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The Turned Off Child by Myrna Gordon

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Greetings to everyone this Fall season. The Oregon Chapter of the LDA wishes to welcome you to our Fall 2006 Newsletter. We hope you will find these articles informative and useful. Please feel free to contact us for further information and assistance. Remember to visit our website @ www.ldaor.org for links to other resources.

THE TURNED OFF CHILD By Myrna Gordon Why are so many of our children failing to work up to their abilities in school? What turns students off to learning at school and at home? What is the difference between a motivated learner and a turned-off child? Are you looking for answers as to why your child id depressed, has low self-esteem, and fights doing his work both at home and at school? Is your child afraid to try new things for fear of failing? Does he disappear into a world of video/computer games or other activities where there is success? Has your child developed self-defeating strategies and thinks he is too stupid to learn? After many years of working with these turned-off children, both as teachers and educational therapists, and after looking into thirty years of research on the subject, the consensus of opinion is that these children have what is called “learned helplessness”. Learned helplessness is a learned behavior – a conditioned response. It is not a conscious decision not to learn. These children have cognitive, motivational and emotional deficits because they have experienced so much failure, or what they think of as failure, in their young lives that they don’t try. It hurts too much to try. They have turned off because, in their minds, that is the safest way to avoid failing. Their explanation for failure is, “I’m dumb” or “I can’t do anything right”. They feel they have no control over the learning situation so they either run away from learning or they become rebellious and fight with everyone who tries to help them. What causes children to become learned-helpless and to develop this negative way of explaining failures and setbacks? Why do they become helpless, depressed, stressed and anxious? To find answers to these questions, we must understand how children view their successes and failures in life. It is not possible to cure learned helplessness by just saying positive thing to children. We need to get them to think about their thinking and to tell us what their negative thoughts are. Once we know that negative things children are saying to themselves, we can try to refute them and change their thinking, their self-talk. There are three probable ways children develop a positive or negative way of explaining life’s events. Home and school have the greatest influence on the child. All adults involved with children can either help or hurt their development, whether intended and desired or not. The primary source for a child’s explanatory style is the mother (or the significant other (in the child’s life. The child forms impressions form what she sees and hears that are the solid foundations for future pessimism and optimism. The secondary source is other adults, particularly those in school. When a child brings home reports and assessments of her schoolwork, she gets a combined reaction of both home and school: in other words, a double whammy. This applies both to positive and negative criticism. A child believes what he hears, and everything has either a positive or negative effect on them. This should make us realize how potent our explanatory comments are. There is not neutral reaction. The third influence on a child’s explanatory style is life crises. Some negative life events include moving, death, divorce and unresolved fighting. The time to look at a child’s explanatory style is in grade school and junior high, before lifelong habits and defenses become cast in cement. Remediation of learned helplessness is like a three-legged stool. The first leg id developing an adequate understanding of what learned helplessness is and what causes it. This cannot be stressed enough, for without a thorough understanding of the problem and its depth, not only can the problem not be remediated, but the child may be insulated against future help. The second leg is helping children discover the root beliefs that cause their self-defeating strategies and the distorted perceptions these beliefs create. If you don’t eliminate the negative thinking first, it will be like trying to put a Band-aid on the measles. To do this we teach children to be “thought detectives”, to think about their thinking. It has to be the child’s thoughts, not ours. We like to have the child tell us about an event, her beliefs about what occurred, and what resulted because of these beliefs. Sometimes we start with events in our own lives and model these for the child. It is also sometimes good to start with happy events before getting into negative events. We have children do this over and over again until they become very good “thought detectives”. The third leg of the stool is giving children the tools to change and refute the distorted beliefs and thereby reduce the emotional, motivational, and learning deficits they create. Once children have become good at looking at their thinking, they are ready to start disputing this thinking. We want them to argue with themselves like an attorney and to change the things they are saying from negative to positive. We model by doing this ourselves with negative things that happen in our own lives. We try to help the child by suggesting alternate ways of looking at a situation. However, in the end the child must internalize and believe that suggestions for them to become a part of his own self-talk and be effective. Throughout everything, we do with the learned-helpless child, we must establish and maintain a warm trusting relationship. If the child is feeling fear it is impossible for him to relate and think about his thinking. It is necessary that the adult working with the child have a positive attitude. There should be not emphasis on errors, only what is right about the work. Children need to know how to handle mistakes in a positive manner, and as adults we can model this behavior for them. The work need not be perfect by our standards, but it needs to be acceptable by theirs. Every child has something that he does well; use this as a means to work through. Have the child teach you how to do something, letting him role-play being the teacher. There should be no time pressures. We like to reward positive behaviors along the way. This is not a bribe but a way of conditioning their responses to something pleasurable rather than punishing. One method of remediation we have found to be very effective is giving children a different rationale for their failures. We relate their brain to a light switch. When the light switch is off we cannot see well. The same is true of our brain, for we cannot think well if it is turned off. To get light we must turn on the switch, and to start the child thinking we must turn on the switch in them. Sometimes we ask the child to put on our adult shoes and to try to run. When the child finds it difficult or impossible, we ask, “Does that mean you can never run again?” The child will answer, “If just means the shoes are too big.” Children sometimes have physical problems, such as visual or hearing, which make learning difficult. They learn that these are not excuses but differences and they learn to accept them and then to compensate for them. The same is true of emotional and family problems. Children need to understand and to get help in coping with these problems. We know we have just briefly touched on some of the aspects of remediating learned helplessness in children and eliminating school failure. We have written a book titled The Turned-Off Child: Learned Helplessness and School Failure, published by American Book Publishing. This is available through Publisher Direct Bookstore at www.pdbookstore.com. We can change the child’s whole life by turning the child on to learning. Myrna Gordon is from Beaumont CA and is a member ODA of California. If you would like to contact her, you can email her at gordonrm@adelphia.net, or go to the website: www.turned-offchild.com. Source: National PTA (www.pta.org)