Secrets of a child psychologist: “Many schools now can actively harm our children”

Professor Sam Wass holds a first bachelor’s degree in experimental psychology from the University of Oxford and is currently Head of the BabyDevLab at the University of East London. His research focuses on stress, concentration and learning in infancy and early childhood. He tells Nick Durden why there is so much more to learn about treating childhood mental disorders.

“I have always been interested in understanding the world from a child’s point of view, so my interest is in the development of babies and children, helping them manage their emotions at home and at school, as well as in life in general. There is still so much we don’t understand about young children – we’re still in the stone age when it comes to treating childhood mental illness – but we do understand. Are Study.

I will give you an example. Children can process many things very quickly, but there is evidence that this is not the case in certain situations. Take a class. Children spend a lot of time in busy urban environments, which by their very nature are very challenging environments. Here they can fight.

As adults, we learn to process all the different information that comes to us. Our brain does this incredible job of separating different speech signals and allowing us to amplify the ones we want to pay the most attention to. But it’s much more difficult for a child’s brain. Thus, through research like this, we are trying to help redesign children’s learning environments—in other words, the classroom—in the hope of simplifying and improving their learning environment for them.

Many of today’s educational environments can harm children in ways we don’t even know, so the way we raise children in 30 years will be very different.

There is also growing attention to disorders such as autism. Children at high risk of atypical development are more likely to develop autism if they have an older sibling with autism or ADHD. Yes, autism is something you’re born with – genetic evidence suggests it’s inherited – but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do to lessen its severity if it does happen.

The brain is plastic, so the sooner we work with it, the more theoretically we can help solve the problem or prevent it from getting worse. Currently, the median age for a diagnosis of autism is four years and for ADHD is six years. The sooner we make a diagnosis, the better we can help.

There used to be this terrifying notion of so-called “refrigerator moms” in cases of autism, suggesting that the reason a child develops autism is because they have a parent who is very cold and emotionally unresponsive, and therefore they themselves are close. This has now been largely debunked, but the idea remains. If something is wrong with my child, it must be my fault as a parent..

It’s not the parents’ fault, but we can work with the parents to help the child. We are currently exploring the idea of ​​stress contagion, how emotional states are distributed between people, and the transmission of this fear to children from generation to generation. When young children have anxious parents, they are likely to become anxious too. Of course, this must be properly communicated and prepared for the respective health care provider. Our goal in this area is to identify aspects of parenting that may be atypical and then take appropriate action.

Elsewhere, as we know, children are spending more and more time in front of their screens. Too much can be bad, yes, but technology isn’t that bad. When I was a kid, the teacher just wrote something on the blackboard and I had to copy. It’s not very effective training. Technology-assisted learning is much more interactive, and there is evidence that learning in this way has benefits.

Thanks to all these studies, we have received much more information about the development of the child. When it comes to emotion regulation, the more we learn about how we manage our emotions, the better we can manage them. Of course, we cannot suppress emotions. You can’t tell it to a child No feel the emotions they are experiencing, but metacognitive awareness of them can help dissipate this useless state more quickly. Awareness is the key.

Kierkegaard said that fear is the dizziness of freedom. Thus, the more you expand your awareness, the more you will find something to worry about. No, this does not mean that ignorance is bliss, it just means that we should be more aware of our actions and be aware of the consequences of those actions.”