Social Work Insights

Mental Health with Elementary Age Students

Estimated read time: 1:20

Summary

The webinar, hosted by the Nova Scotia College of Social Workers in collaboration with the Canadian Association of Social Workers, focused on mental health challenges faced by elementary-age students. Speakers discussed mental health statistics, the role of social workers, and strategies to improve youth mental health. Emphasized was the importance of trauma-informed care, relationship building, and mindfulness practices to aid children. The session underscored how teachers, counselors, and communities can collaboratively tackle rising mental health issues among youth by leveraging play therapy, emotional regulation techniques, and structured support systems. Practical interventions aim to build a supportive environment around young individuals and their families, enhancing overall mental well-being.

Highlights

Elementary students are showing significant mental health challenges, needing immediate attention 🚨.
Social workers play a critical role in identifying and addressing mental health needs of youth 👥.
Building relationships is key! A genuine connection can change a child’s mental health outlook 🌱.
Play therapy and mindfulness can dramatically improve mental health outcomes in kids 🎨🧘‍♂️.
Understanding cultural and family dynamics is crucial in providing effective mental health support 🌍.
Teaching emotional regulation can equip kids with tools they need for mental resilience 🛠️.

Key Takeaways

Understanding mental health in children is crucial for social workers, educators, and counselors 👩‍🏫.
Elementary-age kids are manifesting alarming mental health challenges, demanding a collective approach 🧒💬.
Practical tools like play therapy and mindfulness are vital in supporting youth mental health 🌟.
Social workers and educators should aim to create an inclusive support system for children 🌈.
Building genuine relationships can drastically impact a child's mental health journey ❤️.
Supporting children's mental health now can prevent greater issues in adulthood 🚀.

Overview

In this insightful webinar, the Nova Scotia College of Social Workers dove deep into the mental health challenges faced by elementary-age students. With contributions from experienced educators and social workers, the session explored startling statistics that highlight a growing mental health crisis among youth. The speakers emphasized the complex interplay of cultural, familial, and societal factors that contribute to these issues and the essential role of social workers and educators in addressing them.

Key strategies discussed included the importance of using a trauma-informed approach to build stronger relationships with students, understanding the impacts of cultural backgrounds, and engaging with families to create a supportive environment for children. Techniques such as play therapy, mindfulness, and emotional control were highlighted as effective tools for fostering positive mental health. Additionally, the session explored how early interventions can prevent the escalation of mental health problems into adolescence and adulthood.

The interactive session also covered the professional responsibilities of social workers in enhancing public welfare and questioned existing structures to propose collaborative improvements. By focusing on resilience building and educational support, participants were encouraged to bring these practices into their work environments to help nurture healthier communities.

Chapters

00:00 - 01:30: Welcome and Introduction The webinar hosted by the Nova Scotia College of Social Workers begins with an acknowledgment of its location in the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq people. The importance of the Peace and Friendship Treaties first signed in 1725 with the British Crown is mentioned, emphasizing the historical context without addressing land surrender.
01:30 - 03:30: Context and Background The chapter titled 'Context and Background' discusses the historical agreements related to land and resource rights, particularly focusing on the indigenous groups like the Migma. It highlights the recognition of titles and the establishment of rules that govern the ongoing relationships between nations. The text emphasizes that all individuals in Canada, including settlers, ARA (Accord de Réconciliation Autochtone) participants, and those of refugee origins, possess treaty rights and responsibilities. There is a collective challenge to work towards reconciliation with indigenous peoples and communities, advocating for a shared effort to address these relationships and responsibilities.
03:30 - 05:10: Webinar Overview The chapter discusses the involvement of social workers in residential schools and other colonial initiatives aimed at displacing and disempowering Indigenous peoples. It highlights the ongoing role of social workers in aiding communities, particularly in Nova Scotia, as they navigate the challenges of reconciliation amidst intersecting issues such as the pandemic, economic uncertainty, and racism.
05:10 - 10:10: Key Concepts and Challenges The chapter titled "Key Concepts and Challenges" emphasizes the importance of approaching work with a trauma-informed lens. It encourages members to utilize available resources and ground their practice in professional values and ethics. The speaker, Animy Gavink, is introduced as the professional practice consultant with the Nova Scotia College of Social Workers. The chapter sets the context for a webinar focused on mental health concerning elementary age students.
10:10 - 14:30: Mental Health Concerns in Youth The chapter discusses the mental health challenges emerging in elementary age youth. It reviews startling facts and statistics, uncovers the reasons behind the rise of these challenges, and explores how children manifest their experiences. The chapter also delves into the implications of these experiences on an individual's mental health as they mature. Additionally, it examines how teachers, counselors, and communities can address this trend. The concept of play and its effects are also discussed as potential avenues for addressing these concerns.
14:30 - 19:30: Social Work Practice and Standards This chapter focuses on the importance of relationship building within therapy, emotional control, mindfulness, and the influence of digital information on developing brains. It provides practical guidance for aiding younger individuals and families in enhancing mental health. Collaboration with the Canadian Association of Social Workers is highlighted as a crucial element of this approach.
19:30 - 27:30: Supportive Resources and Strategies This chapter introduces Deina Malanson, a behavior intervention teacher at a school in the Annapolis Valley Regional Center for Education. She works with youths diagnosed with a mental condition or experiencing poor mental health. Deina has also taught mental health courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels and has presented on mental health topics in the Annapolis Valley and other locations.
27:30 - 31:00: Conclusion and Audience Q&A The chapter titled 'Conclusion and Audience Q&A' provides a brief overview of the speaker, CCPA, who collaborates with schools, psychologists, and community services to address various concerns. The session is structured to include approximately 60 minutes of speaking and listening, followed by a moderated question and answer period. Attendees are also informed about how to access the slide deck for additional information.

