Virtual Teacher

Like adults, children are not immune to the stressors of life. In managing personal and academic challenges, kids quite often experience frustration, expressing high concern and self-doubt with remarks such as: I can’t do anything right. I messed up again. I’m so stupid. I’m a failure if I can’t do this. Nothing works out for me. I’m going to do awful. I know I’m going to fail this test. The other kids think I’m weird. Everybody makes fun of me. I know something bad is going to happen. Most children seem unaware of this pattern of negative thinking, missing the important connection between repetitive and pessimistic self-talking (negative thoughts) and a low self-confidence with high anxiety. Like with the rest of us, these kinds of negative judgments or beliefs put us down; we criticize ourselves harshly for common errors and mistakes, doubt of our skills and abilities, and anticipate only the worst. With children specifically, negative and pessimistic thinking stron...

In the psycho-educational field we firmly believe that adult behavior strongly influences child behavior, often creating an emotional atmosphere that is more conducive to noncompliance than to compliance. More specifically, what we say to children and how we say it can either accentuate or de-escalate a behavior problem. Caregivers need to be vigilant of those communicative (i.e. messages) and interactional (e.g. strained adult-child interactions) factors that may inadvertently fuel inappropriate behaviors in children. Next, I share some insights of things we say to children that may be contributing to disruptive behavior at school and at home. Among them, we can find: ·         Creating on-the-spot penalties for misbehavior rather than developing and discussing consequences for negative behavior with children before problem behaviors happen. Children need to know the consequences for misbehavior in advance. ·      ...

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Forman (1993) defines coping skills, or coping efforts, as sets of information and learned behaviors that children can use purposely to bring about positive outcomes in potentially stressful situations. Coping techniques teach psychological, social, cognitive, affective, and behavioral skills that children and adolescents can use to deal with potential stressors. According to the author, knowing and using coping skills can prevent or reduce a variety of academic, emotional, behavioral, and health problems in children and adolescents. On the other hand, the inability to handle potentially stressful situations or stressors may result in emotional, behavioral, and/or physical health problems. Coping skills are a way of promoting general, emotional, and social competence in children, and we can divide them into two major categories: a)      Problem-Focused. Acting on the stressful stimuli to change or to solve the problem. Using problem-solving techniques, we focus th...

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To improve our ability in disciplining children, we do not need flamboyant techniques or procedures; we just need better communication and persuasion skills. Generally speaking, persuasion is the process of communicating with children using just the right words to get the positive outcome we want. Most specifically, in persuasive discipline, we use specific language patterns and ways of talking to shift the child’s attitude and mind-set from noncompliance to compliance. Here is a partial list of persuasion-based techniques that parents, teachers, and tutors can use to improve child compliance (for the complete list, see Reyes, 2013):  Persuasion Technique 1: Assume that What You Want is True If you talk and act as if what you want is true, your child will believe you. When we assume something, we are sending the message to the child that he or she already wants to do what we are requesting; for example, asking, “Do you want carrots or celery?” assumes that the child wants and...

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School staff and caregivers can help children understand how their internal self-talking or private speech influences the way they feel and behave. Knowing and reciting positive and optimistic self-statements help children feel happier and display improved self-control. Anger-prone, distraught, and/or impulsive children can be trained in monitoring their private speech and thoughts. Once the child recognizes the body (e.g. muscle tension and sweating) , thoughts (e.g. “I hate Mr. Evans!”) , and action (e.g. cursing and kicking) signals that cue an agitated state of mind, he can interrupt himself before acting aggressively and/or impulsively, and then the child self-corrects to calmer behavior and thoughts using his customized self-dialogue. Anger-prone and/or impulsive children can use specific self-statements or self-instructions to stop their habitual ways of thinking and to direct more positive responses. Self-coping statements to guide children in (a) handling anger triggers, ...