Alex
So your other book, Straight Talk About Psychological Testing for Kids, does a deep dive on how psychological testing works and how parents can use it to help their kids. Could you talk about this a little bit? Specifically, are there different kinds of psychological testing? And how can a parent or caregiver know when their child needs psychological testing?
Ellen
So let me start with the first one, which is the book is about how to go about getting an evaluation for your child, how to be able to tell if the evaluation is a good one, and also explains in detail, different chapters explain, like, what’s a good evaluation for a child with anxiety disorders or a child with Dyslexia or ADHD? What are we looking for? It also explains the tests themselves. What is an IQ test? What are the sorts of tests we use to measure reading and math and those sorts of things? I think the tipping point is how much is your child struggling? So are they meeting expectations in school? Do you feel like their reading is in line with other kids in the classroom? You sort of have a sense and your child will give you information about that too, if they’re frustrated, if they seem to be complaining they don’t like school. Also, if we’re talking about a psychological issue, what you really want to be looking for is how much is that psychological issue interfering with their day-to-day functioning? How upset are they? Are they able to eat and sleep and have social relationships? Or are there big changes that you’ve seen in your child that make you think, like, we need more information about this? And there are a lot of different sorts of evaluations.
The sort of like Cadillac version of evaluations is the neuropsychological evaluation, which looks at all different aspects of functioning memory, attention, intelligence. But there are also other sorts of smaller pieces of that evaluation. Sometimes we’ll refer to it as a psychological evaluation, which is really just focused on psychological functioning, or an academic or psycho-educational evaluation, which will focus just on academics and learning.
Alex
You sort of alluded to this a little bit, but what are the differences in seeing this in younger kids and in sort of teenagers?
Ellen
Young kids rarely are able to articulate that they’re feeling nervous about something. So they show us they’re nervous or anxious by their behaviors. So oftentimes they don’t want what we call shift set. They don’t want to go from home into school because that’s making them anxious. But they can’t say, I’m nervous about school. Today we’re going to do such and such. And so I don’t know what to do because they are not thinking that. That’s way too complex of a thought process for a four-year-old. Now, older kids are oftentimes better at saying that, but even so, I think that irritability is something that’s oftentimes part of even young school-aged kids into adolescence. But they’ll oftentimes talk about anxiety as I’m stressed. I’m so stressed I don’t know what to do. They might just give up, or they might become more perfectionistic.
Alex
Helen’s point about how there’s a sweet spot between kids that have lower processing speed and a resulting anxiety from that, versus kids with a whole lot of anxiety, sort of perfectionism with a sort of higher processing speed, one that almost exceeds what they should be capable of. I think that’s a really good point. I think those two profiles of kids are far different and require a whole different sort of set of tools to deal with to address their problems. Getting them to that sort of sweet spot in the middle I think should be the goal for all educators. She also brought up a really interesting point about being able to diagnose sort of younger kids’ processing speeds, I think, is basically impossible because of the sort of nature of tasks that are associated with the testing and also the inability to sort of test their executive functioning. That seven-year-old isn’t going to be expected to write down their assignments in a notebook. So I think diagnosing those issues becomes all the more important. Next, I’d really like to ask Ellen about some of the issues that are facing kids with processing disorder and anxiety today.
Ellen
Kids today in general have much, much more to deal with, and the curriculum has changed dramatically from one in which they’re able to sort of ease themselves into the learning process. And kindergartens used to be very much play-based, just a time to learn about letters and sounds and how to get along with others. So that’s been taken away, and I think all kids are struggling with this. But if you’re already anxious and it’s already hard for you to incorporate what’s going on in your world, to be asked to incorporate more and sooner in your development is going to result in increased risks for anxiety. And that’s what we’re seeing. I mean, we’re seeing more anxious kids than ever. I personally think it’s in a large part because of what we’re asking them to do. I was just thinking just this morning, I was supervising a case, and the referral question was for a seven-year-old. He’s bad in executive function skills. And I think seven-year-olds don’t have executive function skills. Executive function skills are something that we learn by the time we’re 25. But a seven-year-old shouldn’t have to remember much of anything.
Alex
So it sounds like you think it’s a bit overdiagnosed I would think with younger kids.
Ellen
Tseven-year-oldhe research shows that ADHD isn’t overdiagnosed, but I wonder sometimes if it’s misused in these cases as a way of sort of maintaining the status quo for the environment. When teachers are saying the seven-year-old doesn’t have great executive function skills, there’s something wrong with that statement. We’ve overdone it in a way that is not enhancing kids’ development. In our culture, we value being able to do things quickly and being able to get them done correctly. More is better. And I might see that same child at age 14 or 15 who’s now super burned out, really anxious that we want kids to be superheroes. And I sometimes say to parents, only the top 5% of kids could be in the top 5%. But we have this idea that all of our kids are in the top 5%. It’s just not possible. And that’s okay. Our society isn’t built on just the top 5%. In fact, high scores and a lot of things come with downsides, too. There’s no perfect score on an IQ test.
Alex
The curse of American Exceptionalism, I think.
Ellen
Exactly, yeah.
Alex
So what are some of the ways that you treat these kids?
Ellen
So one of the things that we have found to be most effective for kids with slow processing speed is helping them learn a sense of time. And our research has shown that kids with slow processing speed don’t have a very good internal clock. This is consistent with research that shows that kids with ADHD are actually very poor at time perception. And the ability to perceive time is just very similar to your ability to kind of perceive color. So what we’ve asked them to do for years now is time management. We’ve asked them to manage something they don’t actually understand. And so it’s very much like asking somebody who’s colorblind to color coordinate a room.
The nice thing about time perception is it’s not a blindness. It’s something that we can actually teach. And one of the ways to do that is to time things. Make them aware of how time is passing. Make them learn how to read an analog clock. Most kids don’t do this anymore, but you can sort of see how time is passing in that way. It can also help with anxiety, because if you don’t have a good sense of how much time you have left, you’re kind of chronically anxious. Or again, that chronically unanxious until everything really falls apart. And then you’re like, oh, my God, now I’m losing it. So that’s one thing I’ll say to parents. Have them time how long it takes to get through a day? How long does it take to brush your teeth? Is it ten minutes? Is it two minutes? How about getting to school in the morning? Those sorts of things make it kind of like a game. You don’t want to overdo it either. And then the big thing that we recommend is the ability to have extended time on things like tests and assignments.
I also think that inner exploration is very important. So in the book on processing speed, we call it the three A’s of Processing speed. So acceptance, accommodation, and advocating. And I think this cuts across and far beyond just processing speed. But accepting who we are, like, this is who I am. It takes me longer than it takes the average kid in my class. That’s me. And I don’t even like to use the word limitations because in some ways it can be limiting factors, and in other ways, it can be really wonderful things. Like I was saying, the right amount of anxiety is your superpower. So being able to accept, okay, I am on the anxious side, so how do I need my environment to accommodate me? And then how do I advocate for that?
