If we’ve learned anything recently, it’s that the COVID-19 health crisis isn’t going away anytime soon. Fortunately, in this blog we bring you some ideas for bringing calm to your life when everything can seem so chaotic.
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is a form of counseling and, as with applied behavior analysis (ABA), a branch of clinical behavior analysis. It is an empirically-based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies mixed in different ways with commitment and behavior-change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility is the ability to stay in contact with the present moment regardless of unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations, while choosing one’s behaviors based on the situation and personal values. The foundation of ACT are six core processes that help establish the overarching goal of ACT: Psychological flexibility. The six processes are: Contacting the present moment, defusion, acceptance, self-as-context, values, and committed action. This blog entry will provide exercises based on three of the core processes aimed at helping address challenges that children may be facing during the current pandemic crisis.
- Defusion (or not taking one’s thoughts too seriously) Children may become “fused to” certain rules or routines that they’re accustom to such as where school should take place, when they usually see their teachers, or how to complete an academic activity. The goal of ACT, in this situation, is to promote flexibility around policies that children are “fused to” and encourage them to engage in behaviors that will lead to positive reinforcement (e.g., completing a school assignment so that they earn activity reinforcers now and a good grade later). If your child gets stuck on ideas that involve “I can’t” (e.g., “I can’t do this class at home”), then try the I Can’t (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999) activity. Write down the phrase “I can’t” on a card and complete the phrase with an action that your child can easily perform. For example, you might write “I can’t stick out my tongue”. Next, ask your child to engage in an action that the card says they cannot do (e.g., sticking out their tongue). You can do this with one action, or make a game out of it by putting several “I can’t” cards in a bowl and taking turns performing the actions that the cards say you cannot do. Then debrief with a discussion about how the game is like their life. For example, they actually can attend their class while at home, even though the words on the card say they can’t, so maybe they can try treating the “I cant’s” in their heads just like the “I cant’s” on the cards.
- Self-as-context (or flexible perspective-taking) The pandemic has forced many people to take on new roles and many children can struggle with these changes. For example, they might think “Mom isn’t supposed to be a teacher”, or “I’m not supposed to be doing school in the same place as my little brother in kindergarten”. Becoming rigid with these thoughts can be detrimental to children’s progress in the current situation. Therefore, its valuable to teach children to become flexible in their perspective-taking about roles. The Cool chameleon (Dixon, & Paliliunas, 2017) activity is designed to teach children to talk about themselves in flexible ways and relating it to their own changing roles (e.g., at home student versus in-school student). For this exercise, have your child identify his/her many roles (student, sibling, fourth-grader, etc.) and give each role a different color. These colors are then related back to the different colors of a chameleon, and how this animal flexibly shifts colors throughout the day. Encourage your child to create their own relevant examples of flexible “role shifting” for themselves or others. Walk your child through how this new way of talking about roles can help them get stuff done and earn positive reinforcement they value. For example, “Now, I’m wondering if it might be possible for you to be your “student” color at home sometimes so that you can get all of your schoolwork done and earn your video game time? Then you could change into your “gamer” color while you play your video games!”
- Acceptance (or the willingness to experience discomfort in order to move towards your values) Current circumstances that children are being expected to adjust to can include the presence of new challenges. It may often be easier for them to engage in behavior that leads to immediate escape or avoidance (e.g., refusing to attend classes from home). Unfortunately, the difficulty of the current situation is not something that can be avoided or removed. We can view this as an opportunity to teach children perseverance and resilience by giving them tools to approach and experience the full range of emotions that they are having at any given time. The goal is to strengthen a child’s ability to notice that it is not possible to make negative thoughts and feelings go away. Instead, the goal is to teach them to make positive choices when things get difficult. The Sink or swim (Dixon & Paliliunas, 2017) exercise requires a bucket or cup, a Ping-Pong ball, and water. Fill the bucket with water and tell your child that you would like for them to make the ball stay at the bottom of the bucket, and that they can play a preferred activity once this is accomplished (e.g., playing video games). It won’t take long before your child will realize that the ping pong ball won’t stay at the bottom of the bucket unless they hold it there the entire time, in which case they will miss out on the fun activity that they would rather be doing. Walk your child through noticing this fact, ask them to let go of the ball and move across the room where the fun is happening, and to notice how they can still have fun even with the ball floating, simply by accepting that it is there and shifting their focus to what they care about.
Hopefully you and your family find these exercises helpful. If so, come back soon for more exercises on promoting present moment awareness, values-based living, and committed actions.