Mental Health with Elementary Age Students Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 welcome everyone to this uh webinar hosted here in Nova Scotia we are the Nova Scotia College of social workers and uh it LO we are located in mcmi the ancestral and unseated territory of the mmog people this territory is covered by the treaties of peace and friendship with mmog and Mal people first signed with the British crown in 1725 the treaties did not deal with
00:30 - 01:00 surrender of lands and resources but in fact recognized migma and Malice title and established the rules for what was to be an ongoing relation between nations all people in Canada have treaty rights and responsibilities those who have settler ARA and Refugee Origins are challenged to collectively work towards reconciliation with indigenous peoples and communities even as we reckon with
01:00 - 01:30 our profession's role in residential schools and other colonial projects designed to displace dispossess and disempower Indigenous peoples social workers are also embedded in communities that are grappling with their own roles in the great and necessary labor of reconciliation as many Nova scotian fishing communities struggle through this conflict and crisis worsened by the intersections of a pandemic economic uncertainty and racism
01:30 - 02:00 we encourage our members to approach this work with a trauma-informed lens to draw on the resources available to you and to ground your practice in the professional in your professional values and ethics my name is animy gavink I am the professional practice consultant with the no Nova Scotia College of social workers and it is my honor to welcome you today to this webinar entitled me mental health with Elementary age students
02:00 - 02:30 in this session we will unpack mental health challenges emergency emerging in elementary age youth after reviewing startling facts and statistics we will learn the reasons for this rise how children manifest their experiences and the implications on an individual's mental health as they grow older how we as teachers counselors and concerned communities can deat this FR Trend will also be explored we will uncover the effect of such ideas as play
02:30 - 03:00 therapy relationship building emotional control mindfulness and the effect of information highway on brains still in development we will leave this session with some practical ideas on how to assist younger individuals and their families to increase their positive mental health today's webinar is in collabor collaboration with the Canadian Association of Social Workers for which we are deeply grateful in collaboration
03:00 - 03:30 with us noosha College of social workers it's my pleasure to introduce to introduce you to deina malanson who is a behavior intervention teacher at the school at a school in the Annapolis Valley Regional Center for Education she works with many youth who have a diagnosed mental condition or have simply poor mental health she has taught mental health courses at both The Graduate and undergraduate levels and has presented on Mental Health in the Annapolis Valley and with the
03:30 - 04:00 CCPA uh or the a she works closely with schools plus psychologists community services and is looking always for ways to find the best way to address the concerns of a little bit of the housekeeping ahead um we are going to be speaking and listening uh for approximately 60 Minutes followed by a question and answer period that I will moderate please note that all the details you need like how to access to slide deck
04:00 - 04:30 and uh other resources get your certificate of attendance and uh other housekeeping information is found in the bottom of your screen all the widgets can be accessed by clicking at the icons at the bottom of your window you can also resize and move around any of the elements you see on your screen to customize your viewing experience during the presentation I encourage you to type in your questions at any time and I will begin answering them um asking them at
04:30 - 05:00 the end of the presentation or throughout uh there's also a chat box which some of you have already found where I see people who have arrived from skatan and Manitoba and Newan so welcome everyone from all Canada's territories and provinces during the presentation um uh we'll do our best to answer the questions uh or they will all be addressed or we'll work towards making as many of them answerable uh at the end
05:00 - 05:30 of our Deen's presentation with that I hope you enjoy this time and I'm really honored to pass it on to our incredible speaker take it away deina well this is a new thought for me um a new presentation a new way to go at presenting uh before I go any further I want to congratulate each and every one of you this is an extremely trying time
05:30 - 06:00 and demands are being put on our time and our emotional regulation that I can only imagine for some of you so congratulations what an amazing group of people you are to be able to get yourself through all of this but today we are here today uh to speak about our youth I specifically wanted to talk about Elan rentry youth because those are the ones that I see most On The Rise however much of what I am saying is going to be applicable to students youth adults seniors so feel
06:00 - 06:30 free to take this information and use it as you will the key Concepts I want to try to cover today I'm going to to take a look at some stats we're going to talk about some mental health concerns strategies and practical approaches that you as social workers can use um and then we're going to wrap it up with some questions the first question I have and this is a very different form for me I'm used to having a lot of feedback so forgive me if I Stumble um um the first
06:30 - 07:00 question I really want you to ponder is why do you think we have to take a look at mental health well there's so so so many reasons why as we know there have been an increase in poor mental health and even an understanding of what mental health is I myself have gone into many different classrooms to talk about mental health and everybody looks on Mental Health as something being wrong with you something that needs fixing and they seem to forget that we all have
07:00 - 07:30 mental health I am specifically talking about poor mental health today because even before the pandemic hit the statistics regarding our elementary youth were staggering we had youth as young as five years old trying to commit suicide yes five years old it's a staggering statistic and it's very accurate the most of the mental health concerns came between youth that were between the ages of 9 and
07:30 - 08:00 16 and from then it it got a little bit better but I'm not exactly sure if everything was being reported at that point in time however since Co hid a recent poll found that over 50% of Canadians reported poor mental health since the be pandemic began 50% of Canadians right now that means 110 of you that are watching this have reported wor mental
08:00 - 08:30 health that is staggering and what that means for us and what our jobs are becoming is being influenced largely by this some of you I see you're from all over Canada some of you are already in the middle of Wave 2 I'm in a very lucky place in Nova Scotia we're very fortunate but some of you are already feeling the effects of a second wave of covid and I can only imagine the mental health statistics that you're facing and it is staggering
08:30 - 09:00 and we do have to keep in mind that even with our mental health we can have individuals that are diagnosed with mental health and non-diagnosed with our mental health it's a very much a spectrum it is possible to have your diagnosed mental health challenges and still experience well-being you could have absolutely no symptoms but still be have your own mental health challenges and and then in the other Spectrum you
