Any Glass Kids in Your Family?

 Any Glass kids in your family?

Glass children aren’t children who are fragile; they are kids who are invisible.  Often in families with children with disabilities family time and resources are consumed with meeting the needs of the child(ren) with disabilities.   Typical kids in the family can feel the responsibility to reduce their own needs so that all of the needs of the child with the disability can be met.

Typical kids are very sensitive to the needs of their parents and their siblings.  They can feel that compared to the needs of the child with a disability their needs are insignificant. Because of these feelings, Glass kids see their role as supporting the child with special needs and do not feel "worthy" of family time or resources to meet their own needs.  They can be very quiet.

There hasn’t been much research done on how all this impacts those glass children.  

It is not unusual for the typical child to be given responsibilities to compensate for the special needs child issues.  The typical child has to accept when the special needs child breaks a toy or disturbs a friendship. Their feelings about these losses are minimized in comparison to the child with disabilities.  Glass children can feel they were robbed of a childhood because of the times they had to step in the place of the parents.   Or that they could not have special trips or special toys because the resources went to the special needs of the child. Glass children may not be able to have a pet because the special needs child has medical issues that prevent a pet.   The Glass child often feels the responsibility to protect the special needs sibling from taunts or unkind words from the plain children at the school.  These children often feel they get the love that is left over, except there frequently isn’t any love or energy left over.

Then there is sometimes the expectation that the typical child will provide care for the disabled child after the parents have died.

Glass children grow up to be caregivers who expect little from others.  They are givers who are deeply in need of being care receivers.

Having a child with special needs is very challenging for a family.  Perhaps it is most challenging for the typical sibling who feels both responsible for the special needs child but also envious of the love and attention every kid wants, and it’s all going to the special needs child.   Sometimes Glass kids are only seen when they are being asked to be adults at an early age.

AI beyond cheating

 AI Beyond “cheating”

 

Students have embraced AI with a vengeance.  Who can blame them? It’s easy, fast and promised to be perfectly correct.   According to teachers, students have quickly caught on to AI and are using it regularly.  That’s ok with them as long as kids come clean that the work is not theirs.

But there is another more serious issue that is bothering teachers.   Teachers are very concerned that it is the perfection of AI that is most damaging.  Students are increasingly fearful that their own work just “won’t be as good”.   Thereby, putting students’ willingness to risk being wrong.  Allowing yourself to be wrong is at the very essence of creativity.  It is only when we are willing to be wrong, to step outside the acceptable box, that creativity happens.

Educators have a very dark view of what AI will do to students.  Educators- teachers, and district leaders- expect AI to have a negative impact on teens’ mental health over the next 10 years.  A full 69% feel this way.  Just 14% predict the influence will be positive.

On the other hand, just about a quarter of the teens surveyed believe AI will have a negative effect on them.  And 30% believe the impact will be positive.

What isn’t new about this news is that typically the younger generation is more accepting of new technology and educators are not only of the older generation but are usually slower to accept technology in general.

While teachers may view the “outsourcing” of writing to AI as cheating, from the students’ viewpoint this use of AI is anxiety reducing. They don't worry that they will be wrong or grammatically incorrect.   Consequently, the use of AI for written work is seen very differently by younger teens.

What is of greater concern to mental health, by both generations is the use of  AI to supercharge bullying with deepfake pornographic images of classmates.   As generative AI develops, creating these deepfake images will be easier and that kind of impact on mental health will be much greater.  There have already been multiple instances of students creating porno image so classmates and posting them on social media.  

“We have met the enemy and they are us” as the cartoon character said so many years ago.  Educators need to address the immediate issues that are now, including teaching kids the potential horror of the internet and AI.  We have work to do much beyond worrying about who has written that 5-page term paper on the causes of WWII.  AI is way beyond cheating.

April is Autism Month

 April is Autism Month

During the month of April, we give attention to the issue of autism.  Which is a good thing because during the other months of the year we can spend looking for appropriate programs for kids and adults who are on the spectrum.

According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, autism is a condition that results from differences in the way that a brain develops.  Autism is a spectrum disorder.  That means its manifestation can be very minor and subtle or at the other end be very severe to the point of totally overwhelming an individual’s life.

As with anything else, the extra attention in the media has created an influx of identification.  That, taken together with the historical (Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson) identifications, being diagnosed with mild autism is almost a social benefit.

One of the more common treatments is ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) usually done one to one and requiring many hoops through which families need to jump in order to receive the service.  All 50 states now have laws requiring that insurance cover the treatment for people identified.  However, treatment is expensive so insurance companies are slow to accept the need.

What else is there?  First and foremost, we should be essentially past the view that kids on the autism spectrum are are emotionally disturbed and should  be treated as such.  People on the autism spectrum are not emotionally disturbed, even if their behaviors might sometimes mimic those who are.

Secondly, instruction in social awareness and speech and language therapy are crucial interventions to ensure that more mildly impacted individuals can thrive at their highest level.  Lastly, the earlier the better, is particularly critical for those on the autism spectrum.  Progress can be slow but the earlier intervention begins the better.

