New Guidelines For Children’s Emotional Health

In terms of guidelines and practices for children’s emotional health, they aim to teach children and young people to deal with the emotions they experience in their daily lives.

Even though you may not be aware of it, more and more children are being diagnosed with various emotional disorders. Interestingly, about 15% of cases have something to do with anxiety.

In other words, the high pace of life, academic demands, parental stress and genetic vulnerability are some of the factors that can cause a child to develop a psychological disorder.

From this perspective, there are many treatments that aim to find a solution to the problems.

Traditionally, some form of cognitive behavioral therapy has been used to target a particular disorder.

If, for example, it was about childhood depression, a couple of the most relevant methods in psychology were the programs PEAC (Méndez) and Kevin Stark’s ACTION.

Nowadays, there is a much greater interest in treating various psychological disorders in a comprehensive way. The reason for this is that many of them have a common core.

Therefore, based on this and with regard to the adult population, mention should be made of Norton’s transdiagnostic cognitive behavioral therapy and Barlow’s overall treatment model (Unified Protocol).

Both programs aim to find common factors for different emotional disorders (anxiety, depression, somatotrophic disorders, etc.).

This so that the patient can discuss these with their therapist, who will use the most effective and appropriate techniques and strategies.

The positive thing is that this practice has now been extended to include child psychology and that various programs are being tried to establish guidelines and practices for children’s emotional health .

A compilation of guidelines and practices for children’s emotional health

Jill Ehrenreich is a psychologist at the University of Miami and leads the program for the treatment of children and adolescents with anxiety and affective disorders.

She has succeeded in developing and testing an innovative health program for the treatment of children with emotional problems: the Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders in Children and Adolescents.

The starting point in this is i.a. that the differences between different disorders that children suffer from are subtle. In fact, anxiety and depression are often comorbid disorders, just like in adults.

Therefore, a study published online in the journal  Cognitive and Behavioral Practice found that the severity of anxiety and depression decreased significantly in children who underwent this type of therapy.

The main goal of this intervention is to identify the individual patient’s weaknesses and to develop a plan so that these do not constitute insurmountable obstacles to solving the problems.

Therefore , the new treatment program is based primarily on cognitive techniques, but it also includes effective behavioral strategies.

“You are braver than you think, stronger than you seem and smarter than you think.”

-Christopher Robin-

The pillars of treatment consist of:

• Knowledge of emotions. To learn to identify them and realize the role they play.
• Ability to deal with emotions. To teach students about the relationship between thoughts, emotions and behaviors. To explain how an intervention in one of the three plans has effects on the others.

• Problem-solving skills. Here they use D’Zurilla’s and Goldfried’s problem-solving techniques for young children.
• Strategies for evaluating situations. It is a matter of being able to assess whether a situation is unpleasant, neutral or positive.
• Parental guidance. Sometimes children’s problems depend on the parents’ attitudes, especially when there is negative reinforcement. Therefore, the leading role of parents is crucial in controlling this variable.
• Behavioral activation. This is a classic strategy used in the treatment of depression. Thus, the purpose here is to increase a person’s positive reinforcements in his environment.

The development of the study

The researchers recruited 22 children aged 7 to 12 years to participate in the study. All children had the main diagnosis of anxiety disorder and depression as a co-diagnosis.

Once a week for 15 weeks, the study participants participated in group therapy focused on emotional health.

The results showed that 14 of the 18 children who completed the program no longer met the criteria for anxiety disorder.

In addition, only 1 in 5 children suffering from pre-treatment depression still met the criteria for depression after completing the program.

One of the most surprising results was the improvement in children with comorbid depression and anxiety.

Usually, depression causes the treatment to take longer or becomes more difficult when it coincides with another psychological disorder.

This is an obvious problem, as most current therapies do not treat different emotional problems at the same time.

The researchers’ hypothesis, which was based on Peter Norton’s results, argued that if one addressed the main disorder from a broader perspective, which included appropriate strategies for depression, the secondary disorder would also be improved.

As Norton pointed out, the key is to find the underlying cause of all the problems and avoid “artificial distinctions.”