Dealing with internalizing issues
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Supporting a path forward with strategies that work for anxiety and depression
Explore strategies to help support school-aged students and families while learning at either home or school.
Many of you have parents and caregivers reaching out for ways to support their students with the potential internalizing issues of anxiety and depression. We’ve assembled some helpful tip sheets focused on dealing with and supporting anxiety and depression in PreK–12 students. Additional insight from Kimberly J. Vannest, PhD will help you provide the guidance families and caregivers may need right now.
What to look for and how to help
Potential solutions to help you assess, identify, treat, and monitor
Help children thrive in their school and home environments with effective behavior assessment. The BASC™ holds an exceptional track record for providing a complete picture of a child’s behavior by applying a triangulation method for gathering information. Analyze behavior from three perspectives — Self, Teacher, and Parent — using a comprehensive set of rating scales and forms to help you understand the behaviors and emotions of children and adolescents. Solve behavior issues today for better lives tomorrow! Explore the BASC-3.
Reducing anxiety through home/school collaboration
Most of the research studying the effects of interventions on reducing anxiety in school-aged children occurs in clinical or therapeutic settings rather than a school-based environment. The BASC-3 Intervention Guide and the Behavioral and Emotional Skill Building Guide will provide interventions that can be used in the classroom or shared with parents in a collaboration between home and school.
Contingency management
Contingency management relies on the use of natural consequences and reinforcers for reducing anxieties associated with specific behaviors or events. The following basic steps are used:
- Identify contingencies maintaining the problem behavior
- Ignore problem behavior and eliminate prior contingencies
- Institute frequent and powerful reinforcers for appropriate behavior
Teachers should establish the process and reinforcers through collaboration with students and caregivers, ensuring consistent supports are used both at school and home.
Planning and rewards for depression intervention
Studies have shown pleasant-activity planning to be an effective depression intervention. When struggling with depression, students may lose interest in the activities that once made them feel happy, and they may lack the motivation to join them again. Pleasant-activity planning for depression includes goal setting, developing a plan to engage in an activity, behavioral contracting, and self-rewarding. This strategy can be used for groups of students, but the planning and rewarding phases must reflect students’ individual preferences.
Guiding intervention decisions through assessment and monitoring
Using the results from assessments like the BASC-3 is key in planning evidence-based interventions, but that’s merely the first step. It’s critical to regularly measure the effectiveness of the chosen interventions through progress monitoring. While re-administering the complete BASC-3 will meet that need, it’s time consuming and provides more information than is needed for progress monitoring.
The BASC-3 Flex Monitor can be customized to the needs of individual students in order to better track intervention effectiveness. Its web-based platform allows psychologists to select specific items that evaluate depression or anxiety to be selected.