Week 2 Group Topics and Review

Week 2 of 5

Week two of the Collaborative Problem Solving Parent Group offers parents practice with the Empaty step of Plan B, a detailed description of the lagging thinking skills, and exploration of problems to be solved.

If you are reading this as a therapist, teacher, or other professional working with a child or family, background knowledge of the model is recommended.

Week 2 Practice:

The group practiced identifying the concerns of several vignettes, identifying lagging skills, and identifying unsolved problems.

Week 2 Information:

Thinking Skills:

Remember week 1? Your explanation guides your intervention: If you explain negative behaviors as resulting from thinking skill deficits, your job as a parent or professional is to find a way to nurture and develop these skills.

1. Executive Functioning Skills: Problems with organization and planning, shifting activities or thoughts, Anticipating problems
2. Language Processing Skills: Receptive or Expressive language difficulties cripple problem-solving because thinking and communicating both require language.
3. Emotional Regulation Skills: Chronic irritability or other negative feelings impair the ability to control and modulate emotions even before a child is frustrated.
4. Cognitive Flexibility Skills: Black and white, rigid, all-or-nothing, rule-bound, literal/concrete thinking gets in the way of seeing the gray in problem situations or social situations.
5. Social Skills:Cognitive distortions/thinking errors, or deficits in skills needed to perceive the social environment and engage with others make relationships and social situations difficult.

Unsolved Problems:

Again, remember week 1? We handed out the “MakingMeltdowns Predictable Trigger Worksheet” as a way of tracking problem situations throughout the week. A problem situation, meltdown, or blow up, occurs when the demands of the environment requires the child's lagging skills.

Typical Unsolved Problems at Home:

Waking up

Morning routine

Sensory Hypersensitivities

Homework

Screen Time (Computer, TV, etc.)

Bedtime

Sibling Interactions

Chores

Taking Medicine

Week 2 Homework:

Make a list of triggers and problems to be solved.

Note lagging skills observed

Use the ALSUP as a discussion guide...

Read chapters 5, 6, and 7

What the Kids Did This Week:

•  Kids in our childcare listened to a short story about a boy named Mike. Mike is really into sports and has no interest in taking a shower because he just does not have the time. His parents are having a hard time with the resulting odors. Small groups talked about the situation and each participant drew or wrote down ideas and solutions to the problem.

• The small groups also thought through 'turning off the TV.' Kids wrote or drew ideas about why it is important to the grownups to do it and, from their own perspective, what bugs them or is hard when the screen goes dark.

• The kids also had dinner with their parents!

Week 2 Handouts:

ALSUP (Assessment of Lagging Skills and Unsolved Problems, Ross Greene)

MakingMeltdowns Predictable

Learning Links:

ACES Study - Robyn Peters Bennett A 14 minute video about how Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) impact long-term health outcomes. Watch this!