Aug 5, 2018, Temple (TX) Daily Telegram: Teachers learn trust-based relational intervention http://www.tdtnews.com/news/article_22225378-984f-11e8-bcc8-2787d0a8a042.html Temple teachers gathered last week to learn how to serve as an antidote to chaos for at-risk children. Nancy Preston, the retired head of counseling for Temple Independent School District, led a training session Monday on Trust-Based Relational Intervention. Since leaving Temple ISD, Preston now works independently as a TBRI practitioner. “The amygdala gets over-developed in children with trauma … they don’t stop to think,” she said. “You have school teachers going ‘What were you thinking?’ They don’t know what they were thinking.” TBRI is a copyrighted technique for working with children who are considered vulnerable and at-risk, children who may come from traumatic backgrounds…. “What I’m talking about are those children who may have that level of (academic) brilliance, but … the chaos when they get home is too much for them to overcome,” Preston said…. Some behavioral problems, Preston said, come from problems in neurological development caused by trauma. Children raised in chaotic circumstances sometimes react to frustrations with an immediate, strongly emotional response, similar to a baby crying when hungry, tired or frightened. “The kid that comes up swinging, the kid that pushes the teacher back, the kid that runs from the room … this is a survival skill,” Preston said. Preston said that children with traumatic backgrounds can sometimes deal with stress and regulate emotions better with small interventions, such as taking a break to jump on a mini-trampoline, or doing wall push-ups in the hallway. Other sensory changes can also help, such as changing a child’s chair to a stool that rocks back and forth with them, or otherwise giving them an opportunity to fidget…. “These children misread faces; they misread voice tone,” she said. Traumatic events that could harm a child’s emotional control, Preston said, include difficult pregnancies, difficult births, early hospitalization, abuse and neglect, all events that can cause high levels of stress hormones that affect brain development either before birth or after. …
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Childhood Lost
Children today are noticeably different from previous generations, and the proof is in the news coverage we see every day. This site shows you what’s happening in schools around the world. Children are increasingly disabled and chronically ill, and the education system has to accommodate them. Things we've long associated with autism, like sensory issues, repetitive behaviors, anxiety and lack of social skills, are now problems affecting mainstream students. Blame is predictably placed on bad parenting (otherwise known as trauma from home).
Addressing mental health needs is as important as academics for modern educators. This is an unrecognized disaster. The stories here are about children who can’t learn or behave like children have always been expected to. What childhood has become is a chilling portent for the future of mankind.
Anne Dachel, Media editor, Age of Autism
http://www.ageofautism.com/media/
(John Dachel, Tech. assist.)
What will happen in another 4 years? How can we go on like this? This is a national (and international) problem of monumental proportions. We have an entire new class of children who cannot be accommodated by the system: many are manifestly neurologically impaired. Meanwhile, the government and the medical profession sleep on regardless.
John Stone,
UK media editor, Age of Autism
The generation of American children born after 1990 are arguably the sickest generation in the history of our country.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
It seemed to me that with rising autism prevalence, you’d also see rising autism costs to society, and it turns out, the costs are catastrophic.
They calculated that in 2015 autism cost the United States $268 billion and they projected that if autism continues at its current rate, we’re looking at one trillion dollars a year in autism costs by 2025, so within five years.
Toby Rogers, PhD, Political economist
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