Young Families INSIGHTS
January 2001
Linda Swann, NAMI NC Young Families Program Coordinator, Editor
Linda Buzard, Layout Manager

Children’s Needs Do Not Change with Century

Families and schools have gone through many changes in the past century. Families have become less stable in the last 100 years as evidenced by increases in divorce and domestic violence. They also have become more diverse with the emergence of single-parent families, blended families, grandparents rearing grandchildren, and multi-ethnic families. Extended families are more often many miles apart.

Schools are also quite different today. They have become more high-tech, larger, and less personal. How will these trends continue to affect children?

What do children need most from their families and other influential adults in their lives? These six qualities represent some of the most important priorities of children.

1. Children need commitment. They need the security and stability of knowing someone cares about them and is committed to promoting their welfare and happiness.
2. Children need time. They need time with their families, friends, and teachers to talk, play, work, and dream. Quality and quantity time are equally important.
3. Children need communication, someone with whom they can talk and share feelings in a safe environment. Good communication reduces loneliness and isolation.
4. Children need to feel appreciated. Too much time is spent criticizing or complaining. The expression of appreciation builds self-esteem and makes them feel valued.
5. Children need to learn stress management skills. Make no mistake, they are as affected by the hectic pace of life as adults.
6. Children need spiritual well-being. Spiritual faith is a major strength, providing a positive outlook, no matter what faith or religion is involved.

Children will continue to need these things regardless of the diversity of families and communities or changes in our culture.

TIPS FOR THE HURRIED FAMILY

• Think of time as human inventions like clocks, sundials, hourglasses, rather than a cosmic reality.

• Try to be more relaxed about time.
• Ask your family, including children, what they most enjoy and focus on those things.
• Eliminate activities that don’t improve the quality of your life (like needless television).
• Pay attention to your body’s time. Notice how it responds to natural light, weather, and the aging process. Respect this in family members as well.
• Expect you and your family to undergo intense periods of activity followed by leisurely downtime. Historically, this is how humans have lived.
• Cut back on sleep only if you must.
• Modulate your time. When you’re hectic, schedule in a break. It can enhance your overall productivity.
• Go watchless on weekends.
• Develop an interest in activities that put your mind in flow – gardening, reading, fishing, checkers, etc.
• Put your family on your calendar!
• Examine your family values and live by them.

By Paula A. Wolf

Chief Lobbyist, Covenant with North Carolina’s Children

Senior Fellow, North Carolina Child Advocacy Institute

The Covenant with North Carolina’s Children was started in early 1995 out of a concern that children’s issues were not getting a thorough hearing by the state legislature. Since 1995, the Covenant has grown in membership to include more than 100 civic organizations, professional associations, advocacy groups and other NC nonprofits assisting children and youth. Covenant organizations represent a combined membership of approximately 500,000 North Carolinians statewide.

The Covenant’s stated purpose is to advance public policy to benefit North Carolina’s children. In 1996, the organization made a serious commitment to achieve this goal by hiring its own full-time lobbyist. In January of 1997, Paula A. Wolf was hired to represent the Covenant and its legislative agenda. From the beginning, the North Carolina Child Advocacy Institute has served as the primary financial sponsor of the Covenant.

The Covenant is divided into seven work groups (Child Welfare & Protection, Early Childhood, Economic Security & Welfare Reform, Education, Health, Juvenile Justice, and Safety) that analyze the issues in their field and make recommendations for action to the full Covenant. This format maximizes member participation and utilizes member expertise. In November, all these work groups will develop our agenda for the 2001 legislative session.

Covenant meetings are held on the second Monday of every month from 2-4 p.m. at the North Carolina Association of Educators Center, located at 700 South Salisbury Street in Raleigh. The combined resources of our membership make meetings an excellent opportunity for information sharing. In addition, all members receive a legislative update every week via fax or e-mail during the legislative session and are given the option of receiving e-mail information via a number of NCCAI InfoNet Listservs.

