Exposure Therapy for Kids
Exposure Therapy for Kids
Don't fear the unknown--make it known!
Don’t miss two pieces from me this week, both at The 74:
How team-based teaching models have the potential to address several of the challenges public schools have been facing lately, including labor shortages, low employee morale, and declining student performance. (And check out NCTQ’s recent report on how state policymakers can help facilitate more districts adopting team-based teacher staffing models.)
A look back at the federal ESSER funds and what the research says about how the money was spent and whether it “worked” or not. Spoiler alert: It’s complicated, and it depends on what you think the money was for. More problematic, the ESSER cliff will force a lot of districts to scale back at the same time that kids remain far below where they were pre-pandemic.
Two recent articles have made me think about how the tactics used in exposure therapy could be good for kids. Exposure therapy is the idea that people can confront their fears through gradual exposure to the things, situations, or activities that give them anxiety. In clinical settings, exposure therapy has been demonstrated to help people overcome phobias and other anxiety disorders.
Here’s the WSJ on “How Pediatricians Created the Peanut Allergy Epidemic:”
The peanut allergy panic began in the 1990s, when the media started to cover stories of children who died of a peanut allergy, and doctors began writing more about the issue. In fact, peanut allergies at the time were rare and mostly mild: In 1999, researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital estimated the incidence of peanut allergies in children to be 0.6%.
In 2000 the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued a recommendation for pregnant mothers and children up to 3 years old to avoid peanuts and any products containing peanuts. But the peanut problem didn’t get better; it got worse. Peanut allergies in the U.S. have skyrocketed over the last two decades.
And in the meantime, researchers discovered that early exposure to peanuts reduces peanut allergies. Here’s the WSJ again:
In a second clinical trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015, [Dr. Gideon Lack, a pediatric allergist and immunologist] compared one group of infants who were exposed to peanut butter at 4-11 months of age to another group that had no peanut exposure. He found that early exposure resulted in an 86% reduction in peanut allergies by the time the child reached age 5 compared with children who followed the AAP recommendation.
The Mayo Clinic now says that, “postponing the introduction of highly allergenic foods beyond 4 to 6 months of age hasn’t been shown to prevent eczema, asthma, allergic rhinitis or food allergy.”
In other words, the earlier advice to avoid potentially allergenic foods has created a double-edged sword. On one hand, a higher share of young Americans have peanut allergies than in the past. On the other hand, much of this increase may have been caused by avoiding peanuts in the first place. Solving this conundrum will be a tough nut to crack (pun intended).
Coincidentally, I also stumbled on a (new-to-me) blog from Paul A. Kirschner & Mirjam Neelen. They argue that one way to help students who have test anxiety is to have them take more tests. Not only is this a good learning strategy, it can also ease anxiety:
…it’s worth encouraging teachers to use retrieval practice in the form of no-stakes testing in their classrooms to decrease students’ feelings of terror when it comes to testing and to increase learning overall. In other words, when students are terrified of testing, tackle it through testing!
When I read this, I immediately thought of my daughter’s experience in math class last spring. She was preparing for a big test at the end of the year. For her, it was high stakes: It would determine whether she was eligible for early Algebra or if she’d have to wait another year.
Her teacher made sure all the students were well aware of the stakes of the test, and she made the kids complete practice lessons (with built-in quizzes!) in Khan Academy and ST Math. In the weeks leading up to the big test, the teacher made all of the students take practice tests and send the scores to their parents (which let me see my daughter’s progress).
I suppose this could have been a traumatic experience, but it worked for my daughter. Exposure through practice helped her perform when it mattered. She rose to the high expectations, did well on the test, and placed into early Algebra. She now says math is one of her favorite subjects.