Tagged: child development
What makes a child anti-social?
The media is full of the rise of anti-social behaviour (e.g. violence, aggression, bullying, fighting, lying, stealing, vandalism, fire-setting, drug and alcohol abuse, cruelty to animals) in children and youth offending, but what is the cause of childhood antisocial behaviour and are all anti-social children the same? What is the role of parenting?
Are all anti-social children the same?
There is evidence that not all children with anti-social behaviour are the same. Some children may show a phase of anti-social behaviour in adolescence but this passes and they settle down in adulthood. Far more concerning are children with a life-long tendency to anti-social behaviour. These children tend to be anti-social from a younger age and behaviour is more extreme (e.g. cruelty to animals at age 5 years), but even amongst these children there is evidence of different subgroups. Much research is focused on differentiating groups of anti-social children to see if we can better understand them.
One differentiating factor found is lack of empathy. Empathy is the ability to share someone else’s feelings and experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation. Psychologically speaking, this requires two different types of processes: a “thinking” part: the ability to see things from another person’s point of view; and secondly a “feeling” part: the ability to recognise emotion in others and to feel it in oneself. People without empathy are described as being callous and unemotional. To be anti-social, violent or aggressive is easy if you do not empathise with the victim, so it is no surprise that >90% of children with callous-unemotional traits are involved in some form of anti-social behaviour.
How does empathy affect anti-social behaviour?
Researchers have been interested in children that lack empathy for a while now because of its links to extreme anti-social behaviour, and the definition of “psychopathy/ sociopathy” (this is a criminal justice not mental health term) includes having this lack of empathy. The childhood precursor to this psychopathy label is “callous-unemotional traits” (as it is pretty harsh and pessimistic to label kids as psychopaths), and even this terminology has recently been rebranded as “limited prosocial intent” so that it sounds less pejorative; but this is just semantics, we are essentially talking about the same thing: people that have shallow feelings with lack of empathy and guilt.
My colleague, Essi Viding does research into these traits and wrote a great summary paper (2012), the findings of which I wanted to share as I thought it was fascinating. It turns out that if you study ASBO kids (kids with anti-social behaviour), you will find that 50% of them have these callous-unemotional traits. These children don’t really care about others’ feelings and tend to show no remorse for wrong-doing. It is this group of kids that have the most serious and long lasting problems.
What is the difference then psychologically and biologically between children that commit antisocial behaviour with and without empathy?
In experiments where anti-social kids are hooked up to show responses (for instance heart, skin and eye-tracking monitors or brain scans) to photos/ voice recordings of other people in pain or grief, the children with callous-unemotional traits showed no or reduced physical or brain response. Most people will wince in shared pain if shown pictures or exposed to sounds of others in pain, but these children don’t. When these children were asked to play a game where not following the rules led to punishment, they continued to flaunt the rules and did not seem to learn from punishment. There is biological support for these findings with differences in brain scans in areas of the brain linked to emotion processing and reinforcement learning pathways in callous anti-social children.
In contrast, the anti-social children with empathy showed the same aversive responses as children not involved in anti-social behaviour to pictures and sounds of pain and grief, and learnt quickly from punishment. However when they are shown threatening faces, they over-respond with emotion and when they are shown neutral and ambiguous facial expressions, they identified them as being threatening. Brain scans back up these differences. The anti-social children with empathy tended to have abnormal amygdala development. This is the area of the brain involved in fear and anxiety processing. These anti-social children have normal empathy but have a heightened awareness of threat, which explains why they perceive neutral faces as threatening. In a world where everyone is viewed as threatening, hostile or an enemy, it can make sense to be combative, aggressive and violent. This is that bully in the playground that says “Are you looking at me?” – when you weren’t even looking at them.
Genetic studies have also supported this divide, finding that there is strong inheritance of callous nature, whereas anti-social behaviour without callousness was not inherited but generated by environmental factors such as harsh or inadequate parenting, or an interplay between these environmental factors and genes associated with anxiety or heightened emotion.
