At our workshops around the country, youth professionals continue to report seeing more and more children from deeply troubled homes. If you are not a mental health worker, your college training may not have prepared you for working with children whose behavior is driven by the trauma they endure at home. This article gives you a few of the basics all youth professionals need to know in order to maximize their ability to successfully do their job with children

from deeply troubled homes. However, please note that these introductory basics are just the start of the information you'll need. As more and more contemporary children seem to have major family problems compared to years past, it is absolutely critical that both you and your team thoroughly know mental health basics. Since studies emphasize that seeing and helping distressed youth are the primary ways to prevent school shootings, that's another reason that non-mental health youth professionals like educators must upgrade their skills right away. As Richard Lawrence of St. Cloud State University has noted, "We need more mental detectors, not metal detectors in schools."

See the Pain
How are your "mental detection" skills? Some youth professionals never notice that they're working with children in distress. Not noticing makes it more likely that you might add to the child's burdens, and these children already carry a heavy load. You may also miss any cues that show that this is a child who could one day explode in violence. Learn to look deeper into problems like sleeping in class, depression, back talk, irritability, and poor performance, to consider if family problems could be the cause. For example, a child may sleep in class not because she's "just a lazy kid" but because it's the only place she has free from the all-night roar of Dad hitting and berating Mom.

You Can't Fix It
If you are not a family therapist, be careful about focusing your efforts on changing the family. Veteran counselors struggle to impact severely troubled families. Non-family counselors are unlikely to have the desired impact because they lack the time, expertise, and training to succeed. As a non-mental health worker, your expertise lies with children. Put your energy there instead. You can certainly encourage the family to seek counseling, but understand that family therapy should not be provided by people outside the mental health field.

Offer Accommodations
The night after a beating, it can be tough to focus on math. If you have data to indicate abuse, of course you report it, but if you only suspect trauma, be prepared to offer accommodations. If you give traumatized youngsters time to process and recover from recent crises, they will work as hard as they can on days that they are able. Can you fairly ask any more of a human being than that? Since school shooters often feel persecuted or badly treated by others, here is another reason to show you are sensitive and caring instead of adding to the perception that people are mean and just don't care.

Fill in the Gaps
If you can't get the family to do their job, then you fill in the gaps. For example, you may help a child devise a plan to wake up for school each morning, but have granola bars, sox, and other items that the child may need in order to function throughout the day at your site. It's tragic that you must cover for the family to such an extent but if you don't, the child will continue to suffer, and may be so distracted by his unmet physical needs that he can't benefit from the services your site offers. Since studies show that many school shooters were having trouble coping, that is another compelling reason to fill in the gaps.

Evaluate and Upgrade Deficit Skills
Here is a very quick way to see if your team members are competent "mental detectors" able to spot children in distress. Can your team members name the 4 most common mental health/family problems that children face? The answer is included in our Follow-Up Resources section immediately below, but before you scroll down to look, stop and consider if you know the answer. If all the members of your team cannot name these 4 problems, how can they spot children with these concerns? Teams that do not know how to spot distress lack the ability to prevent school shootings. Thoroughly upgrade deficient skills now-- for the sake of students who suffer-- and to more effectively ensure that a shooting never happens at your site. As the study indicates, metal detectors will never work as well as mental detectors.

Follow-up Resources
Did you know the top 4 mental health/family problems that children face? These problems can affect the child directly or another family member. These problems are: 1) substance abuse; 2) severe emotional disturbance; 3) sexual abuse; and 4) physical, verbal or emotional abuse. If you didn't know this, that means you need to upgrade your skills.

Statewide Testing Produces Unheard Cry for Help

In Texas, as in many states, annual state-wide testing includes an essay section. More than one million students complete the required essay. Of the one million essays submitted, guess how many essays become a cry for help. According to USA Today (March 28, 2005), nearly 700 youngsters wrote about their own abuse, neglect or rape. The New York Times notes this week that the recent Minnesota school shooting may have occurred because "anguish turned homicidal." In the next sentence, they wrote: "Teachers are ill-prepared to identify and address the normal emotional difficulties of their students, much less the aberrational ones." Further, they correctly observe that "school counselors, who are better suited for the task, are severely outnumbered."

