https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/you-can-mentor/id1474640776

The post You Can Mentor (Podcasts) appeared first on kinshipparkrapids.org.

The post Champions For Change appeared first on kinshipparkrapids.org.

Although COVID-19 appears to spare children from the most serious health problems, marginalized youth are likely to bear the heaviest burdens of trauma and economic fallout. This has serious implications for mentoring programs, which often serve particularly high risk youth. For example, an analysis of the two million young people aged six through eighteen, whom Big Brothers Big Sisters of America has served over the past decade, revealed that the majority were from low-income families (78%), and/or lived in single-parent homes (61%).^[i] Similarly, a 2018 evaluation of 2,165 American youth participating in thirty nationally representative mentoring programs found that nearly 70% of mentees were from marginalized, non-majority racial backgrounds.^[ii] The vast majority (85%) of the mentees’ parents reported that their children had recently been exposed to family stress (such as a family member struggling with substance use, frequent family arguments, or homelessness), while more than three quarters (76%) noted that their children faced economic adversity and safety concerns (such as housing insecurity, parental job instability, or gangs or drugs in the neighborhood), with participating families’ median annual income ranging from $20,000 to $30,000. Compared to young people on average nationally, mentees were roughly twice as likely to be living in extreme poverty, and in a single-parent household, and to have an incarcerated parent or family member. ^[iii]

Youth often experience the stress and anxiety as much as parents, particularly those who are already vulnerable. In an excellent new article for the Atlantic, excerpted below, journalist Vann R. Newkirk II discusses the particular vulnerabilities of the kinds of youth that mentoring programs serve.

“For children who spend time in multiple households, rely on outside figures for guidance or mentoring, or are used to a stream of relatives in and out of home, prolonged social-distancing measures will mean profound separation from some people who provide care. All the FaceTime in the world can’t make up for fill-in help from aunts, uncles, grandmothers, and gym coaches. And for some kids, those supports are the main things interceding in a toxic—or even dangerous—home environment.

While most adults still have work and other routines to carry on, school is the primary source of structure and socialization for kids. Children have rich social lives, often experienced almost exclusively in school and extracurricular activities. And schools are the primary providers for lots of essential services. As New York City debated recently, schools are the only thing standing between some children and food insecurity. Beyond that, schools might be the only places some kids receive even cursory dental, physical, or mental-health care; rigorous physical activity; or clean water. A 2019 overview of formally established school-based health centers found they provided primary-care services for more than 6 million students across almost 11,000 schools. Low-income households are already struggling to grapple with the rising price of municipal water—and now a major source of free water for low-income kids will be gone in some places for a month or more.

The staggering economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic will add a new dimension of suffering to the experience of young people. The numbers struggle to capture the reality of the situation. In the middle of mass freezes of whole sectors of industry, perhaps a fifth of all workers have lost their jobs or had significant cuts to hours in a span of days. If the pandemic does indeed spark a recession, then data from previous downturns indicate that food security, physical health, and general well-being for children will diminish, and quickly.

Rand Conger, a professor emeritus at UC Davis and a longtime researcher of the intergenerational consequences of poverty, told me the data from previous recessions are clear, and that we’re only beginning to see the effects. Conger studied the agricultural downturn in the 1980s, and followed patterns of disintegration of spousal and parental relationships, as well as spikes in child abuse. “It was so devastating for so many families,” Conger said, “and severe punishment tends to increase.” Child neglect and abuse tend to track with greater traumatic events, economic instability, and stress. Sadly, they might be tracking already. Reportedly, a single hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, has treated six children with severe physical-abuse-related injuries. Doctors believe the cases are related to parents’ stress over the pandemic.

All the evidence suggests that children—and poor children especially—will bear an incredible burden during the coronavirus pandemic and the attendant economic shocks. But that evidence has trouble breaking into a national conversation dominated by mortality rates and work-from-home strategies. Bruce Lesley, the president of First Focus on Children, told me this failure could be costly for kids. “It’s all the stuff that people just aren’t thinking about in terms of this crisis and how it feeds into existing problems and exacerbating them,” he said. “In enormous ways, I just think that people are missing all those sorts of things.”