Finally, it has also been found that the children in the different groups respond differently to parenting strategies. Punishment and traditional sanction-based strategies (time-out, withdrawal of privileges) works well for empathic anti-social children, but has no effect on callous children. Callous children only respond to positive reinforcement (praise) and rewards.
What causes anti-social behaviour?
This type of evidence has led to different theoretical models for two groups of children involved in anti-social behaviour.
Group 1: Genetic predisposition. Antisocial and callous kids: these children are thought to lack empathy as they do not find other people’s distress aversive and because they fail to be able to learn from punishment. It is easy to be aggressive and cruel if you are unable to feel guilt and if the suffering of others doesn’t bother you. It is easy to continue to behave in this way life-long if you are unable to learn from punishment. These difficulties are often inherited in brain structure.
Group 2: Environmental Causation: Anti-social but not callous kids: these children have abnormal socialisation because they have a heightened sense of threat, and view the world as hostile towards them. They exhibit aggression and cruelty as a result of living in unstable and threatening environments which has shaped their brains and psychology to respond in this way as a means of coping and survival. Their anti-social behaviour is often in the context of a peer group within which there is support and empathy.
What has this got to do with parenting?
Whether we like it or not, parents are the first line defence against anti-social behaviour in society. By better understanding the causes of anti-social behaviour and by understanding our children, we can best adapt our parenting to prevent our children becoming anti-social. Although children in group 1 with genetic predisposition are the more difficult to help, they can be supported by fostering self-esteem. They will respond better to motivation to act in a pro-social way, rather than harsh punishment which will not deter them. Anti-social behaviour in children with empathy can be prevented by strong loving families that place appropriate boundaries and sanctions. For these children, wider society has a great role to play in generating or preventing anti-social behaviour, as tolerant, peaceful and accepting societies can offer protection whilst violent, unstable and alienating societies can fuel them.
Reference:
Anti-social behaviour in children with and without callous-unemotional traits. Viding et al. (2012) Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 195-200.
Autism and Empathy
What is autism?
When I give people the formal definition of autism, I see their eyes glaze over as it is rather long winded and meaningless to those who know little about autism. So I’m not going to talk about autism diagnosis, which is somewhat complex, but one aspect of autism: empathy.
Many people equate “lack of empathy” with autism, so much so that whenever someone has been inconsiderate, others may joke that they were “being a bit autistic”. Say this around me and I get really annoyed as autism is more than lack of empathy and most inconsiderate people are not autistic. Autistic empathy problems are fairly specific. Hurting other people without remorse is generally considered as “lacking empathy”, although shrinks prefer to use the term “callous and unemotional” as it does not ascribe a cause to the behaviour. This is important as there can be many different causes to this type of behaviour. I will give you 3 adapted real life examples of callous behaviour involving the death of an animal to see whether you can identify the one most likely to be a case of autism.
(a) A 5 year old boy was playing with his pet hamster. The hamster bit him as he was a bit rough. The boy got his baseball bat out and bludgeoned the hamster to death. In explanation of what had happened, he showed no remorse and said “It bit me on purpose, so it deserved to die”.
(b) A 10 year old boy was playing golf. He was very good at golf. A squirrel appeared in his line of sight, and he had the question as to whether his driving accuracy was good enough to hit the squirrel. He hit the squirrel with the golf ball striking the squirrel hard and killing it. In explanation of what happened, he showed no remorse saying “My aim is very good”.
(c) Two 8 year old boys were pulling at a cat’s tail to hear it hiss which they found funny. They tied string to its tail and used that to pull it around. Then they thought it would be funny to set the string alight, which then set the cat alight. In explanation of what happened, they showed no remorse saying “We don’t know what happened to the cat; it had nothing to do with us”.
In Big Sis’s Oxford School Dictionary (apologies, this is sadly the only dictionary our household possesses), empathy is described as “Noun. The ability to understand and share in someone else’s feelings”. In order to empathise, you require the ability to do the following:
1) Be aware that other beings (animals or humans) have independent thought, action and feeling; this is sometimes called having a ‘theory of mind’.
