School Phobia Solved

What are you supposed to do with a Ph.D that could not be accomplished with a mere Masters degree?

I had been employed as a School Psychologist by a suburban school in Westchester County NY before and after completing my Ph.D studies. During my original graduate training the emphasis was on "Clinical School Psychology" which meant that your concern was ideally to understand what was going on inside your subject, his emotions, thinking, expectations, attitudes and world view. Following the necessary assessments you would design an intervention (counseling or therapy) intended to introduce internal changes that would enable him to better cope with his life challenges. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. The outcomes were not predictable.

During my doctoral training I was introduced to external matters like the relationships between the subjects behavior and the entire environmental context within which those actions on his part were displayed. Under this new wider lens, the focus of my efforts was finding ways of changing the subjects surrounding environment that would lead to behaviors that were better adaptive to his world. Permit me to illustrate:

One of the elementary schools I served had a fifth grade boy who rarely attended school two days in succession. The Principal, the teacher and his mother had tried everything they could think of, to no avail.

Frank refused to take the school bus and when his mother tried driving him each morning, he screamed and made a scene every time they tried to pry him from the car seat. What to do? I was teaching psychology part time at a near by college at the time and decided to use that as a resource. One of my male college students was introduced into Frank's classroom on a series of days when Frank was in attendance. His assignment was to be a classroom helper but in particular to befriend Frank.

After a couple of weeks they were having a great old time together. His attendance improved but he still exhibited continued signs of school phobia. In particular, it was in going between his mothers car and the school entrance that was the remaining vestige of the problem. We tried to gradually narrow that span of approximately 100 feet. The college student started on day one by meeting the car at the curb and walking Frank to and through the entrance. The next day he walked up to within five feet of the car door and called to Frank who responded by coming out and joining him. The next day the gap was widened to ten feet, and so on and so forth.

We couldn't continue this forever and so after a couple of weeks the helper started coming less often and on an irregular basis. Franks phobic behavior had virtually been eliminated. We subsequently applied the same kind of sequencing to boarding the school bus.

What goes on in a persons head continues to be critical but if you want to extend help with the highest likelihood of success within his day to day world the actual surroundings must be included in your considerations and targeting. A major advantage of this more inclusive approach is that it multiplies, infinitely, the number of changes that can be introduced in the helping effort.