For more than a decade and a half, our company, Youth Change, has been criss-crossing North America, attempting to train teachers, counselors, principals and other youth workers how to better understand and assist troubled youth and children. For most of those years, we have been saying over and over, in school after school, in city after city, that anguish can easily become rage. In the past, the media has characterized school shooters as students who were bullied. That over-simplified sound bite has made our job so much harder because bullying is often not the sole-- or even primary-- contributing force that
spurred the tragedy. The central force was the developing rage and on-going depression. The focus on bullying meant that quiet anguish that didn't involve bullying, could pass unnoticed by adults. Any opportunity for prevention is lost. In the Minnesota case, clearly, the young shooter was a pressure cooker. The signs of depression, alienation and frustration were there to see; and bullying may not have been a factor at all. It is time for youth professionals to refine how they view school shooters. By subscribing to past media characterizations linked to bullying, youth workers are more likely to miss most the important clues: anguish and frustration. These two powerhouse emotions can easily occur without any bullying.

If you want to become better prepared to notice and understand youngsters who are human pressure cookers, there is only one option. If your background does not include mental health basics, now is the time to upgrade your skills. Concern about a potential tragedy at your site is not the sole reason that non-mental health workers must finally broaden their expertise.

The real reason that these youth professionals must become more skilled in basic mental health methods is that for every sad child who does pick up a rifle, there are hundreds more who struggle and suffer more quietly. We now know there are at least 700 of them in Texas.

Children in Oregon have also confessed distress in that state's essay exam. Some of those sad stories have lacked proper punctuation, or apparently had sub-standard sentence structure, and ultimately received failing grades. A child tells of beatings or a recent rape; or writes of homelessness, or a lost parent. Not only will the cry for help fail to be answered, the cry for help itself is graded as failing.

Recently in Texas, a student died. It was the day before the state- wide exam. The school staff asked to delay the exam to allow the children time to grieve. The students were nonetheless required to take the test, seated next to the empty desk of their newly dead friend and classmate.

High stakes testing mania has become the center of the education universe. It consumes countless dollars, devours teachers' time, and diminishes the importance of every other educational activity. If a teacher wants to keep her job, she must produce the right testing numbers. With eyes firmly focused on testing, teachers are left precious little time to even think, never mind notice
children's anguish. Testing is most certainly not the cause of this country's problems with school shootings, but testing has contributed to it. Flunking cry for help essays, compelling testing even hours after death, and our relentless pursuit of magic numbers are just a few of the ways that we sacrifice children's humanity to the gods of testing. If we put a mere 10% of the effort we devote to testing mania, into noticing and helping deeply troubled children, perhaps we could stop some of the shootings before they occur. Further, since you can't push profoundly distressed children to perform well on tests anyway, perhaps by noticing and attending to the distress, many sad children would accomplish more academically.

How do you know if your team is properly noticing and helping distressed students? Here is a quick litmus test for you to use to determine if your team has a solid basic mental health knowledge base, plus the inclination and willingness to notice deeply depressed youngsters who might one day explode; brief answers are provided as applicable:

1. Can your staff name the 3 students at highest risk of engaging in extreme violence?

Answer: Conduct disorders; thought disorders; extreme agitated, depressed kids.

2. Using one-size-fits all methods won't work with the three students identified in

Question #1. Does your staff know how they must work differently with each of those three types of students?

3. Can your staff name the symptoms of major, clinical depression, and the three methods that work best to prevent explosive rage?