2) Be able to experience and recognize your own emotions and feelings and the situations in which different emotions arise.
3) Be able to imagine that others may have the same feelings, emotions and thoughts that you experience if they were in similar situations.
Autistic “lack of empathy” relates to inability or difficulty with the fundamental step, step 1, which impacts ability to completely master steps 2 and 3. This “step 1” ability is something that you either have, or don’t have. It relates to abnormal brain wiring which goes awry in pregnancy and early infancy. None of us were ever sat down and taught “this is a table: it does not think, act or feel; this is a human, it is able to think, act and feel”, we just realise it ourselves one day, usually in infancy. To an autistic child, something this fundamental is not obvious. A typical complaint from parents of autistic children, and what I imagine would be the most painful as a parent; is that an autistic child may see parents as no different from anyone else, or indeed, any other object. An autistic child may show interest in a parent as a “biscuit dispenser” or “toy-buyer”, but are unlikely ever to have an intimate and confiding relationship with anyone including their parent, due to their inability to recognise other people as thinking, sentient beings. It is hard to comprehend or to believe, but if you are not naturally aware that other people have independent thought or feeling, then the death of a parent would affect you as much as the loss of a toy (provided someone else stepped in to dispense biscuits and buy toys). Classically, without step 1, steps 2 and 3 are impaired. Autistic children find difficulty in describing emotion in themselves as well as others. Some autistic children with good intellect are able to behave empathically. They are able to actively learn that others are thinking sentient beings, and are able to learn what someone would feel and think in a given situation. They learn it in much the same way that we might learn the highway code. It does not come naturally, but we can learn to behave in the way that is required of us. Just as with the highway code learning, actively learnt behaviour can slip in times of tiredness or stress, and is useless in new situations where the rules are unknown.
“Lack of empathy” frequently occurs in children without autism. The work of the clinicians in an autism assessment is to differentiate these children from autistic children.
Children with ADHD, who have a different brain wiring problem have a tendency to impulsivity. They can behave as if they lack empathy as they typically do things without thinking. If someone falls over, it can look very funny. All of us like to laugh when we see people falling over, which is why slapstick comedy is so successful. In real life, most of us would be able to inhibit our impulse to laugh if the person was actually hurt and crying in pain. The ADHD child, cannot inhibit impulses, and therefore will laugh, appearing to “lack empathy”. However, if you question the child afterwards they are able to interpret the situation empathically and realise that they should not have laughed, although they might say “but I couldn’t help it.” Of course some children with ADHD will also have autism spectrum disorder, as one brain wiring problem increases the risk of another.
Other children without brain wiring (neurodevelopmental) problems can develop difficulties with steps 2 and 3. For step 2, I will give two simple examples, but there are likely many permutations for the development of what shrinks call “callous and unemotional” symptoms in the absence of autism. Firstly, Children who are emotionally neglected and not stimulated to interact with others and experience emotion can have difficulty in experiencing and recognising emotions in themselves and others. The classic example of this is from Romanian orphanages. After the fall of the Communist government in Romania in 1989, aid workers found thousands of abandoned children being housed in orphanages in terrible conditions where abuse and neglect were rife. Babies were literally left alone in cots day in and day out with minimal human contact. When discovered, many of these children appeared to be autistic, as they had difficulties with social interaction, communication and empathy. However, the majority of these children, when adopted out to loving families, gradually acquired the ability to empathise and socially interact normally. Their early childhood experiences of neglect had impaired their ability to experience emotion amongst other things, and therefore they had difficulty in understanding emotion in themselves and others. Love, not rote learning of rules was able to restore their empathy as the majority did not have brain wiring problems.
Secondly, young children who suffer emotional abuse (which can occur alone or with physical and sexual abuse) or are constantly witness to violence and trauma, may have had no biological difficulty in experiencing emotions, but as their emotions are too hurtful due to the extremely stressful environment, they may employ a defence mechanism of “blocking out” or “numbing”/ “desensitisation” of emotions in order to survive. Channelling “I am a block of wood” is sometimes your only defence in a situation where you are entirely powerless. These children find allowing themselves to experience emotion difficult or impossible, which limits their ability to understand emotion in others, even long after the abuse/ trauma has ended.
