Summering Safely in 2020

The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted our lives and the lives of our children in ways that no one could have predicted. From a spike in unemployment, to online school and all the challenges that it brings, everyone is tired and looking forward to warm, sunny days filled with beach vacations, days in the park, ice cream on the boardwalk, and playground excursions.

Unfortunately, although infection rates have diminished and most areas are slowly starting to open up with restrictions, COVID-19 is by no means conquered, and significant risks remain. Even as summer begins, research shows that a warming climate does little to mitigate the effects of the virus. Summer 2020 is going to look different from summers past.

Due to the asymptomatic nature of some cases of COVID-19, anyone could be walking around and spreading the virus without their knowledge. That is why it is important to continue to practice both mask-wearing and social distancing. It’s annoying--I know I’ve already driven out of my house, realized halfway to my destination that I forgot my mask, and been forced to turn around--but it really can make a difference in the spread of the virus, especially if combined with staying six feet away and frequent hand washing. The good news is that children do not appear to be a high risk group for COVID-19. The data collected by the CDC shows that the vast majority of confirmed cases belong to adults, especially adults 65 and older. But it is not impossible for a child to contract it, which is why schools were closed and why children older than two should wear a mask and practice social distancing. In addition, parents and scientists are concerned about the emergence of a multi-systemic inflammatory syndrome that shares many characteristics with Kawasaki disease, an inflammatory disease of childhood that can affect blood vessels

Summer 2020 won’t be like past years, but it can still be a fun and relaxing time for families. In this post we will discuss some of our ideas for summer activities that can help slow the spread of the virus while keeping kids happy and occupied. Arts and crafts, a classic childhood activity, can be a great starting point. Drawing with crayons and colored pencils, painting, using Model Magic, or even textile activities like knitting and crochet will keep kids of all ages occupied and away from large crowds. Some crafts can even be adopted as a group activity for everyone in your household, such as tie dye, puppet shows, or cooking. Arts and crafts are great because they encourage creativity and hard work, while also keeping your child safe from the virus.

For older kids and larger households, games are a group activity that can bring variety and excitement to a summer in social isolation. Growing up, my family played a lot of card games and board games, and it was a great way to bring us closer together. During quarantine, it helped us to forget about the news for a while and just focus on spending time together. There are literally millions of games on the market, but a classic to start with is a simple deck of cards--it’s inexpensive, and the possibilities are endless.

Although exposure to crowds of people should be avoided, you don’t have to spend your whole summer staying indoors. Having a day out at a local park should be safe as long as you wear a mask, practice social distancing, and sanitize your hands. It’s a good idea to do some research to figure out which parks near you are more popular and which ones may have less people. Where I live, the state government released a list of guidelines and restrictions that should be followed, as well as which parks are more likely to be crowded with people. Each state will have different guidelines for using facilities, which activities are open to the public, and which parks attract the most crowds.

Finally, certain states will be opening summer camps in a restricted capacity as reopening proceeds. The American Camp Association released an 82-page reopening guide for camps attempting to open this summer. It emphasizes that camps should only be opening with permission from state and local authorities, usually during Phase 2 or 3 of reopening. Campers will be required to be screened for symptoms each day, activities will take place in small groups only, frequent sanitizing of camp materials is strongly recommended, and materials should never be shared between campers. These restrictions could possibly make camps more expensive, and some camps may not be able to open at all. If you normally send your child to a camp, do some research to see what kind of amended summer schedule the camp will operate on this year.

These restrictions are annoying, exhausting, and especially difficult for families with children. But, by following them, we can help stop the spread of the virus which has already done so much damage to many families all over the world. We look up to superheroes, the people who go to great lengths to protect strangers from harm. Now, we have to do the same thing. But it doesn’t mean that we can’t find things that make us happy, even with restrictions. We must strive to find a balance between our individual mental health and the good that we can do for others. Summer 2020 will be tense and difficult, but we can make it fun, too.

Opening Up ...

Today is our first day back in the office after shutting down in mid-March. It's been a surreal few months for us and, we are sure, for most of you.

First of all, we hope that all our patients, colleagues, and their families are well and have been staying safe. We have continued Yellin Center operations remotely during the worst of the pandemic, using technology to conduct consultations, follow-ups, medical management appointments, and attend CSE meetings. Dr. Yellin also stayed in close touch with his medical colleagues at NYU and elsewhere, to remain on top of the latest facts and recommendations, while Dr. Reddy has explored whether and how to conduct aspects of our evaluations using technology.