09:00 - 09:30 can have what seems to be symptoms but no diagnosis and what we're seeing in our our elementary youth is more and more and more there is no diagnosis but there is a virtual Cornucopia of symptoms coming through this I take you to this next slide and I thought this was a funny slide because here we have a very healthy adult knowing what he's going to say but when his poor mental health hits with the anxiety it's destroyed and everything he had practice comes out me Charan e Jane
09:30 - 10:00 and what does he say damn because he knows he's messed up he knows his anxiety is interfered and in a very very small way this is what's happening to a lot of our individuals in elementary school they know what is right they know what they have to do but their poor mental health is causing them to behave in ways that are not socially acceptable um as uh Anna mik mentioned I am I have been a behavior intervention
10:00 - 10:30 and the biggest thing I found with my my young kids is that they all knew what they did wrong but they didn't have the capacity to stop themselves from doing it they knew the minute they hit somebody they shouldn't have they knew the minute they threw the desk they shouldn't have they knew the minute they bit someone they shouldn't have but they simply didn't have the capacity to recognize their own strengths and how to get out of this without resorting to this type of behavior this is the effect that poor Mental Health is having on our
10:30 - 11:00 youth now I also am talking about so many different disorders here and a lot of them you've heard of I know most I know you've heard of all of these I should say your anxiety disorders your ADHD contact depression psychosis bipolar eating disorder schizophrenia and there's plethora of ones that I haven't even mentioned but these are real disorders that I am seeing in elementary kids as young as 5 years old generally speaking speak for example
11:00 - 11:30 ADHD is not supposed to be diagnosed until they're six or seven but because of some of the symptoms that are showing up we are getting kids that are being diagnosed younger and younger for right or for wrong they are being diagnosed and when they are being diagnosed this also means that they're on the medication for it which again has its own side effects so in addition to the poor mental health that they are getting treatment with they're they're being affected with many many many different types of side effects again this all plays on your poor Mental Health so when the question why is answered
11:30 - 12:00 this is why because we have so many different things coming at our kids and as we know poor mental health can appear as so many different things someone can be extremely passive and non-communicative someone can be aggressive I've heard people say well that child has no empathy oh they're just being non-compliant they're being argument argumentative but sometimes it shows up as being fatigued and they show up as being very very
12:00 - 12:30 quiet however sometimes and these are the Dangerous Ones there are no symptoms that are caused by so many different things like peer pressure learning challenges anxiety an excess of anxiety busy schedules depressions information overload you can read them all these are all things that have can have a negative effect on most of our elementary youth guess what
12:30 - 13:00 Dr John herds of University of watero says that children with mental illnesses or mental challenges or poor mental health have very different needs than adult patients and that is something that is common sense but it's not something we often think of I myself even when I'm working with my youth because they're doing things that seem so grown up and so mature I will make the mistake of talking to them as if they actually understand why they're doing it the kids don't they're just becoming overwhelmed with a lot of their
13:00 - 13:30 poor mental health the recent collaborative study by the Canadian researchers at waterl found that children are at higher risk for self-injury and suicidal ideation than adults again they may not have the full comprehension of what it's doing to them or what harm it can do the kids can also be much more physically and verbally abusive and they display much more outwardly aggressive behaviors and again in my experience
13:30 - 14:00 it's because they have not had the opportunity to practice the opportunity to learn or the opportunity to actually discuss why they're being why they're acting this way so when we take a look at our mental health in younger kids we do have to take a look at some of these considerations there is seldom a formal diagnosis although as I said the diagnosis are starting earlier and earlier a diagnosis I I don't want to be
14:00 - 14:30 in this quoted here by any means but a diagnosis is not the end itself a diagnosis should become the beginning of a process in helping them a diagnosis helps us figure out where to go um but I I remember I had this one youth um he uh was forever rate on tasks he would walk in his toes he would not be able to manage appropriately in social situations and consequently we were trying to get a DI nosis ofd the
14:30 - 15:00 teachers I was working with at the time didn't know what to do because he didn't have the diagnosis what we have to do is if it looks like a duck and Walks Like A Duck and talks like a duck treat it like a duck until we hear otherwise you're not going to do any harm by putting some supports in place if someone looks like an ASD student someone who has ASD rather than leaving them defend for themselves that's going to cause more harm again the earlier the students are diagnosed or Pres presume to have a specific diagnosis the more it does
15:00 - 15:30 become their identity I've had so many youth come and see me and say I have anxiety as the first thing they say when that happens it's a very dangerous situation because to me that means that everything they do is associated with their anxiety and although it might be there are so many great strategies that help them overcome some of the negative aspects of anxiety not to mention anxiety is normal we all
15:30 - 16:00 have anxiety and so I do have to bite my tongue when they come in and say I have anxiety I have to bite my tongue instead of saying yeah so do I because we all have it but because of the negative connotations associated with such a diagnosis sometimes they tend to be negative towards themselves another fact for mental health challenges is that any disturbances that they do have disrupt whatever situation they're in if they're in Pre school if they're in daycare if
16:00 - 16:30 they're in school settings if they're with babysitters if they're at home mental their poor mental health can affect how they're reacting and how people are reacting to them which unfortunately only serves sometimes to reinforce the behavior again behaviors due to poor mental health can often occur in one place and it becomes a means of coping in those situations and I have seen that time and time again with extremely young youth four and five years old um we kind of think of it as as the terrible twos
16:30 - 17:00 you know you don't get something you cry and scream but when that starts Behavior at at ages four five and six that's when it becomes less socially acceptable and that's when it becomes a major Mental Health Challenge because they don't know how else to cope except the one way that's been working for them time and time again often the challenges appear to have no origin and it's really difficult to determine why what might be triggering the response but I can guarantee that
17:00 - 17:30 every Behavior every manifestation of poor mental health there is some kind of an origin and it kind of becomes our jobs as social workers Educators um counselors to help the student figure out how to overcome that origin so that they can address their poor mental health challenges in a healthy more productive way that is conducive to society
17:30 - 18:00 okay moving on this is a very different way to present I am so used to the give and take so I do apologize if I sound um a little bit lost it's because I I keep expecting feedback and of course I can't get it in this situation so I totally apologize for that um when we're looking at uh positive mental health sorry I negative not I want to back up here yeah considerations for challenges from okay we did that this next slide I thought was really interesting simply because we