These two groups of children may have “attachment disorders”; some may grow up to develop “personality disorders”. Emotional availability of parents and care givers and exposure to violence lie on a continuum, and it is likely that even within the general population, there is variation in how in tune people are with their own emotions and the emotions of others even if they have not been through abuse and trauma.
There are children who have no difficulty with step 1 and 2, but have problems with step 3. They understand that people have emotions and they experience their own emotions. However, their own emotions are so over-encompassing, often due to insecurity; that they are unable to think about or care about the emotions and feelings of others. These children may have suffered abuse or neglect as children and pushing heavily for their own needs and wants has been the only way they have been able to survive. If these children are asked about emotions, they are able to describe them well. They are able to demonstrate theory of mind in non-emotive tasks and may even, in a hypothetical scenario that does not involve them, have no difficulty in seeing both points of view. However, when the scenario is switched to involve them, their thinking becomes self-focused and there is no room to think about other people’s feelings. Their own feelings are always prioritised over that of others. These children may be thought of as “narcissistic” and may grow up to have personality difficulties.
Finally, there are children who have no problem with empathy but choose to behave in a hurtful way to other people for their own reasons; they gain pleasure from being in power and deliberately causing pain, to gain membership to a culture or subculture, to extort money, to gain respect or retribution to name a few.
Hopefully, by now, you may have a better chance of determining which of our “animal killers” is the most likely to have an autistic spectrum disorder. Scroll down, to see if you are right.
Case (a) by ascribing intent to the hamster is in possession of basic theory of mind (a more clearly autistic response in this situation would have been to say “The hamster was hurting me so I stopped it from hurting me”); in this case additional examples of behaviour would need to be examined to argue a case one way or another. Case (b) has autism. There is clearly no theory of mind going on here, the squirrel was a mere target for target practice and may as well have been an inanimate object. Case (c) is definitely not autism as cooperating to torture a cat requires social skill between the two boys, unless there is a clear “leader” and “follower”. By attempting to deceive people by denying knowledge of what happened implies quite a sophisticated theory of mind. They would need to realise that you did not know what really happened, and that if they denied knowledge, they may be able to convince you that they were not involved.
Autism has several other criteria (the formal definition of autism being of “a triad of difficulties in social interaction, communication and restricted and repetitive interests”), so you would never make a diagnosis based on something as simplistic as the above. It is however useful to illustrate the importance of detailed information in assessment of every single feature of autism as scenarios which present behaviourally in a very similar way (e.g. killing of an animal) may have very different causes. A typical autism assessment involves information gathered from multiple sources and in depth interview and observation by a multi-disciplinary team.
How fast is your child’s thinking?
I am posting again on my infant 360 degree appraisal series. Core abilities include memory, attention span, processing speed and impulse control. These are factors that affect ability in all other areas. Deficits in core ability will detrimentally affect ability on the other aspects of function. In this post I will cover processing speed and impulsivity.
Processing speed
Processing speed in the brain is exactly the same as the processing speed of your computer. Some computers are just faster than others. If your computer downloads a movie instantly, while others are still buffering, you can imagine who has the advantage. I remember as a child marveling at my older sister’s ability to do sums in her head while I was still scrambling around for fingers and toes to count. That’s the advantage of processing speed; she was doing the same thing that I was, but just faster and more efficiently and keeping her socks on. Processing speed improves with age in an individual, but there is clearly variation in processing speed between individuals.
Processing speed is all about “how fast” someone can do things. Therefore, in order to test it, you need to know that the child is able to do what you are asking them to do. Tasks chosen should therefore generally be easy. Clinically one measure of processing speed used is a sheet of paper with different symbols on. The child is timed to cross out all the symbols of a particular shape. The score is then based on time taken with a penalty for any false positives (crossed out shapes that were not the specified shape) and false negatives (the correct shape was not crossed out). The task can be varied in difficulty by having all the symbols look very different or very similar. If you are experimentally minded and have an older infant (3 years upwards), you can easily replicate that test at home to gain an idea of processing speed. Here are handy sheets that you can print and use if you are so inclined: Processing Speed Test. Go on, you know you want to, and share with your friends (to find out what their kids score – whilst feigning disinterest of course).
