Family-Like Environment Better for Troubled Children and Teens

The Teaching-Family Model changes bad behavior through straight talk and loving relationships.
Findings

In the late 1960′s, psychologists Elaine Phillips, Elery Phillips, Dean Fixsen, and Montrose Wolf developed an empirically tested treatment program to help troubled children and juvenile offenders who had been assigned to residential group homes. These researchers combined the successful components of their studies into the Teaching-Family Model, which offers a structured treatment regimen in a family-like environment. The model is built around a married couple (teaching-parents) that lives with children in a group home and teaches them essential interpersonal and living skills. Not only have teaching parents’ behaviors and techniques been assessed for their effectiveness, but they have also been empirically tested for whether children like them. Teaching-parents also work with the children’s parents, teachers, employers, and peers to ensure support for the children’s positive changes. Although more research is needed, preliminary results suggest that, compared to children in other residential treatment programs, children in Teaching-Family Model centers have fewer contacts with police and courts, lower dropout rates, and improved school grades and attendance.

Couples are selected to be teaching-parents based on their ability to provide individualized and affirming care. Teaching-parents then undergo an intensive year-long training process. In order to maintain their certification, teaching-parents and Teaching-Family Model organizations are evaluated every year, and must meet the rigorous standards set by the Teaching-Family Association.
Significance
The Teaching-Family Model is one of the few evidence-based residential treatment programs for troubled children. In the past, many treatment programs viewed delinquency as an illness, and therefore placed children in institutions for medical treatment. The Teaching-Family Model, in contrast, views children’s behavior problems as stemming from their lack of essential interpersonal relationships and skills. Accordingly, the Teaching-Family Model provides children with these relationships and teaches them these skills, using empirically validated methods. With its novel view of problem behavior and its carefully tested and disseminated treatment program, the Teaching-Family Model has helped to transform the treatment of behavioral problems from impersonal interventions at large institutions to caring relationships in home and community settings. The Teaching-Family Model has also demonstrated how well-researched treatment programs can be implemented on a large scale. Most importantly, the Teaching-Family Model has given hope that young people with even the most difficult problems or behaviors can improve the quality of their lives and make contributions to society.
Practical Application
In recent years, the Teaching-Family Model has been expanded to include foster care facilities, home treatment settings, and even schools. The Teaching-Family Model has also been adapted to accommodate the needs of physically, emotionally, and sexually abused children; emotionally disturbed and autistic children and adults; medically fragile children; and adults with disabilities. Successful centers that have been active for over 30 years include the Bringing it All Back Home Study Center in North Carolina, the Houston Achievement Place in Texas, and the Girls and Boys Town in Nebraska. Other Teaching-Family Model organizations are in Alberta (Canada), Arkansas, Hawaii, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Believing You Can Get Smarter Makes You Smarter

Thinking about intelligence as changeable and malleable, rather than stable and fixed, results in greater academic achievement, especially for people whose groups bear the burden of negative stereotypes about their intelligence.
Findings

Can people get smarter? Are some racial or social groups smarter than others? Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, many people believe that intelligence is fixed, and, moreover, that some racial and social groups are inherently smarter than others. Merely evoking these stereotypes about the intellectual inferiority of these groups (such as women and Blacks) is enough to harm the academic perfomance of members of these groups. Social psychologist Claude Steele and his collaborators (2002) have called this phenomenon “stereotype threat.”

Yet social psychologists Aronson, Fried, and Good (2001) have developed a possible antidote to stereotype threat. They taught African American and European American college students to think of intelligence as changeable, rather than fixed – a lesson that many psychological studies suggests is true. Students in a control group did not receive this message. Those students who learned about IQ’s malleability improved their grades more than did students who did not receive this message, and also saw academics as more important than did students in the control group. Even more exciting was the finding that Black students benefited more from learning about the malleable nature of intelligence than did White students, showing that this intervention may successfully counteract stereotype threat.
Significance

This research showed a relatively easy way to narrow the Black-White academic achievement gap. Realizing that one’s intelligence may be improved may actually improve one’s intelligence, especially for those whose groups are targets of stereotypes alleging limited intelligence (e.g., Blacks, Latinos, and women in math domains.)
Practical Application

Blackwell, Dweck, and Trzesniewski (2002) recently replicated and applied this research with seventh-grade students in New York City. During the first eight weeks of the spring term, these students learned about the malleability of intelligence by reading and discussing a science-based article that described how intelligence develops. A control group of seventh-grade students did not learn about intelligence’s changeability, and instead learned about memory and mnemonic strategies. As compared to the control group, students who learned about intelligence’s malleability had higher academic motivation, better academic behavior, and better grades in mathematics. Indeed, students who were members of vulnerable groups (e.g., those who previously thought that intelligence cannot change, those who had low prior mathematics achievement, and female students) had higher mathematics grades following the intelligence-is-malleable intervention, while the grades of similar students in the control group declined. In fact, girls who received the intervention matched and even slightly exceeded the boys in math grades, whereas girls in the control group performed well below the boys.