18:00 - 18:30 often hear the phrase fake it till you make it but until you actually see this succeed with students who have poor mental health it is just a silly phrase however statistics have been shown that people who were deemed to be pessimistic had a 20% higher risk of dying over a 30-year period than those who were considered optimistic and I tried this in my class I I do a lot of mind activities with a lot of my classes that
18:30 - 19:00 I go into and one of the things we did is we did the Laughing mindfulness exercise and I'm sure many of you have heard it and many of you have done it but it was so interesting because when I walked in it was a Monday morning and they were all very tired because of the weekends they'd had they all had their own personal baggage with them and I had them go through the Laughing exercise and for those who don't know what it is it's a very simple exercise you get your students to close your eyes uh put their head down their head if they're comfortable with it and you get them to start just smiling to themselves and of
19:00 - 19:30 course they're wearing masks so it's really funny because you can see some people trying to smile but it hasn't reached their eyes um and so they try to smile and then they go to a small Giggle and then they go to a more of a belly laugh and then they laugh like a hyena and then you bring it all the way down so from the hyena to the Belly Laugh to the giggling to the smile and the change in atmosphere in that class was astounding it was so fun to watch them them realize that I can fake it until I
19:30 - 20:00 make it and then once they were feeling better it was amazing the whole class began to um discuss a lot more things they were much more interactive and it's a really quick five minute exercise which I highly recommend whenever you have someone in your in your sessions as social workers with families with youth try it sometime because it's really neat how it works um people who kept track of their gratitude once a week were more upbeat
20:00 - 20:30 and had fewer physical compaints than others and I'm sure many of you do this already I'm not an expert in this area I'm I'm like you trial and error I try these things so in my counseling sessions that I do I'm also a a trained counselor and in my counseling sessions that I do I always start off with three things that you're grateful for and as soon as I do that it changes the tone of the session again and so that we can have more positive conversations about the challenges they may be
20:30 - 21:00 facing conversely people who obsessively repeated the negative thoughts and behaviors were able to change their unhealthy patterns when they focused on positivity and I know it sounds very floaty very um you know I hate I don't well very very light and very artsy in some ways but it is very very true if you focus on that positivity it helps you through a lot of the negativity that you you're feeling and I'm not saying
21:00 - 21:30 dismiss the negativity but I'm saying feeling positive about what you have accomplished um and this is why this is why one of my great SL slides I absolutely love I don't care what people think of me at least mosquitoes find me attractive this is a simple cartoon but there is some truth in this one of and this goes back to that wonderful um positive laughing mindfulness exercise that we do
21:30 - 22:00 this is just another slide to show you the effects of Mental Health crisis because we are indeed in a mental health crisis and I use that term and I use it strongly and I use it over and over again because unless we get the mental health of our colleagues our students our youth under control it is going to be very very difficult in the years to come for them and for everybody else um
22:00 - 22:30 yeah I'm using this slide I'm sure some of you seen this slide as well to talk about uh the effects of poor mental health again in this particular side what we see is we see someone running from a mouth um this is the type of anxiety the T type of of reaction that we would have if we're St extremely nervous extremely scared etc etc etc this is what affects our system this is is what makes us be panicky this is what makes us run I see
22:30 - 23:00 a bear I run unfortunately what our kids are feeling now is they're still having the same reactions but it's a different stimuli and I often use the Triune brain model I don't know if you can see this uh the Triune brain model where we have the three parts of our brain and this is our thinking part and this is our instinctive part and what happens when they're in this High state of poor mental health High emotional state is
23:00 - 23:30 their instinctive part takes over so that the rational part can't think and I use the the example of a bear um if I see a bear I know I'm supposed to stay still I know I'm supposed to make myself big I know what I'm supposed to do if I see a bear I'm running my instincts have taken over and this is what happens when these young people have these extreme mental health moments these poor mental health moments their instinct takes over and they resort to what they know what has
23:30 - 24:00 worked in the past and it might be a form of of flight fight or freezing but it's the same reaction but a different stimuli and it's really important to know that so that we don't discount how they're actually feeling Elementary youth are no different when they're trying to get control of the situation they're fighting if they're actually acting out it's a fight response if they're being
24:00 - 24:30 non-compliant it's a flight response they're avoiding um avoidance is a flight rather than a fight when they shut down and they don't do anything that is actually a freeze and I kind of consider flight and freeze very similar in a lot of ways but it is a freeze response and the last one when they run away it's obviously a flight response these responses are because their Instinct are kicking in and the rational thought is no longer there this is also why when you see an
24:30 - 25:00 elementary student in the middle of an emotional release to try to talk to them and ask them what's wrong you know how can I help you calm down that's not going to help because they're right here and they're going to fight they're going to flight they're going to do everything they can because their thinking part is not working their instinctive part has taken over and until we can get them to relax and use their thinking part we're not going to be able to help them Sol and this is key with kids and I have
25:00 - 25:30 seen it time and time again the number of times I've had to try to keep a child from hurting themselves or others um you wouldn't believe the numbers that I have done I've had kids bite me kick me um do anything because they're trying to run away because they're trying to fight what they're doing and it's all instinctive and at the end of it they feel so bad that the shame Factor kicks in which is a whole other presentation so when someone's mental health is poor
25:30 - 26:00 they are unable to control their reactions to start off with which is why we're in the problem we're in with a lot of these Youth and of course we know that young adults with significant mental orders dis disorders come from young children with significant mental disorders it doesn't go away you can't just say they'll grow out of it what they may grow out of is the desire to change the
26:00 - 26:30 desire to do things more socially acceptable it may change um in the fact that they just don't tell you what they're feeling anymore but it is a fact that young children with significant mental health disorder leads to young adults and then it becomes a whole other issue and the law becomes involved so now let's talk about you guys um I know a lot of you are social workers um and I'll be honest I am not a social worker and I'm coming at this from an education perspective and I'm