It’s a morbid, anxiety-inducing exercise—trying to forecast all the ways things could go wrong—but it’s one Lesley thinks is necessary for working proactively to save children. In addition to supporting direct payments to families in this crisis, Lesley is advocating for an expansion of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), funding increases to federal support for homeless and foster children, and a national moratorium on evictions. The one piece of good news is that there are plenty of lessons to learn from events like the Great Depression, the HIV crisis, and Hurricane Katrina that can help the country prepare to protect the youngest generation.

The coronavirus is a strange beast. By severing intergenerational relationships, it disrupts all the ancient ways families have always coped with disasters. It is singularly difficult to combat in the modern age of interconnected economies. And, through whatever quirk of biology, the virus appears to mostly spare children. All of those things might tempt Americans to think of it as something new, to be relieved by its selective mercies. But the most likely outcome is that this pandemic, like most others in history, will again uncover our most basic inequities. For children and their parents, that might mean that mortality rates are only the beginning of the story.”

For the original story from the Atlantic, please click here.

^[i]  Jarjoura, Tanyu, Herrera, & Keller. Evaluation of the Mentoring Enhancement Demonstration Program.

^[ii] Children’s Defense Fund. (2014). The State of America’s Children. Washington, D.C.: Children’s Defense Fund.

Mental Health America. (2017). 2017 State of Mental Health in America. Alexandria, VA: Mental Health America.

National Center for Educational Statistics. (2017). The condition of education. Washington, D.C.: NCEC. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2017144

^[iii] Danielson, M. L., Bitsko, R. H., Ghandour, R. M., Holbrook, J. R., Kogan, M. D., & Blumberg, S. J. (2018). Prevalence of parent-reported ADHD diagnosis and associated treatment among U.S. children and adolescents, 2016. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 47(2), 199–212. https://doi.org/10.1080/15374416.2017.1417860

^[iv] Eisenhower, A., Blacher, J., & Bush, H. (2015). Longitudinal associations between externalizing problems and student-teacher relationship quality for young children with ASD. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 9, 163-173. doi:10.1016/j.rasd.2014.09.007.

Raposa, E. B., Rhodes, J. E., & Herrera, C. (2016). The impact of youth risk on mentoring relationship quality: Do mentor characteristics matter? American Journal of Community Psychology, 320–329. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12057

Jarjoura, Tanyu, Herrera, & Keller. Evaluation of the Mentoring Enhancement Demonstration Program.

^[v] Herrera, C., DuBois, D. L., & Grossman, J. B. (2013). The role of risk: Mentoring experiences and outcomes for youth with varying risk profiles. New York, NY: MDRC.

From The Chronicle of Evidence-based Mentoring/ April 2, 2020/in Editors Blog /by Jean Rhodes

The post The kids aren’t all right: Why mentees will be disproportionately affected by the pandemic appeared first on kinshipparkrapids.org.

The post Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Stress and Coping appeared first on kinshipparkrapids.org.

The post Screen time soars for US children amid global pandemic appeared first on kinshipparkrapids.org.

In the comedy, Role Models, two self-absorbed salesmen, Danny and Wheeler, are arrested following a road rage incident and elect to perform community service hours over going to jail. They are assigned to work at a mentoring program where Danny is paired with a nerdy role-playing game enthusiast while Wheeler finds himself trying to connect with a foul-mouthed, street-wise kid who has repelled the overtures of countless previous mentors.

Forging connections with the mentees is anything but easy and, at a particularly low point, both men reconsider the jail sentence over this particular form of punishment. Over time, however, Danny is drawn into the world of his mentee’s fantasy games, supporting his interests in ways that the teen’s parents never would or could. Wheeler connects with his mentee over their shared, painful experiences of parental abandonment and eventually Wheeler leverages this trust into teaching his mentee valuable self-regulation skills. Both Danny and Wheeler gain wisdom and empathy along the way and their lives improve.

Although improbable, threads of this movie align with the latest research on relationships and, in doing so, capture several important truths about what makes mentoring work. Strip away the implausibility of sentencing criminals to mentoring, and strip away their crudeness and shockingly poor judgment, and some of the active ingredients of mentoring relationships are revealed—a positive connection.