Answer: There are a vast array of symptoms that can signal depression. While only mental health professionals can diagnose, all youth workers can watch for sad moods especially without apparent cause, diminished enthusiasm, anxiety, hopelessness, feelings of worthlessness, helplessness, problems with concentration, changes in sleep, changes in weight, changes in appetite, and suicidal gesturing or comments.

These are a few of the most common signs. The best methods to address depression, especially with the help of your school counselor: exercise, talking and carefully monitored anti-depressants.

4. Can your staff name the most important method to use with conduct disordered students?'

Answer: The single most important method is to keep the costs of misbehavior high, and the benefits low.

5. Is there a mechanism at your site or within your community to ensure that all children are noticed by their teacher,

mentor or other adult so that warning signs (like violent web site postings, threatening remarks, alienation, and desperation) are not missed?

6. Candidly speaking, what would your staff say is the highest priority at your site?

Answer: Academic achievement and high testing scores really shouldn't be the answer in our contemporary times. The answer offered by your team should be site safety, or else safety is not the priority that it must be in our current violent times.

Educational goals will quickly assume lower status if your team ever loses students or staff in a shooting or other tragedy. School safety should be the one thing that is more important than anything else that occurs within the walls of your school. Without school safety, nothing else matters.

Need more solutions now? Visit our web site and we will flood you with free resources including our free Problem Student magazine and thousands of sample solutions. Some days, it can seem impossible to get youngsters to pay attention. Here are 3 tips to teach young people to more successfully pay attention.

1. Tip: Teach Visual Tracking
Few schools or counseling centers actually teach youngsters how to pay attention, but kids won't magically learn these skills on their own-- even if you consequence or sanction them. Among the first skills to teach: visual tracking. Here is a sample strategy, but multiple repetitions using an array of methods will be needed. See the follow-up resources below for additional techniques: Use a magnet and metal to illustrate how students' eyes should be "stuck" on the teacher.

2. Trick:
Read this one carefully or you will definitely miss something that is worth a lot. The trick: Hide something. Remember when you were young, you wondered "Does the teacher really read my term paper?" so you wrote the word "PEANUT BUTTER" in the middle of the paper to see if she was paying attention enough to even notice. You can use a similar technique with students: bury the announcement of a reward or goodie deep into a handout or the paperwork for a task.

3. Tip: Teach Distraction Control Skills
Among the skills that schools and agencies expect from students, but neglect to teach: managing distractions. Here is one sample strategy, but be prepared to use a variety of methods and many repetitions before the concepts are sufficiently implanted: Teach students that distractions are "attention-grabbers," then show them how to avoid, modify, ignore, or request help to manage them. You can use a radio, fan, CD player and other noise-generating items to demonstrate avoiding, modifying, ignoring, and getting help with distractions. Don't limit yourself to just audible distractions. Include other types-- such as visual distractions-- by simply having someone walk through the room, or you can place an unusual or interesting object where students will notice.

4. Tip: Teach Maintaining Focus
It's not just ADD students who have trouble focusing. This is yet another necessary and expected skill that is typically not taught. Again, you will need a variety of interventions, but here is one to start with: The idea of sustaining a focus is tough to communicate, especially to younger students, and to kids with challenges. If a child can't conceptualize the target behavior, there is little chance they can do it, so it's important to successfully convey a picture of the desired behavior. To give a picture, play a game called "Focus on This." Ask students to focus on an item, such as the clock on the wall. Challenge them to stay focused for 1 minute, then 2 minutes, and so forth. Don't limit yourself to the visual aspects of focusing. Repeat the game but this time, choose an activity that requires listening, and use sound bites or music excerpts for the focus. A fun follow-up is to see who can maintain their focus the longest despite distractions that you create. This follow-up method teaches students how to maintain focus despite distractions. If you offer a reward to the student who
focuses longest, you will have a lot of fun while thoroughly "cementing in" the concepts.

Want More Interventions Like the Ones Above? We can help you locate the resources you need. There are hundreds of free interventions on our web site that you will use every day. Need help? Reach us through our web site.