26:30 - 27:00 coming at it from a counseling perspective but as I went through the standards of practices for your Nova Scotia colleagues of social workers here one of the big things that you do is promote the protection of public and specifically of clients that's what we're talking about when we're talking about poor mental health and trying to find ways to help poor mental health it's that protection of the public and specifically of clients and again from my position within an elementary school well it's actually a middle school but um it's an
27:00 - 27:30 elementary 2 middle school but that protection of the public becomes key because when you have the young kids coming around running around doing extremely aggressive behaviors the protection becomes Paramount and the best way to protect is to educate and to help the person who is doing the problems which is where this comes in again for the purpose of this act this is from the social workers act I say I did a little research on this
27:30 - 28:00 stuff um the practice of Social Work is the assessment remediation and prevention of social Pro problems good luck guys that is a huge huge mandate when I saw this I was like wow that could prevent social problems fantastic it is something that is your mandate and that you aim for but we know that this prevention of social problems is so much broader than just the social issues that we see in a daily basis
28:00 - 28:30 these young kids that are having the poor mental health issues are the epitome of social problems and they've learned it generally within their home or something that's happened to them and they've learned it um and it's breaking the cycle of them learning it breaking the cycle and teaching them there's another way to help them through these challenges rather than just their instinctive part which is generally running hitting biting and it's trying to change their whole social makeup from what they know and showing them that
28:30 - 29:00 something else works so when I was looking up social work it is actually assessment read remediation and prevention of social problems fantastic but what does it do it is supposed to and I'm sure it does enhances the social functioning of individuals families groups and communities to me I love that they're bulleted and I love this mandate by the way I was really impressed with this um they're bulleted but to me you can't
29:00 - 29:30 help one without the other you can't help an individual without helping the group in the community and the family if you to take an isolated child from a house and teach it what to do in isolation and show it how to respond in isolation and then when they go back to the family and the individual it's not going to work as well because the family hasn't been educated about it and the groups haven't been educated about it so our whole task as a community uh in Social Work becomes
29:30 - 30:00 helping the entire Community big big mandate and again from what I've read what you do is you do direct counseling you do development of programs promotion delivery of Human Services social policies development promotion that is fantastic what I'm going to talk about that works the best from my own perspective is the direct counseling stuff and we're going to get to some of the strategies that I use with some of my kids very shortly um of course to do
30:00 - 30:30 this you have to have your social work you have to have the knowledge behind it you have to have your own very clear sense of values and you have to have the skills to do it without a clear understanding of how mental effect Health affects youth we are unable to do our jobs and I say we being counselors being teachers being social workers and this is another really great little comic that I found um it's not his fault he's a little
30:30 - 31:00 aggressive he's got smbd seriously medicalized behavior disorder and I use that because there are so many diagnoses coming out there's so many letters that kids are being labeled with that sometimes you can't help but wonder is it too many and I myself think sometimes it is we do know there is a case of of overdiagnosis we do know that there's cases for people being medicated when they don't need to be but that doesn't change the
31:00 - 31:30 underlying behaviors that they're having and the mental health that they're having so whether and I I get a lot of this from teachers whether we believe the diagnosis is correct or not is irrelevant if we see the challenge we still have to try to help them with their mental health challenges regardless of any diagnosis and I'm sure you guys see that in your work as well if we were live I would do a brainstorm unfortunately we can't do it in this form but you may just just want to go through in your mind some causes
31:30 - 32:00 that you think that may lead to poor mental health and youth I'm going to continue on with this but think about that too because that is very important so why are we seeing this undes undesirable behavior in youth these are taken from some research that I've done and some uh from some papers that have been done and my own experience I think we're seeing a lot more undesirable beh aior in youth because of the learning environments
32:00 - 32:30 that they're in right now we are really giving them a lot of information um The Learning environment may not be conducive for everyone someone who has been diagnosed um with ADHD or someone who has been diagnosed with ASD they cannot participate in the class the way that's expected of them most of the time it's too much for them so the learning itself learning environment itself may be causing some of the problems I also believe that there's too much
32:30 - 33:00 information for their development level right now we are in a knowledge age anything we want to know we can Google online simple we just ask it and we find it but younger and younger kids are having iPads are having phones are having access to TV shows um are I mean you just I won't go to that yet um there's an overload of information for these kids and it's not that it's bad it's that their brain may not be at the
33:00 - 33:30 developmental level to handle there's too much higher level thinking involved in the information that is being presented to them if you take a single look back to last week in the election there was so much information being thrown at so many people and if you think that the younger kids weren't watching that I'm I'm sorry to say you are mistaken they were watching it they were taking it in and they had no idea how to process it I don't know how to process it I'm a 51y old woman I have multiple degrees I am a
33:30 - 34:00 trained counselor I don't know how to process the information I was given yet we are having our kids younger and younger be aware of this information they don't know what to think of it they don't know how to pronounce it another example is covid information that has gone around covid is a devastating disease definitely but right now I'm strongly feel that our youth are being terrified and this is very very hard on them it's hard on their poor mental health there it's hard on their mental health and it's seeing an increase of
34:00 - 34:30 poor mental health another thing that I want to talk about a little bit is screen time and before you all roll your eyes and think oh yes we've all heard about this I'm not entirely convinced that a lot of screen time is a bad thing I think screen time should be developmentally appropriate um and from there we're going to discuss it a little bit more I also again you may not agree with this but there is so much organized Play Now Sports are organized Dan is organized very few people go out to the
34:30 - 35:00 ball field and just hit a ball it's you have to be on a team I believe that might be causing some of the mental health issues there's a huge um movement talking about how the kids aren't feeling connected the relationship which of course leads to the lack of relationship building skills so they're used to getting the instant gratification and instant results and they do not always understand someone else's perspective because a lot of their time is not spent