The secrets to forging strong ties were recently illuminated in the book, Friend and Foe, by Business Professors Adam Galinsky and  Maurice Schweitzer of Columbia and University of Pennsylvania, respectively. In it, they provide sometimes counter-intuitive, but evidence-based strategies for handling the everyday relationship tensions and difficulties. Certain suggestions (e.g., screw up to gain trust) seem especially relevant to working with teens. Sometimes sharing a good laugh with your mentee at your own expense is a great way to make yourself seem more approachable. With the caveat that the Role Model mentors would be entirely inappropriate, here are six things that, according to research, they get right:

1. Make mistakes. All too often, mentors try to be perfect role models when, in fact, their mentees are likely to be more responsive to them if they make (and admit) mistakes in ways that humanize them. In one study, people were asked to evaluate three job candidates. Two equally competent candidates were interviewed but, as part of the experiment, one spilled coffee all over his suit during the interview. A third candidate was less competent. The researchers found that the competent but clumsy candidate was most highly regarded  He seemed most approachable and more likable. Bottom line: mentors (parents, bosses, advisors, etc.) should stop worrying about being perfect. As long as they are trained and competent, it’s okay, perhaps even preferable, to mess up from time to time.
2. Convey care and concern. The researchers describe one study in which a confederate approached people on a rainy day at a train station to ask if she could borrow their cell phone to make an important call. Sometimes she simply asked while in other instances she preceded the request with “Sorry about the rain.”  Only 9% agreed to help her out when she simply asked for the phone but nearly half agreed to help when the request was accompanied by the apology as it somehow conveyed warmth, trust, care, and concern. As the authors note, “Regardless of how superfluous the apology was, as long as it conveyed care and concern, it boosted perceptions of warmth and increased trust.”Other studies have shown similar requests–i.e., when an interruption is preceded by asking if it’s a good time to talk, people are more responsive. Small gestures of concern and care can go a long way.
3. Connect around the mentee’s interest.  In Role Models, Danny went out of his way to learn about his mentee’s interests in role-playing, and once he got it, he proceeded to go deep into the experience himself. This sort of perspective-taking can go a long way in helping mentors understand what their mentee is experiencing and finding ways to draw on interests to leverage positive change.
4. Ask for advice. Researchers have long shown that the simple act of asking someone for advice can help them to better see your perspective. Moreover, people think more of you when you ask for their advice. As the authors describe, “people fear that by asking advice, they will appear less competent. But this is a perspective-taking failure: When we ask for advice, as long as the request is not completely obvious, we appear to be more competent. After all, we have just flattered someone by seeking their advice.” This strategy can be particularly useful in hierarchical relationships like mentoring. As the authors note, “asking advice of someone below you on the hierarchical ladder — like when the boss asks a subordinate for their opinion — can have a powerful effect as well. The person below you in the hierarchy will be delighted to be acknowledged for their opinions and thrilled to have their expertise acknowledged.”
5. Apologize the right way. Even with the best intentions, a mentor might do all sorts of things (miss a meeting, be distracted on their iPhone, or say something hurtful). But, beyond just a simple apology, it is sometimes best to commit to change in a way that better ensures that it won’t happen again,  “In our own research, we have found that a promise to change is one of the most important components of an apology… Though the simple apology helped, it was the promise to change that had the most impact on how much trust their partner placed in them in subsequent rounds of the experiment.” Of course, such apologies are never easy,  and research suggests that apologies can make one feel a loss of power in the relationship. But as the researchers would argue, it’s best to focus instead on what is achieved through apology, “As soon as you start to feel defensive or begin to rationalize some action that might have caused harm, take a moment of reflection. Take a step back and consider what an apology might accomplish. Even when we are justified in our actions and even when we acted with the best of intentions, there are times when an apology is the right course of action.”
6. Have fun. We have new research (under review) to support this and drawing on current research, online evidence-based mentor training Mentoring Central has an entire segment devoted to the importance of having fun together. Moreover, research on child therapy has highlighted the importance of humor and laughter for creating a non-threatening climate that is conducive to disclosures and more serious discussions.

The comfort, familiarity, and closeness that humor conveys may be important to youth in feeling engaged and understood by key adults. Of course, humor in mentoring involves finesse. Adults must maintain boundaries and avoid misinterpretation, sarcasm or inappropriate jokes. But, with mounting research showing the benefits of age-appropriate humor, fun, and laughter in forging close relationships, this and other critical components should not be ignored.

The post What a wildly improbable movie can teach us about mentoring appeared first on kinshipparkrapids.org.

The post Mentoring a child is simpler than you think appeared first on kinshipparkrapids.org.

The post Mandated Reporter Training – Maltreatment Types appeared first on kinshipparkrapids.org.