Other simple ways to test processing speed, particularly of younger children include sorting. Sorting items by colour can be mastered easily by an infant and if you time this you can get an idea of the processing speed (again factoring in accuracy). Equally, the time it takes to push shapes through a shape sorter can be used, although this is more of a test for visio-spatial skills, motor skills and processing speed; rather than processing speed alone. Children with good visio-spatial skills and processing speed will be able to do this task quicker. Children that adopt a trial and error approach to the shape-sorter, will get there eventually, but they will be outclassed time wise by someone who is able to process in their head which shape is likely to fit through which hole. Spatial ability is known to predict performance in mathematics and eventual expertise in science, technology and engineering (Tosto, 2014). By the time Lil Bro was one year old, we had acquired so many hand me down toys that we had several shape sorters. The first had only 3 shapes (square, circle and triangle), the second had 10 shapes and the third had about 24 shapes including complex trapeziums and parallelograms. If you are sad like me, you can monitor development through progression of progressively harder shape sorters.
Impulse control/ response inhibition
It is very easy to observe a child’s impulse control, or largely, lack of it! Most adults are able to control their immediate urge to do something to hold out for a greater reward or avoid punishment. For instance, most of us are able to save money in order to buy something big and we are able to wait our turn rather than push into a queue to avoid being told off. Most toddlers are not able to do this, so if you put a new “toy” in front of them, they will try and grab it even if you tell them not to. Try drinking a glass of wine while holding an alert one to two year old in your lap. Good luck.
Sometime between toddler-dom and adulthood, the ability to control impulses develops and strengthens. The earlier that a child develops impulse control, the better they will be perceived, as this will mean that they will be less likely to do things like touch things that they shouldn’t, shout out in class, push in to queues, interrupt other people talking and running across the road without looking. People tend to like children better if they don’t do these things.
You can easily observe your child’s ability to control impulses by taking them into a fancy department store or if you are more daring a china shop. Immediately, you will be telling your child not to touch anything then you can see how long they last. If you really want to test them, you can mix it up a bit. Say “If you don’t touch anything, I’ll buy you some chocolate on the way out” and see if they fare better, or you can up the ante on the temptation and take them to a sweet shop and expect them not to touch! That would be very cruel indeed.
Cruel though is what child psychologists and psychiatrists are in the pursuit of answers, and they actually do this test in the research labs with a cupcake which cannot be eaten despite being left directly in front of the child, on the promise that they will get two cupcakes for leaving it alone. As expected, older children find this easier. This test is very easily replicable at home for anyone who wishes to be so mean (or who has plenty of cupcakes to be eaten)!
Core-ability training
Like for attention, where repeated episodes of bringing back to task and encouraging goal-oriented attention can increase attention span, so too can processing speed, memory and impulse control be improved. The suggested activities for assessing processing speed, memory, impulse control and attention can also be played in order to train infants on these core abilities.
This back of an envelope sketch shows a graph of human brain growth and decline. During infancy the brain is going through massive growth with the child building circuits and connections in the brain in response to its environment at a rapid rate. It is thought that training at this stage in development is likely to physically affect brain development (the interconnections between different parts of the brain) and have larger impact than training at any other time in life. Similarly, continued mental activity (such as playing chess) at the other end of the lifespan can slow the inevitable brain decline in old age by strengthening connections so they are not lost.
There is growing scientific interest in obtaining evidence that attention span and impulse control can be trained. Research into ADHD treatment and prevention are moving towards computer games, aimed at toddlers that will train attention to goal oriented activity (Wass, 2011). Potentially, future ADHD prevention will involve computer-based intervention at infancy rather than medication in childhood. Why wait for a computer game to be developed to do this when parental interaction is much more fun and rewarding. In actuality, many parents are doing this already, only they are doing it instinctively when trying to interact with their child on an activity – encouraging, supporting and helping a child stay focused to complete something fun. Now you can carry on doing these things with the smug knowledge that you are not just passing the time, or playing a game, but also potentially physically improving your child’s brain.