We've kept our terrific staff on board and they have been in touch with many of the families and students we serve, scheduling virtual meetings and working on the many steps needed to open our offices safely for everyone. We've posted our current policies on our website and will continue to update these as circumstances change.

Over the past couple of weeks, we've reconfigured our spacious office to allow for social distancing during evaluations and stocked up on masks, gloves, sanitizers, and table dividers. We've removed the toys, games, and magazines from our waiting areas and are screening our staff and all visitors before they get to our office -- and taking no-touch temperatures when they arrive. Masks are required to enter our building and in our offices.

We will continue to conduct many aspects of our services via technology, to minimize contact between students, their families, and our staff, but at this time are not offering the core aspects of our assessments remotely.

On a personal note, we've gained a new grandson, born during the height of the pandemic, where a last-minute switch of hospitals enabled his parents to be together during delivery. We've discovered a wonderful new website,  Readeo, that enables us to have our two and a half year old grandson, who does not live nearby, to read a book together with us. But, like so many of you, we also have had friends and family struggle with illness and, sadly, loss.

As we look around at our world, beset by the strains of pandemic and injustice, we hope that our lives and our cities will be like the plants we found when we returned to our offices after weeks at home. They were battered and bent, but we hold out hope that with time and care they will once again be healthy and thriving. We hope the same for you, our city and our country.

Part Four - Executive Function Help: Maintaining Organization, Minimizing Distractions, and Managing Logins

As we all remain on "lock down" and kids and adults alike are working from home, we conclude our timely four part series by Beth Guadagni on helping your children (and maybe yourself) organize their digital lives.

We are operating The Yellin Center remotely at the moment, complying with the Governor's mandate. We are responding to calls, speaking with families, and using telemedicine wherever possible. Please stay in touch, stay home, and stay safe!

 

Maintaining Digital Organization
Lots of parents and teachers help students implement systems to organize work and important dates, only to see those systems fall apart quickly. This can be frustrating. Parents/teachers/kids typically react to an initial failure of this kind in the same way: they throw up their hands and assume that the system didn’t work or that the student is simply beyond help in this department. Now, we’re not saying that every system works for every student. However, every student should be given ample opportunities to succeed within a system before it is discarded in favor of another.

If you read our last few posts or if you’re trying a new system of your own, schedule time every single school day (and maybe once on weekends) for your student to tidy up her digital life. Setting a time for this for this home schooling era calls for some flexibility but this is usually best done after the school day ends, before homework begins. Help you student put this on her calendar, if she keeps one. Set aside at least 15 minutes initially, and sit with her for at least the first few sessions.
First, she’ll need to work on email. Remember that her goal is to have no more than ten messages in her inbox. Look at each email that’s there and encourage her to consider the following questions: 

• Which of these can be taken care of quickly. 
• She should write and send a quick reply, add a date to her calendar, etc., then archive them.

• Which of these are pressing? 
• She should do what needs to be done in time to meet an upcoming deadline, then archive them.

• Which of these can I leave here? How do I know this?
• She should articulate a clear plan for why the emails aren’t as pressing as others and when she will return to them.

Now, on to files: prompt her to go through each folder of her digital file storage. Any document that is in the wrong place should be moved, and anything that is not titled should be named immediately. If she needs to create any documents for that day’s homework, watch her create them from the correct folder and title them right off the bat.

Habits take time to form, but these are so powerful that they are worth the time. Be consistent with practice and troubleshooting and your student will be develop skills that will serve her throughout her life.

Minimizing Distractions
For kids who struggle with executive function, doing online research can be a minefield. Watching a helpful YouTube video aimed at learning a procedure or conducting research (yes, those exist) can spiral into an hour-long session of following clickbait. Extraneous content on webpages can distract your student from the task at hand.

If your student uses Chrome, help her install an extension called DF YouTube; the DF stands for “distraction-free.” When it’s turned on, this extension hides all the thumbnails advertising related—or, often, not-so-related—videos that can tempt students down the rabbit hole.

While you’re installing things, add an ad-blocker. A good one like AdsKill will prevent pop-up banners and videos and even malware. Many people with poor executive function struggle to filter out distractions, so these tools can help students zero in on the material at hand, allowing them to produce better work, faster.

Managing Logins
Most adults are overwhelmed by the number of logins that need to be managed, so imagine the difficulties faced by young people with weak executive function! We recommend two ways to approach this problem: a master list or a password keeper.