If you have additional questions about the Covenant or its membership requirements, please call Pam Seamans, Covenant Chairperson, at 919-403-9204 or Paula Wolf, Covenant Chief Lobbyist and Senior Fellow at the NC Child Advocacy Institute, at 919-834-6623, extension 227, or check out the Covenant website at www.ncchild.org

To date, the Covenant has clearly demonstrated that there is strength in numbers! We are very proud of what we have accomplished together as a group and would like to encourage you to join our advocacy efforts on behalf of North Carolina’s children and youth.

NAMI North Carolina is a member of the Covenant. Our own Beth Melcher chairs the Health Workgroup.

The Classroom Teacher: An Observation Specialist

A well-trained teacher, with keen observation skills and knowledge of neurodevelopmental functions and associated behaviors, has the best opportunity to search for and identify learning strengths and weaknesses. Teachers may find recurrent themes indicative of student performance patterns

• in the classroom environment
• in the context (content and format) of the curriculum materials
• in the work demands of the tasks the student is being asked to perform (volume, memory, organization, and rate)

Parents, too, have the opportunity to make such observations and provide additional important information.
The key to thorough knowledge of student learning abilities is not in the quantity of right and wrong answers. Instead, knowing a student's strengths and weaknesses and identifying breakdowns in the learning process come from direct, systematic, and sensitive observation of

• patterns of errors and successes from multiple sources and samples
• how the student performs tasks
• when and in what context successes and difficulties occur
• with what consistency the behaviors occur
• the ease, fluency, and capacity in assimilating and expressing new knowledge
• affective reactions and coping strategies

By observing and searching for recurrent themes, a management plan for every student can be achieved. These plans will enhance learning, reduce frustration, and provide success--necessities for the maintenance of self-esteem and learning motivation. Well designed plans

• help students understand themselves
• guarantee protection against public humiliation
• foster self-esteem and pride
• preserve a student's personal accountability
• facilitate the strengthening of strengths and affinities
• accommodate or bypass impeding dysfunctions and skill deficits
• include direct interventions at the breakdown points, so as to strive to improve weak functions and skills
• enlist collaboration between teachers, students, and parents

A teacher's observations are a powerful tool for turning student failure into success through well-designed interventions.
About the author: Ms. Reed is an Educational Diagnostic Specialist at the Clinical Center for the Study of Development and Learning at UNC-Chapel Hill and an Educational Consultant to All Kinds of Minds, a non-profit institute for research and the study of differences in learning. She has special interest in the assessment and management of learning differences in children and adults.

(Source: Parent Journal, a quarterly publication for parents of children with learning differences, published by the Parent Educational Resource Center, a program of the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation.)

Mark your calendars! Our Annual Spring Conference is scheduled for April 20-21, 2001 at the Sheraton Imperial in Research Triangle Park. This year’s theme is "Partnerships for Progress: Collaboration is the Key." We are devoting Saturday the 21^st to Young Family issues. Our plenary speaker that day is Dr. Jean Frazier, a child psychiatrist at Harvard University and McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. Her interest in neuropsychiatric illnesses began when she did a research project on the overlap between Tourette’s Syndrome and anxiety disorders. She has also worked on a multi-site autism project as a resident psychiatrist. She was on staff at the Child Psychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Health under Dr. Judith Rapoport, coordinating the Childhood-Onset Schizophrenia project.

We are also pleased to have the following workshops. Martha Kaufman, new Chief of the Child and Family Services Section of the Division of Mental Health, will speak on "Coordinating Services for School-aged Children." Martha has long been an advocate for the participation of families in the treatment of children with mental illness and for involving families in developing policies that affect them.

George Lynn leads a second workshop on "Survival Strategies for Parenting Children with Emotional Disorders." George, a resident of Washington state, is a pioneer in the development of counseling strategies for children diagnosed as ADD, Tourette’s Syndrome, and Bipolar Disorder. His new book, "Survival Strategies for Parenting Children with Bipolar Disorder" was released in the fall of 2000 and will be offered for sale at the conference. George has a similar book on ADHD which is also a wonderful, practical resource for parents and anyone working with these children. He is the parent of a teenager with Tourette’s and Aperger’s Syndrome.

We should have a conference brochure later this winter. Please call if you want more details. We hope to see you at the conference in April!

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