References:
Tosto et al.(2014) Why do spatial abilities predict mathematical performance? Developmental Science (Dev Sci), On-line ahead of print.
Wass et al., Training Attentional Control in Infancy, Current Biology (2011), 21, 1-5.
How good is your child’s attention and memory?
Core abilities include memory, attention span, processing speed and impulse control. These are factors that affect ability in all other areas; deficits in core ability will detrimentally affect ability on the other aspects of function.
Memory
Memory is very easy to assess as it is required in day to day life. I used to have a very good memory. My mother has a story about me when I was three years old. She met up with her brother with me in tow. As he left, he told my mother his new phone number and she wrote it down on a piece of paper. That night, when she wanted to ring him, she could not find the paper. However, I recited back to her the number that I had heard him say. It was correct. Sadly, following the birth of my children, I can no longer remember anything, which is highly frustrating.
Thankfully, my children have inherited my memory, and I often joke with them that they “stole” my memory. I first realised that my daughter had a very good memory when she was about 18 months old. I mislaid my keys. She watched confused at what I was doing as I upturned the flat, until eventually I said out loud “Where have I put my keys?” This was a rhetorical question as I did not really think that anyone would be able to tell me. However, Big Sis got up, walked to another room and showed me exactly where I had left my keys. It was not as if she was playing with them or she had seen them recently as we had been together the whole time. She had seen me put them down some hours earlier, and was able to recall exactly where she had seen me put them down, even though I could not. These days whenever I need to remember something, I just tell Big Sis to remember it and I know that I need never forget again (probably until she has children of her own that “steal her memory”).
Following this incident, it is a given that any CP worth their salt would play memory games with their children. Matching pairs is a good memory game that is easy to play with children (select 10 or 20 pairs of cards and place them face down in random order, each player upturns 2 cards at a time and if they are a pair, they get to keep them, the winner has the most pairs at the end of the game). Other games that I played were putting random objects on a tray and then taking one away and seeing if they could deduce the missing object, or the game “I went on holiday and I packed in my suitcase…” which then involves each person adding to an incremental list of random objects to remember. From games such as this, it is possible to get a good idea of a child’s memory. You can of course also do the more formal testing “digit recall” as in an IQ test, where you recite a random string of numbers and ask the child to repeat them back in order, in reverse order or after a time delay. My telephone number trick as a 3 year old would have been an example of a time-delayed digit recall. A time-delayed 11 digit recall is pretty good for a 3 year old, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t do it now.
Attention Span
Children’s attention span increases with age. An easy way to think about what the average attention span of a child at a particular age is; is to think about school lesson lengths. Educationalists through the years have structured lesson times to roughly match the attention span of the children in their class. Thus, at reception (age 4-5 years), activities are likely to change every 10-20 minutes. By Year 3 (age 7-8), lessons will be between 20-30 minutes, by year 6, 30-40 minutes. At Year 6 (age 10-11), the brighter pupils will be sitting 11+ exams which require attention and concentration for up to 75 minutes in an exam setting. By eighteen, A-level students are treated to the joys of triple maths or triple French; that is a whopping 120 minutes.
You can easily observe your child’s attention span by trying to engage them in a task they should enjoy and seeing how long they last. Which of us parents have not spent ages getting out painting equipment only to find that the child has wandered off after 5 minutes and we are left painting by ourselves. Whenever you do this, you can time how long it actually was that they were engaged in the task and at least you will be able to console yourself on the increasing attention span at each iteration while you tidy up the painting paraphernalia.
Attention span should be tested over a variety of activities, for instance drawing/ painting, puzzles, board games, craft activity, as well as on more academic tasks. Most children with even very poor attention span are able to watch TV and play computer games, so psychiatrists generally do not include ability to watch TV for hours as an indicator of good attention span.