If it would benefit your student to give teachers, tutors, etc. access to passwords for academic sites (think school email, typing practice, Schoology, etc.), consider a master list. Help your student create a document, to be stored in the cloud, with an innocuous name like “Jenny’s Stuff.” On it, put all the login credentials she needs for academic sites. (To protect her privacy, she should not enter anything social or financial.) Next, share this document with any professionals who might need it. Now your student has what she needs to access important sites, and if she struggles an adult can jump in and point her in the right direction.

If your student is more independent (and can be trusted to remember one master password), help her set up an account with a free service like LastPass or Keeper Security. These services are great because when a student is logged in to the service, she can open whatever page she needs to access and her saved login credentials will auto-populate. However, a huge word of caution here: If your student loses track of her device and someone else finds it, they may be able to get into all of her accounts. Help her set up preferences for her password keeper that will log her out automatically after half an hour or so. Also, be certain that your student’s laptop, phone, and tablet are all protected with a good password or passcode. “1234” will not cut it.

Technology can be hugely helpful to students, but the digital world brings challenges as well. We hope this series has given you some useful ideas for helping your student use these tools to her advantage!
 

Executive Function Help: Part Three - Teaching Kids to Manage Their Email Accounts

As we all remain on "lock down" and kids and adults alike are working from home, we continue with Beth Guadagni's timely series on helping your children (and maybe yourself) organize their digital lives. 

We are operating The Yellin Center remotely at the moment, complying with the Governor's mandate. We are responding to calls, speaking with families, and using telemedicine wherever possible. Please stay in touch, stay home, and stay safe!

Establish Order
Many adults lack strategies for managing their email inboxes, so you may be learning alongside your student here! Virtually everyone who has an email account finds themselves flooded with incoming messages. Important emails get lost in the clutter, and many students don’t notice these critical messages when they come in and can’t find them easily later.

To solve this dilemma, help your student create folders for his email. Just like when he organized his files, he’ll want one for the current school year with a folder for each subject within it. Within the folder for that school year, he should also create a folder for each school activity he gets emails about (Cross Country, Band, etc.). If he gets personal email through this account, he should create a Personal folder as well, and he may want one for extra-curricular activities, too (Ski Team, Community Theater, etc.). And he’ll want at least one folder for older emails; if it’s unlikely that he’ll need to look back through them, he may want just one called Archive. Otherwise, he can create one for each year.

Clear out the Inbox
Explain to your student that the goal is to have almost nothing in his inbox. (More on that later.) First, starting with the oldest files, your student should delete anything and everything that he will never need again. This includes all advertisements, every message from Google informing him that someone logged in to his account from a new device, etc. As with organizing his digital files, this could take a while. Encourage him to do a little each day. Because this kind of purging is a fairly mindless process, some kids can do it while watching TV, riding in the car, etc. (Others will need more focus; you know your child best.) To be frank, most of us never need to reference old emails again. However, you never know when something from the past will turn out to be useful, so err on the side of caution when it comes to deleting.

Now that all the junk is gone, your student should categorize older emails by making use of his folder system. Show him how to drag emails into the right places, starting with the oldest ones first. Again, this will likely take some time. He should keep going until he has only a handful of emails left in his inbox. Aim for ten (or fewer). Everything that’s left should be considered “active.” For example, the email from his math teacher reminding the class that they have a test in two days is still active (though in two days it won’t be). The email from his debate coach that he needs to write a reply to is still active. The packing list for the overnight field trip last month is not active and should be moved.

Maintain Order
Believe it or not, there is a magic formula for ensuring that important emails never go unnoticed and that your student doesn’t read, then forget about, an email (and this formula may just help some adults you know, too…) He should never have more than about ten emails in his inbox at any time. Ideally, he should have fewer than that. His inbox can double as a to-do list if he manages it that way. Here’s how: Each time he reads a new email, he should do one of three things:

1) Delete it immediately – Spam should not languish in his inbox. This is the easiest action.

2) Take care of it and archive it – Write a response, download the attachment, add a date to his calendar, then move the email into the right folder. Anything he’s taken care of should not sit in his inbox.

3) Keep it in his inbox because further action is needed, but he’s not going to do it right now.

Old habits, as they say, die hard, and your student may need many weeks of supported, daily practice. He’ll need to be reminded to purge and categorize. He will likely need help determining what can wait and what should be taken care of now. But he’ll likely start to feel less anxiety about what’s overlooking, motivating him to want to maintain the order he’s created.

Coming up in our next and final post in this series, a grab-bag of topics: First, you’ve got great systems – how do you make sure they actually get used? We’ll also cover tips for minimizing internet distractions and staying on top of the many logins students are expected to manage.