ParentLine

Dear ParentLine,

I’m concerned about my 4-year-old son’s social skills.  He is in a pre-school and the teacher reports that he is very impulsive and excitable and has problems listening and sharing.  I’ve been working with him at home and while things seem a bit better, I’m concerned that he is not where he should be with his social development.  Are there any therapeutic play groups or services that you can recommend?  Also, are there any people who visit preschools to evaluate kids for things like this?  Thank you for your help! 

Signed, Mommy V. in Grafton County.

 

Put on your Sherlock Holmes hat.  You’ll need good detective skills, some common sense and a lot of patience to ferret out what’s really going on with your son.  You may find the first set of clues in your own home.  Changes in family structure may contribute to his current behaviors.  Death, divorce, stress between parents, and/or inconsistencies about how you expect your son to behave could be underlying causes.   Structure, routine along with good parental role models and are important factors in a child’s development.

Check with the child’s pediatrician to rule out a physiological issue such as a dysfunction in sensory integration (DSI).  DSI is the inability of the brain to correctly process information brought by the senses. We usually think of the senses as separate conduits of information but in reality they work as a team to bring us a reliable picture of the world and how we fit into it.  However, in a child with DSI because there’s no guarantee that the information they receive through their senses is reliable, they may find their world both distressing and confusing and may act out in response to this. 

If you suspect developmental issues, Melissa Tarmey, OTR/L with Child and Family Services (CFS) Early Supports and Services program suggests that you contact your local school district special education pre-school program.  “Every school district in the state has a requirement to act on any referral.  Depending on the district, you can access the Child Find program which does screenings to find red flags in kids who may need further assessments.  Also, you may want to arrange to get an assessment with a private occupational therapist.” 

You and school administrators may be able to turn up more clues as to the reason Junior is behaving as he is if you both track some specific behaviors that may indicate some attention difficulties.  Meetings between home and school will prove useful to make some adjustments in the way your son is learning.

However, what’s going on here may be linked to a recent finding made by the American Academy of Pediatrics (APA) titled The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds.  The study supports the old adage, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”  This research points to the critical role that play has in order for a child to develop socially, emotionally, and cognitively.  Not only does free, unstructured play help a child develop language, small/large-muscle, creative and social skills, researchers identify play as the way in which a child learns how to regulate their behavior and emotions.

In an interview for NPR titled Creative Play Makes for Kids in Control (www.npr.org),author Alix Spiegel says that for most of human history play might have looked like time spent doing nothing much at all, it actually helped build a critical cognitive skill called executive function.  “Executive function has a number of elements, such as working memory and cognitive flexibility.  But perhaps the most important is self-regulation – the ability for kids to control their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline.  Executive function and its self-regulation element are important.  Poor executive function is associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime.  In fact good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child’s IQ,” Spiegel observes.

Spiegel goes on to report that play has changed dramatically over the last fifty years.  According to many psychological researchers, the play that kids engage in today does not help them build executive function skills.  Kids spend more time in front of TV and video games.  When they aren’t in front of a screen, they’re in leagues and lessons, which Spiegle says are activities their parents invest in because they believe these activities will help their child excel and achieve.  The problem here is that these activities are regulated by adults and that means the kids don’t learn to regulate themselves.

In yet another NPR interview titled Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills, Spiegel reports that psychologists believe that the changes in what children do has also changed kids’ cognitive and emotional development.  Without the opportunity to play at make believe which helps the executive function develop, kids don’t learn how to self-regulate, control their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline.

Spiegle points to a recent study of self-regulation in children in which researchers asked kids ages 3,5,and 7 to do a number of exercises.  Test results show that today’s 5-year-olds were acting at the level of 3-year-olds 60 years ago, and today’s 7-year-olds were barely approaching the level of a 5-year-old 60 years ago.  Spiegle adds that despite the evidence of the benefits of imaginative play, young children’s play is in decline.

In an article titled New Report Emphasizes the Importance Of Unstructured Play for Healthy Child Development, Brooke Lench (www.momsteam.com ) urges parents to trust your intuition and not to feel guilty if you don’t do everything possible that your kids will suffer, be deprived, be left behind their peers.  Lench suggests that sometimes the best thing a parent can do for a child is nothing.  “Children are not miniature adults – there will be plenty of time for them to be stressed and overworked when they actually become adults,” she observes. ParentLine agrees.  Encourage your kid to be a kid and play!

You may be able to easily locate playgroups in your area by checking in with any number of family service organizations and resource centers.  Periodically, Child and Family Services presents playgroups in different areas of the state.  Check www.cfsnh.org for listings of offerings near you.

PARENTLINE WELCOMES YOUR QUESTIONS! 

ParentLine is a free and confidential service of Child and Family Services, a statewide, independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the well-being of children and families.  Call ParentLine, 1-800-640-6486;  write ParentLine, c/o Child and Family Services, P.O. Box 448, Manchester, NH; email parentline@cfsnh.org or visit our website at www.cfsnh.org.