35:00 - 35:30 doing their own uh mediations but having someone else come in a mediation for them those are my thoughts but now we get to what do we actually do about this well one of the things that um The Joint Consortium from BC anyone who in BC love this uh paper joint Consortium I think it's got some fantastic ideas in it but they talk about um some approaches to education and they talk about what else we can do but they also
35:30 - 36:00 make some very key assumptions that I think we all have to make and the first assumption is that children and youth have these inner strengths and gifts that do support their capacity to initiate direct and sustain positive life directions and I'm going to read these and I apologize for reading the slide but I think it's really important that we understand this this first assumption is that children can get through this and I love that assumption the second one is that child and youth
36:00 - 36:30 engagement and empowerment are critical for figuring out what we do next we have to make sure that the youth and the children can be engaged and that they have the the power to make the decisions for themselves in some ways in order for us to facilitate the positive developments children's um Youth and social contexts provide important resources which is why I go back to I don't believe to much screen time is a bad thing it's what they're watching
36:30 - 37:00 that we have to be very very very careful of because to try to cut that out of someone's life that is the social network now and these influences have the capacity to contribute to and enhance their psychological well-being and the fourth assumption is that children and youth social contexts and networks oh sorry um children's and youth relationships with adults and peers contribute to psychological well-being but these relationships have to be
37:00 - 37:30 genuine they have to be empathetic they have to be unconditional caring and they have to be very out an affirmation for the Youth an example of this one I cannot tell you how important relationships are um and how important the non-judging um unconditional caring counts I had a young girl who was school refusal she had uh many many many difficult times coming in this was her fourth year dealing with it each year we'd come up with a different strategy that worked this year nothing was
37:30 - 38:00 working so myself my principal would go out to the car to meet her and we would literally carry her in where she would sit in my room to calm down and then she'd go up to class this particular time we carried her in um and she was in grade three at the time um she bit me and she latched right where's my hand there we go she latched right in between my thumb and my finger um and she ripped the skin off of me what I did was the hardest thing I've
38:00 - 38:30 ever did first of all pretend it didn't hurt second of all talked to her about maybe hurting me wasn't the best thing and when she calmed down we were able to talk our way through this rationally but the fact that I cared for her unconditionally and her bite didn't affect how much I cared for her was Monumental in her coming to school after that it was a phenomenal experience so these
38:30 - 39:00 are can't see the bottom of my screen either I apologize I move that there we go um these are the that the indicators that pen these are how positive mental health can occur when you have positive relationships when you have positive self-esteem when you have good problem solving and coping skills solid family support strong connectors to school supportive teachers engagement and involvement in the faith and religious communities that is actually taken um
39:00 - 39:30 from The Suicide Prevention page uh and the problem is what do we do when they don't have them and this is where we're getting into our problem solving stage many of the things that I do and I am not as I said I am not the be allend all these are just things I have done to try to help my kids I do use mindfulness practices I use relationship to development I use play therapy and music
39:30 - 40:00 therapy I talk about the influence of the of the information highway I do direct intervention I do direct teaching of relationship building and I put a later start to school and that's a bit of my own hobby horse because we are asking our kids to go younger and younger and for some kids it is fantastic for some kids it doesn't work I'm going to unpack these a little bit and I know that we're oh my gosh we're already at time let's skip past this one we're going to talk about mindfulness and mindfulness
40:00 - 40:30 is one of those things where it is just being about in the moment and I find this so important because most of our mental health challenges are things that are happening in the future or things that have happened in the past and where mindfulness practice is about the now it sure sort of shows us that if we can be in the now we're able to calm our mind in other words you know relax our thinking part so that we can get out and we can can actually do more things to help us relieve our poor mental health
40:30 - 41:00 to find positive attributes for our poor mental health it means paying attention to a particular way on purpose in the present moment non judgmentally and this is so key when you're talking to your students about this that they understand that mindfulness or anything that you're doing is a non judgmental aspect there's three skills emotional regulation attention control and self awareness that are all cultivated by
41:00 - 41:30 mindfulness okay my thing isn't working anymore let's move this okay for some reason my slides have stopped moving all right I don't know if my tech guy is still there but my slides have stopped moving okay I will continue to talk about this um in mindfulness um there are some really essential instructions when you're starting mindfulness um and that is there's short moments of
41:30 - 42:00 awareness you have to find a neutral gear when the attention is unavailable as a resource you do have to use psychological tools um which basically means when you can't focus their attention you use tools to help them Focus their attention I use fidgets all the time I use music all of the time I use movement all of the time we soak in the positive thoughts we help them to soak in the positive
42:00 - 42:30 thoughts and I'm going to I in this presentation which you will all have access to there are some mindfulness exercises which um I think will be very helpful to you but I'm going to move on to the relationship development teacher child relationships from primary to grade two has been linked to child well-being in various aspects of mental health and I would like to say this actually comes from a quote from um a book called um well by
42:30 - 43:00 bir and lad P anyway I have all the stuff there you can look at it later um the relationship development if it works for p to three P to2 I can guarantee that it works for p to whenever this relationship building is key and again it has to be non-judgmental it has to be genuine and I Foster this relationship and I encourage my teachers to Foster this Relationships by doing the simple things like saying hi to the kids when they walk in the hall commenting on their sweater nice sweater
43:00 - 43:30 it builds up a relationship and that relationship is when they really come to trust you according to straining Joseph building positive relationships with young children is an essential task and a foundational con uh con component rather of good teaching and as social workers you do have that teaching role because you're not only coming in to help the families in order to help the families you do have to teach them but this relationship bu does take time and a lot of patience
43:30 - 44:00 however if the relationship is good it's amazing what you can change and what you can help some more um relationships can be key with individuals when trust is given freely but not blindly genuine feelings of interest and concern clear expectations um leaving shame and judgment aside and that is really hard to do because we all come with our own bagage we all come with our own background but when someone is telling