Attention span can be trained. I remember that around the time that Lil Bro turned 1 year, I read somewhere that: children who were regularly read stories from an early age started school ahead of the class. I was already regularly reading to Big Sis but had not started as early as 1 year. Since no one ever tells you when the right time to start reading to a child is, I decided to try it with Lil Bro. On the first day, it was a disaster. Practically after 1 page of “Dear Zoo” he was off, despite my attempts to cajole and encourage him to sit for longer. I could have just given up and thought “Heck, he’s too young – it’s a waste of time at this age”, but for some reason (probably the article that had extolled the benefits of regular reading) I tried again the next day. To my surprise, he lasted 2 pages! This intrigued me enough to continue and I found that by the end of a week or so, he lasted for the whole book.
Pop quiz: Can you deduce from memory the item that has been removed since the last picture of this tray…?
Infant 360 Degree Appraisal
No, I’m not suggesting that we all get our clipboards out and formally appraise our children’s performance. However, just as Jancis Robinson is unlikely to “just enjoy” a glass of wine and David Beckham is unlikely to have a “casual kick about” in the back yard, as a child psychiatrist, it was not possible for me to witness my children’s development without assessment, consciously sometimes, but largely unconsciously.
It became apparent to me that I had done this as I attended Big Sis’s parent’s evening at her nursery (this is the expensive Ofsted Outstanding one). They reported to me their detailed assessments of Big Sis (which did involve a clipboard). “She can jump with two feet together, she can cut along a straight line, she can recite all her numbers to 20, but sometimes misses out 15”. I realised that I knew all this already – down to the number 15 which always went missing. How? Because I had unwittingly been doing 360 degree appraisals on my kids since they were born.
The famous Swiss Psychologist Jean Piaget did experiments into children’s cognition largely using his own children as subjects. Whilst I wouldn’t say I went that far, there are times when I have put forward specific problems to my children to see how they would respond. The majority of the time though, I observed their reactions to problems that happen in day to day life.
Some people that I have spoken to about this have asked me what I look for, and whilst I am not recommending that people go out and do this (it is not validated, comprehensive or scientifically proven and is completely something that I have hodge-podged together when thinking about my own children), if you did want to know, I will tell you what a child psychiatrist observes and thinks about.
For me, there are 6 axes which are important to think about:
1) Core ability – here, I put processing speed, memory, impulse control and attention span. These are factors that affect ability in all other areas; deficits in the core factors will detrimentally affect ability on the other aspects of function.
2) Intelligence – verbal and nonverbal as per the standard IQ test
3) Social ability – ability to read social situations and to adapt in different social situations
4) Emotional regulation- ability to understand one’s own emotions and to control them
5) Motor ability – gross motor (running, kicking, catching a ball) and fine motor (writing, sewing, untying knots)
6) Creativity – ability to problem solve, improvise and generate something new
This information is not just for “tiger mothers” (on which I will blog another time), but my view is that having an accurate view of your child’s ability allows you to push forward or reign in on expectations. An individual’s development waxes and wanes, so continuous assessment is required. Most employees will be expected to do a 360 degree assessment every few years as a minimum and I would suggest that children are no different. Some children will develop quickly then may slow down, others may start slow but catch-up quickly so no one off-assessment, particularly in the early years is going to capture a child’s ability. Saying that, if continuous assessment over childhood into adolescence continues to follow a trajectory then natural outcome may be more predictable.
Bespoke continuous assessment of your own child can also allow you to add or seek help to support areas of weakness although I would always strongly advocate “acceptance” of “ball park ability”. None of us as adult employees would be impressed with our supervisors if following a 360 degree appraisal they sent us on training and then expected a 100% improvement in performance. We should neither expect that from our children and expectations of our children must be bound in reality.
Most schools will be doing this type of assessment as standard on children, but in my mind, its always good to double check external assessments, and also to see that there is consistency of ability in the less structured out-of-school environment, on which teachers will not have access to information. The more you know and understand your child, the more you are able to guide them.
Over the course of the next few months, I hope to blog on each area in more detail.
shrink GROWS kids 