But what of adults who may be late to the diagnosis.  Counseling for social awareness and compensation in social situations ensures that adults can make the most of their abilities.

Autism is with us all year long.  It’s a lifelong complication for those on the spectrum.  The manifestations of the diagnosis are multiple and often co-morbid with other disabilities.

May will soon be here.  It would be good to double down on providing service for the remaining eleven months until we come around again to autism’s month.

 

Free to fail

 Free to Fail

Would you let your child run out in front of a moving vehicle?  Probably not.  But would you let your child fail a school?  How far should teachers and parents go in letting kids fail?  How much will you complain if a child is not doing well at school?

Every good teacher knows we learn more about how a child learns when he/she fails at something than when they get the question correct.  Why is that?  Because when we fail, we can figure  out why we failed.  But when we succeed we don’t take the effort to figure out why and often we can succeed for the wrong reasons.

Children (and adults) need to fail to improve learning.  The trick is to figure out  how much failure is encouraging and how much is discouraging to the point of believing we can’t do something.  In essence we are looking for the Goldilocks spot where we get it just right.

Is doing the best a child can do good enough for success.  Maybe, but not always.  In the real road of life, excuses are not going to be made for a child because he or she has a disability.  In fact, quite the contrary is true. If a child has a disability that child may have to work harder to get a job than the plain kid who doesn’t have a disability even though both individuals may be able to do the job equally well.  Trying out for a team or interviewing for a job, doing the best one can do will not necessarily bring home the victory.

Children need to be allowed to fail.  Neither parents nor teachers should jump in and rescue a child before he or she is allowed to fail.  Resilience is a critical life skill.  The road of anyone’s life is going to have some potholes.  A child needs to be prepared for that road.  Parents and teachers are not going to be able to run ahead filling in those potholes.

Antifragile teaching and parenting is about allowing kids to explore and fail at age appropriate tasks. Otherwise, kids become fragile adults, falling into those potholes.  It’s about intervening to teach the child how to do the task him or herself, not running ahead and doing the task for the child or removing the reason for failing.  Intervening to make sure your kid gets a job or is admitted to a school that is not merited is ultimately setting the child up for failure.  

Jumping in when tasks are too hard rather than allowing the child to have a reasonable struggle and enjoy the glow of having achieved something hard is not only better for the child now but better for the adult the child will become.

Both teachers and parents want kids to believe in themselves.  That isn’t going to happen if they are never given a chance to earn their success  and, thereby, have a reason to believe.  Free to fail is the price of success.

So what's YOUR IQ

 So What’s YOUR IQ

What’s your IQ?  You probably don’t know and if you think you know, you are probably wrong. 

IQ, or intelligence quotient, is best determined in your pre-teens or early teens.  It is also best measured by an individual IQ test, either the Stanford-Binet (SB) or one of the Wechsler series tests.   The two tests are similar in that they each yield a rating of a person’s intelligence, but they are very different in outcomes.  The SB test has its roots in France where Theodore Simon and Alfred Binet were commissioned to develop a test to determine which children would benefit from a public school education and who would not.  Later Lewis Terman, working at Stanford University, adapted the test for American children.  Hence we have the Stanford Binet.  Poor Terman gets little credit.  The important things to remember about the Binet test as it is often called, is its original purpose AND that is it very language based.  Therefore, children with good language skills will do better than children whose language skills are not as well developed.

The Wechsler series of tests were developed by David Wechsler.  There are separate tests for very young children, school age children and adults.  The Wechsler tests differentiate between verbal skills and performance skills.  The Wechsler tests deliver better information to inform instruction.  

Both test purport to tell the examiner how smart a student is.

But do they?   Yes and no.  First of all remember the original Binet test was developed to determine who would succeed in a typical French school.  In many ways today, the tests do their best job at determining which kids will do well in a typical American school.  And they are pretty good at that.  What the tests don’t tell us is which students who do poorly in these tests, MAY still do well in school.

Schools today are increasingly trying to provide alternative methods of instruction.  The traditional school is highly verbal.   If you have good language skills you will do well on both the tests and  in school.  However, there are lots of kids who don’t have great verbal skills.  As schools move to provide learning through other channels of input besides language- think digital games, Smartboards, and project based learning- these children can show their “smarts” as well.

The other big question is, does a person’s IQ score change.  Will how well a person scores on the test  change?  The test activities are based on what the vast majority of kids at a particular age can do.  If a child is tested at a young age and doesn’t mature at the expected rate, his/her scores will go down.  On the other hand, if a child has increased environmental experiences and improved language abilities, scores could go up.

Both tests use a 100 score as average.  Deviation from that mid-point measures above average and below average academic ability.  These tests do not, nor were they ever intended to, measure other talents such as art, music, science or personal relations.

The good news is that educators are learning to rely less and less on these scores so we can all relax a bit.