About the Conference
There is a vital need for more humane treatment and enlightened understanding of children with social, emotional, and behavioral challenges. The Collaborative Problems Solving (CPS) approach recognizes that explosive/noncompliant children and adolescents are frequently poorly understood; that standard approaches to treatment often do not satisfactorily address their needs (and can actually worsen their difficulties); and that, as a result, many such children have very adversarial interactions with parents, teachers, siblings, and peers, and are at risk for poor long-term outcomes.
The CPS model proposes that difficult children and adolescents lack important cognitive skills essential to handling frustration and mastering situations requiring flexibility and adaptability. This training will help adults teach these skills and allow caregivers and children to work toward mutually satisfactory solutions to the problems causing conflict, while reducing the frequency and intensity of the explosive episodes. J. Stuart Ablon, Ph.D., will present research documenting the effectiveness of the CPS model in children in outpatient, school, and inpatient settings.
Who should attend? School teachers, school counselors, school nurses, school administrators, and all mental health professionals including psychologists, social workers, psychiatric and community health nurses, marriage and family therapists, psychiatrists, alcohol and drug counselors, group home workers, social service coordinators, speech and language pathologists, and foster parents who work directly with children and youth and are seeking practical, proven methods to enhance their therapeutic skills and relationships with challenging children.
Learning Objectives
At the conclusion of the workshop, participants will be able to describe the following:
- How different explanations for and interpretations of explosive/non-compliant behavior can lead to dramatically different approaches to intervention
- The various cognitive skills that are central to complying and handling demands for flexibility and frustration tolerance
- Why conventional reward and punishment procedures may not be effective for many explosive/non-compliant children and adolescents
- The basic underpinnings of the Collaborative Problem Solving approach
- How to effectively implement “Plan B” to reduce the frequency and intensity of explosive outbursts and train lacking cognitive skills while maintaining adults as authority figures
Additionally, participants will learn:
- To assess and identify pathways and triggers to emotional explosions in children
- A step-by-step method for teaching parents and other adults to problem solve in a collaborative manner with explosive children
- How to teach social skills and improve a child’s executive functioning through collaborative problem solving