44:00 - 44:30 us something if we can listen without judgment just to help them through it through their poor mental health it makes a significant impact in other words listening the next aspect if we could move my slides ahead um I would be talking about is something called motivational interviewing which is actually restorative justice practice and a motivational interviewing it it you use the ORS practice basically you ask open-ended questions s you have an affirmation of what they say and you do
44:30 - 45:00 reflective learning and you do summarizing no judgment just repeating what they say it's another extremely extremely important aspect to creating relationship I have some pictures of resources in there for you to use with that aspect as well the next thing I wanted to talk about was play therapy and play therapy kind of has a bad name because a lot of people just look on it as kids playing however when you think about some of the families that you work with some of those kids regardless of their
45:00 - 45:30 ages may not have had an opportunity just to play and when you think of all the social skills you learn when you're playing even just sharing um even just uh you know where does a cow go where does a horse go those silly little things that you play with figures they haven't had a chance to learn them and play therapy allows them to learn them in addition any of you who may be counselors out there know the value of just allowing the student the individuals to have free play because you learn a lot about what's going on in
45:30 - 46:00 their mind I mean everything from I I used to have a child that played in the sand uh we had a little sandbox and he would always bury this one figure and he would push all the other figures aside and they would be playing and when we talked about that one figure it represented his grandfather who passed away many years ago so that told me there was a lot of grief that had to be unpacked but that play therapy was the key part of it so play therapy allows you to process emotions it allows a decrease in
46:00 - 46:30 undesirable behaviors it allows the development of Independence and creative thinking and when you think of any advancements that have been made in any field it's that creative thinking that makes the advancements and allowing them to know it's okay to have that creative thinking um Improvement of the social skills has it come out of play therapy and of course stronger relationship with your family members
46:30 - 47:00 now let's talk a little bit about the information Highway um I when I first started doing this presentation I thought this would be a big part of it it turns out when you Google um is information Highway bad is there too much is there too much screen time being used you get thousands upon thousands tens of thousands articles that tell you yes it is bad but when you Google is too uh does screen time help a
47:00 - 47:30 child to develop you get just as many and everything agrees that it's not necessarily the amount of time but it's what you're doing and who you're doing it with and the type of information you're receiving and this goes back to the young kids having so much information being handed to them that they don't know how to process it and so when they get so many things when you think about a game like GTA um Grand Theft Auto that has has such adult themes in it that a grade a seven-year-old who's playing it and yes
47:30 - 48:00 they do but if the seven-year-old is playing with it they don't understand the concepts behind it they don't understand right and wrong they don't have their value set so a game like that does nothing but confuse the child even simple things like a newscast with a lot of violence on it it confused them when 911 happened every child knew about it however adults were still having problems processing it yet we're exposing the children to this it's that
48:00 - 48:30 type of information that's being shared that is the is the tough part not necessarily the quantity but the type and again if you're a child a parent with your child and you're walking them through the information it has a total different effect okay um of course the next aspect to help some of these kids with form mental health is the direct intervention and there are specific programs that are available to help with emotional regulations patience anxiety
48:30 - 49:00 empathy turn-taking etc etc and again I do have them all listed here but that direct teaching is just as important because although many of us learn many of our social skills almost through an osmosis process we were playing with kids and we picked them up a lot of kids with poor mental health they are not able to do that appropriately and therefore they have to be taught it directly or they will never understand it and again this is all from my experience and my um working with kids
49:00 - 49:30 I'm sure there's people out there that will disagree with me and I'm sure there's people out there that are doing much better job than I would ever do but these are just some of the ideas that I have Consolidated um I see I have just a little bit of time left um yeah there was a lot of really good slides in here people I'm sorry you can't see them and hopefully we can get it so you can see the rest of them another time um but the basic take-home away from this is that mindfulness practices have
49:30 - 50:00 a significant impact on younger Minds I have done mindfulness with primaries I have done mindfulness with grade 12 the impact on mindfulness activities is limited only by your comfortability with it and the exercises that you use what I did with the younger kids is very different what I did with the older kids um with the younger kids uh we did a um anyway very different aspects uh play therapy and music
50:00 - 50:30 therapy okay you guys are seeing the slid so I have sorry I just got a message saying that you guys are seeing the slides I am not seeing the slides so I have no idea where we are in the slides at this point um I'm not sure this is very interesting okay look I got nope nope NOP NOP NOP nope um and anyway I'm going to go back to my the direct takeaways uh play therapy music therapy are huge direct
50:30 - 51:00 teaching is huge um direct teaching of relationship building is huge the screen time we talked about that and the motivational interviewing I do highly recommend you look up motivational interviewing because it allows you to get to the challenges of the child with the mental health challenge without actually um putting more trauma on them and having to repeat the things uh and of course relationship building is
51:00 - 51:30 key and that I guess is about it and I'll bring it now to question time if there are any questions sorry and I yeah thank you so much thank you thank you deina can you hear me you're welcome yes that's great I um we did see the slide so there is hope for you that people have been following
51:30 - 52:00 along while you spoke um but I appreciate all that you've said just now in terms of the children in relation to their their life ahead and what the current situations are for them one of the questions that came up throughout your presentation had to do with um the effect of violence in the family home and how that seems to be showing itself at school and whether or not you've had lots of exposure experience with with
52:00 - 52:30 the effect on the mental health of the children in the home that has violence happening um yes the vi whenever I live in an area that might be considered impoverished in some ways and the violence that is inherent in some of these kids um homes are absolutely phenomenal what they have seen is more than I could ever see in my lifetime and it does have a significant effect however there are also some great ways to address these kids when they come and
