Adaptive care plans (ACPs) are an innovative method to providing care for children and adolescents with developmental disabilities who have challenging behaviors during healthcare encounters. ACPs take a family-centered approach to ensure that children with developmental disabilities are able to receive safe and appropriate healthcare by…

Interventions that promote parent and child well-being in families with children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) are important, given the caregiving burden often associated with supporting children with developmental and behavioral challenges. This article summarizes a presentation made at the 2019 AAIDD annual conference…

Second Substitute Senate Bill 5903 (2019) directed the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) to contract with an organization providing coaching services to early achievers program participants, i.e., Child Care Aware of Washington (CCA WA), to provide statewide Infant-Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation (IECMH-C) to Early…

Teachers are often asked to fill out progress reports that include check marks indicating if a child has met certain criteria. While this document offers a superficial glance at knowing a child, it is often the only kind of "assessment" a parent receives. The authors, a daycare teacher and a parent of Rosa, "the mean girl" in…

The persistence of challenging behaviors for some children highlights a need and an opportunity to explore several key principles of behavioral intervention that are necessary for effective decision- making when more personalized interventions must be layered on top of high-quality universal supports. In the absence of expert support,…

The early childhood period from birth to age 8 is an exciting one for growth, development, and learning. It is when children begin to develop social-emotional competence, and it is also a time when children's emerging skills may result in behaviors adults and peers find challenging. It is important that adults who care for and teach young children…

Boys Town has created a program called In-Home Family Services to deliver help to families in stress. In-home family intervention programs have become widely used to help more families who are at risk and experiencing difficulties with a wide range of problems including domestic violence, child behavior problems, parent-child and family…

The pica phenomenon, where non-edible substances are repeatedly consumed, has been linked with developmental and behavioural disorders, particularly autism. The clinical presentation of foreign body ingestion in patients with autism is discussed, and recommendations for caregivers are provided based on the available literature. An 18-year-old man…

When parents get together, the subject of appropriately addressing the behavior of their children often comes to the forefront of conversations. Parents share various challenges they face with their children, including issues associated with listening, eating vegetables, doing chores, and a host of other discipline-related situations. The plethora…

The normal developmental challenges experienced during early childhood as well as more significant emotional and behavioral problems require that parents and caregivers communicate effectively. The manner in which parents and caregivers communicate with each other about children's behavior can have a significant and lasting impact on children,…

Current approaches to troubled children focus on external control and superficial compliance. This article explores the significance of Fritz Redl's concept of building controls from within to effective practice in the 21st Century. The author provides a brief overview of Fritz Redl's concept and hopes that this overview and the material to follow…

Preschool teachers and caregivers today are faced with an increasing number of children as young as 2 years old who exhibit challenging behavior. Unfortunately, these challenging behaviors may continue into adolescence and adulthood if not remediated early. Recently, there has been an increase in research showing promising evidence that when…

Schools are ideal settings for identifying children and adolescents who have been exposed to traumatic events. They are also ideal for providing evidence-based mental health services, such as trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy, to students affected by childhood posttraumatic stress disorder and co-occurring mental health and behavioral…

Adopted children may present with a wide range of disruptive behaviors making it difficult to implement holistic therapeutic interventions. The number of primary caregivers, disrupted placements, and repeated traumatic events contribute to the overall mental health of the adoptee and greater number of occurrences increases the risk of…

Exciting news is emerging that could change the lives of many parents of children and adolescents with autism. Extreme tantrums often "run their lives," according to Dr. Lawrence Scahill, Professor of Nursing and Child Psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center in New Haven, Connecticut. As the Director of Yale's Research Unit on Pediatric…