includes any medical details that you need to know to keep a specific child safe, such as allergies, physician-imposed limits on physical activity, current medications or therapies, problems with choking, and other medical diagnoses. Procedures for addressing such circumstances should be clearly listed in a child’s records. You may also want to obtain information about family history for some disorders that have relatively high heritability rates (that is, they have strong genetic components), such as ADHD. Document both general and individual medical information in writing, and then double-check it in an interview with a family member during the enrollment process.

Second, decide how to gather each type of medical information. To obtain general medical information, you can have families fill out paper or electronic forms. You can gather most individual medical information in the same ways. However, some individual information may be particularly sensitive—such as prenatal drug or alcohol exposure, family mental-health history, or a history of abuse—so it may be better to discuss this information in personal conversations, as families are often unwilling to put such information in writing.

Finally, remember that building trust takes time. It is normal and prudent for people to withhold information that they consider private. (For instance, how would you feel if you took a class and on the first day were required to disclose the last time you drank alcohol, if you had ever used illegal drugs, or if you or a family member had ever had mental-health counseling?) Families may provide more information as they establish relationships with you. Sometimes they may initially deny that their child has any medical concerns but later disclose something significant. If this happens, you might feel upset about the deception, but resist the temptation to berate the family—you need to preserve their newly shown trust in you ...

Table of contents

• Welcome
• Chapter 1:
• Three Lenses for Understanding Children’s Mental Health
• Chapter 2:
• Foundational Tools for Promoting Mental Health and Well-Being as a Teacher
• Chapter 3:
• Trauma in Young Children
• Chapter 4:
• Mood Disorders in Young Children
• Chapter 5:
• Disorders of Feeding, Toileting, and Sleeping in Young Children
• Chapter 6:
• Chapter 7:
• The Referral and Assessment Process
• Chapter 8:
• Communicating and Working with Family Members
• Chapter 9:
• Successful Coping and Self-Care for Teachers
• Appendix A: Blank Release-of-Information Form
• Appendix B: Sample Filled-Out Release-of-Information Form
• References and Recommended Reading