Education Series-"Challenging Youth Behavior: Exploring the Sources on a Pathway to Solution"

About the Workshop…

There are a range of potential factors that may underpin challenging behaviors exhibited by youth. If we quickly jump to strategy implementation without considering the true source of the behaviors, viable solutions may be difficult to find. This session explores marginalization and inequitable treatment of youth, misdiagnosis, mental health symptom manifestations, and social emotional competency deficits as possible underlying correlates of youth behaviors. Additionally, interventions that more closely align with the source of the behaviors will be identified, including advocacy for equity and justice, collaborative approaches that foster comprehensive evaluation and diagnosis, targeted interventions for mental health symptom reduction, and direct instruction in social emotional skill-building will be offered.

Learning Objectives:· Describe the impact of discrimination and inequitable treatment of youth, particularly for children of color, LGBTQ+ youth, and children with disabilities.

· Recognize the potential range of responses children exhibit when experiencing systemic inequities and injustice.

· Identify strategies that support marginalized youth’s ability to safely explore their lived experiences of exclusion and isolation, the meaning they make of those experiences, and how to use their voice, choice and agency for empowerment in response to the inequities they face.

· Use a range of collaboration techniques to ensure comprehensive medical and mental health assessment and diagnoses of youth and team-based approaches to advocate for educational equity.

· Implement interventions with youth and families to reduce symptom manifestation of  anxiety, inattention, impulsiveness, hyperactivity, opposition, and aggression.

· Implement interventions with youth and families to strengthen social emotional skills.