52:30 - 53:00 they are so angry is usually the Ang the the emotion that comes out because they don't understand the aggression when you have a relationship with them you're actually teaching them what a relationship should look like um am I saying it saves everybody no of course it doesn't but it gives them an alternative to consider and as they get older they reflect on it and I can say as they get older because I did have this one young gentleman I taught him when he was it was in junior high way back when um and he was extremely
53:00 - 53:30 violent and he came up to me about 10 15 years later and he said Miss malanson I get what you were saying and as my mother God lover as my mother always used to say if you only reach one then that's one more than you haven't reached so I reached him in some way and it does help in the long run but it is a long process okay thank you um please continue to type in your questions if you may have some um I'm
53:30 - 54:00 really impressed with the ability to uh recognize the interconnection of all things from uh the child's perspective from your perspective as a behavioral interventionist um do you do you find uh that you have a lot of support in the context of your place of employment to uh reach out and effectively starting with the children helping them does it does does it actually spread out
54:00 - 54:30 and become something that you can do beyond the school classroom or beyond that individual person child um a lot of questions there the first I do have a lot of support and I find that we have a lot of support here um however the support can only go so far as the families are willing um and what we do find is a lot of the families of a lot of these Behavior kids have almost given up on them which is again why the relationship becomes so
54:30 - 55:00 important because if they've already written them off they need someone who believes in them regardless of what they do or how they do it um I've been in meetings when the child is there and the mother says things like yeah they're just a bad kid and hearing that from your mother at that young age is devastating so our what our efforts they are getting done in the school and the school wide is spreading and everyone's aware of that and I've actually seen kids progress from primary to seven to become extremely well adjusted youth but
55:00 - 55:30 the community and the families you have to convince them you really have to convince them that that's the way and sometimes you can and sometimes you can't and that's part of what you kind of have to agree with which leads me to something which I didn't have a chance to talk about is self-care really it's so very important for any caregiver a social worker a teacher uh an educator of any kind that self-care aspect is so important so I really encourage you to look after that yourself
55:30 - 56:00 too thank you in addition are you um able to rhyme off the top of your head some wonderful resources there were some sharing in the chat room of um actual links to different places but perhaps you have some favorites of your own that you could say speak to I I do um I have to say I do love zones I use it all the time zones of Regulation um I'm dealing with a couple different uh social emotional learning programs right now one is through the ssis and it has an assessment in it and I can get that link
56:00 - 56:30 that's not included because it was a fairly new one um I also for younger children I do use um social detective as one of them I use oh my gosh I forget the name of it it's it's in my slide really it is which is not up there and I can't see it but there are a bunch of them in there one really quick one is um called should I shouldn't I they're two games they're for elementary or for middle school and it gives situations that you actually are very conversational you turn out to have great conversations with them uh there's
56:30 - 57:00 another wonderful social program for younger kids called we thinkers and this one has four or five story books and you set up different resources for it and it leads your Elementary School you through appropriate social decision making and what other people might be thinking when they make different social differences does a lot of perspective taking um another one is UN stock and on target which is a great one a great resource for autistic students is peers I've taught that and I've trained teachers on that and oh my gosh following through
57:00 - 57:30 that is a dream it's so easy so those are just a few them great thank you you're welcome have you noticed a change in um in the school system that uh makes more room for more interventions from your from your in your role that you have more access um um to be honest no not really uh we have more Specialists we have more
57:30 - 58:00 people at higher levels that can give us guidance but what we need is as with anybody in this type of job you need more time you need more time to build the relationships and you need more time to access the students but with the increase of behaviors in students the time becomes less as opposed to more and it it does take a toll in it last year I had a case load of three kids 15 of them were considered high flyers and that would be about 10 of
58:00 - 58:30 those would be running on a daily basis or getting into a fight in a daily basis or need a direct intervention on a daily basis and that's not a good healthy way to go wow yeah so you you are you have become an expert in your own self-care I take it I have and that's why I'm preaching it now do not be afraid to take your own self-care it is imperative if you if if you fall they have nobody really yeah thank you so I appreciate
58:30 - 59:00 that your your perspective continues to be in support of the inter relationship of children in a context which is very key to the social work uh Viewpoint and perspective in addition it also sounds like you were uh you were giving uh great support to the idea of prevention that what we have in little children and their struggle becomes really significant as they mature and grow older to be young teens and also adults
59:00 - 59:30 which is a which is a constant struggle for those who care about the well-being of the community and Visa The Province the the country um that we put some energy into making sure people have um have what they need to evolve into being full well-rounded individuals who um M yep I I do maintain that no child acts out because they want
59:30 - 60:00 to there's always a reason for it um and punitive responses are great in the moment but we have to find out why they're doing it in order to teach them not to do it and I'm also restorative justice facilitator and I think that perspective comes from there because it is so very important to un for them to understand their effect of their uh behaviors on others as well which leads them understanding why shouldn't do it and it'll it it would all be
60:00 - 60:30 supported really well if all the social determinants of Health were looked after and services were expanded a little larger yeah and I'll be very honest and I please forgive me but I would love to see the um the branches of Justice uh social community services and education actually kind of get together and figure out where can we best put our resources because right now I do feel there is a lot of duplication of work which again goes directly to the time um that people
60:30 - 61:00 are spending on it and I think that there has to be a whole reconfiguration of it all to be quite honest to help every I guess promoting collaboration in terms of inter relationship is uh is is never um never a theme that social workers shy away from so we appreciate this in terms of um uh our time now and uh thank you so much for having been a part of this and sharing what your experiences have been
61:00 - 61:30 thank you so much okay well thank you very much thank you for add one more I'll add one more thing to the audience at large which is to remind you that you can access the slide deck which you can go through at your own Leisure um as well as your certificate of attendance uh through one of the widgets on the bottom of your screen and you will also be able to watch this webinar in 24 hours after it's placed in the on demand section of
61:30 - 62:00 the website for The CW so thanks very much it's been a pleasure and uh be well all of you goodbye