About 1 in 3 children nationwide struggle with anxiety. Yet, most teachers have little to no training in mental health and most parents have virtually none, and the “go-to” strategies for dealing with issues are often not helpful.
Jessica Minahan, a board-certified behavior analyst and special educator, spoke Tuesday at a mental health conference hosted by Daviess County Public Schools on how to properly use practical trauma-informed strategies to reduce anxiety in students.
Minahan spoke exclusively with Owensboro Times prior to the conference about the keynote speech she would be giving.
Minahan said she specializes in supporting kids who have behavior challenges due to mental health — kids who disengage from work, who can be oppositional, or who are having trouble attending in class — and using best practice for what helps kids with mental health and infusing that with behavioral principles to make sure our kids are supported.
She travels the country and internationally to train teachers and school staff on those practices.
Minahan noted that most teachers in the U.S. typically have one or no courses in mental health before they can become a teacher.
“That’s all that’s mandated, yet about 31.9% of kids under age 18 have clinically significant anxiety … and it can manifest in lots of different ways, and teachers don’t specifically have the training,” she said. “So that’s what I try to do for teachers, and make sure it’s practical. I was a teacher myself so I know what’s doable in a classroom and what isn’t.”
In her presentations, Minahan discusses how anxiety impacts learning and behavior in children and how it’s not always intuitive.
“When people get anxious, certain skills go down — for example, your ability to keep your emotions in check and regulate your attention, or not overreacting and staying sort of calm,” she said. “When kids are anxious, they can be more argumentative, they can shut down more easily, and can be much more emotional. We can see all kinds of impacts of that.”
She said the ability to accurately think about and perceive things is also impacted, using the example of making one mistake in a game and thinking it ruins the outcome when that’s likely not true.
Or, a child may think it’s going to take 3 hours rather than 15 minutes to finish homework when they are anxious.
“The inaccurate thinking, the negative thinking associated with anxiety, can lead to a lot of avoidance and it is very less likely for the kid to initiate that assignment,” Minahan said.
There’s also a social impact caused by misperception.
“A lot of times when you’re anxious, you start to interpret other people’s intent in a negative way,” she said. “For example, anxious students will say to me, ‘my teacher never calls on me.’ And that’s not true, but they didn’t notice the times the teacher called on them, they only noticed when they weren’t called. So they sort of start looking at the negative … and anxiety does unfortunately do that to kids and can affect self esteem.”
Minahan said one of the typical strategies that parents and teachers use to combat the issue of anxiety causing skills to drop is implementing incentives, but they should reconsider that method.
“The problem with incentives is they do not teach skills, so saying to a kid ‘pay attention and get your assignment done, and you’ll get extra points’ doesn’t work if they’re flooded with negative thoughts and self doubt and now have lost organization skills so can’t even remember where to start or how to organize their thoughts,” she said. “The incentive is not going to help the skill problem.”
So, she talks about using a skill-building approach where teachers can help the children learn how to think more accurately towards an assignment so that they don’t shut down or get overwhelmed.
She added that the strategy of having children who are anxious or inattentive “take a break” isn’t actually helpful because the child is then left alone with those thoughts causing the issue to begin with.
Instead, she recommends using the same approach adults do if they can’t sleep — read a book or watch TV to keep their mind occupied.
“If you stay on the anxious thought you will stay awake. You have to get off that thought to calm down and go to sleep,” she said. “So same idea in school, the teachers can offer kids a cognitive distraction or to get out of their heads … so things like trivia questions or I Spy hidden pictures, just so they concentrate enough that they calm down. Then they’re much more likely to be able to do work.”
Minahan also noted that many school-aged children now have grown up in the age of the smartphone and enhanced technology. While that’s allowed for more innovative learning, there are negative effects that come, too.
“Kids today have hours and hours less face-to-face social interaction than I did when I was a kid,” she said. “It does create a little more social isolation than kids used to have, and that’s going to unfortunately put them at risk for social anxiety.”
Similarly, she said technology has also hindered the ability to develop a sense of time — such as not truly understanding what can be accomplished in 5 minutes vs. 15 minutes.
“So, I find it really helpful when you say 5 minutes to add action steps,” she said. “Saying ‘5 more minutes, which means you can do one more vocabulary problem,’ or ‘5 more minutes, which means you each can have one more turn.’ When you add that you’re also developing an awareness of what’s possible in 5 more minutes and it will lead to less problems.”
Minahan said that while it can sound like a lot of negatives when discussing how to properly deal with anxious children, the positive takeaway is that there are solutions and that there is a strong desire among educators to always continuously find the best ways to improve the lives of students.
That is evidenced by the mental health conference itself, which was titled “Rise Up For Resilience.”
In a letter detailing the conference, DCPS Assistant Superintendent for Human Services Dr. Amy Shutt wrote, “As educators, our hope is to provide students with the skills to be successful and become the best version of themselves. … We hope through the education opportunities we provide each day that students develop skills of protection so as the storms of life come upon them, they have the resiliency to stay the course and be mentally, physically, and emotionally healthy.”
It continued, “Our goal in hosting today’s program is to encourage and empower school professionals with the skills and confidence they need to embrace children with consistent, supportive and positive behaviors and strategies. … Thank you for your willingness to RISE UP FOR RESILIENCE … and for your shared commitment to helping children RISE UP to overcome challenges, so they may truly grow and blossom.”