These findings are especially important because the actual instruction time for the intervention totaled just three hours. Therefore, this is a very cost-effective method for improving students’ academic motivation and achievement.
Cited Research

Aronson, J., Fried, C. B., & Good, C. (2001). Reducing the effects of stereotype threat on African American college students by shaping theories of intelligence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1-13.

Steele, C. M., Spencer, S. J., & Aronson, J. (2002), Contending with group image: The psychology of stereotype and social identity threat. In Mark P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 34, pp. 379-440. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, Inc.
Additional Sources

Blackwell, L., Dweck, C., & Trzesniewski, K. (2002). Achievement across the adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Manuscript in preparation.

Dweck, C., & Leggett, E. (1988). A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality. Psychological Review, 95, 256-273.

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Bring The Fashion To Your Home

Fashion is a popular term nowadays, but have you really ever wondered what fashion really is? Fashion is basically a word that is used for a particular style that is popular in the current time period. May that be clothing, jewellery, shoes, bags, eye wear, make up or accessories, if it is popular, it will be in fashion. Fashion varies cross culturally and geographically, what may be considered to be fashionable in one part of the world may seem completely absurd in another part.

Fashion is never consistent, the world of fashion is perhaps, the most dynamic environment till date, and fashion completely depends on individual preferences, hence there is no fixed or universal phenomenon of fashion. In a country like Pakistan, for example, fashion trends revolve around their traditional attire i.e. shalwar kameez. Every season change brings about new fashion trends that are religiously followed by all. On the other hand, in the western cities like the England, fashion clothing revolves around an entirely different scenario.

Fashions come and they go, what one must be sure about is to pick out the fashion style that best goes with a person’s personality. One must not try every bizarre trend just to make they look hip or fashionable. The best fashion is the one that depicts your true personality with great comfort and ease. Talking about what is new in fashion these days, tights and skinny jeans are still in, which is the same as previous year. However, people are concentrating on wearing more tights and jeggings (the new combination of tights and jeans). Pairing your tight with a bright colorful top is what is in these summers. Lots of accessories and shades to keep your eyes safe from the blazing heat, is what you should go for, since comfort must come before style. But this doesn’t mean that you cannot look stylish at the same time. Aviators are the most in thing this season if you are planning to buy new sun glasses this summer.

Moreover, huge bags are out of style and clutches and handy bags are in this summer. Pair your outfit with a stylish clutch to complete your attire and you will good to flaunt your perfect stylish sense everywhere. However, you must be sure not to overdo it, since nothing can be as disastrous as being overdressed. So be careful while choosing which fashion is the best for you.

How to Decide on the Layout of a Vegetable Garden

If you’d like to have fresh vegetables this year, you most likely have been thinking about the layout of your vegetable garden. It’s true you could choose to go the traditional route with its tidy rows, but you don’t have to be limited to only this system. Let your imagination go and be extremely creative. Some options are raised bed gardens and container gardens. You even could go all out and substitute vegetables in a flower style garden.

Some green thumbs have recently been putting vegetables in their flower gardens, and vice-versa. Roses, violets, and a variety of other flower blossoms are not only edible, but quite tasty too. It’s a good idea to mix flowers and vegetables for another reason: the mix is great for your soil. Since different plant varieties use and put back different nutrients in the soil, when you mix the plants up a bit it helps to maintain the general balance of your soil for the next growing season.

Standard Configuration

The more conventional vegetable garden plan starts with rows. Individual rows are devoted to specific vegetables. A good rule of thumb is to lay out the rows from north to south, if possible. This orientation assures that your plants get the most sunlight possible. It is a good idea to till the ground and make an area that is level so that you can reach in to care for the plants and weed as necessary. If your garden is going to be big you might want to think about putting in walkways. Walkways will help keep you from stepping on plants while you work in the garden. If your garden will be built on a slope, be sure to have the rows cross the slope rather than run up and down it. Your seeds will be protected from washing away and the plant root growth will be more stabilized.

A vital issue for conventional vegetable gardens is to look into the amount of space your seedlings need to grow. The damp spring weather can encourage many different molds, mildew, and fungus to grow. Plants that are too tightly clumped together have a greater chance of transferring diseases to each other. And bugs can easily infest and spread quickly in confined spaces.

Go Above Ground

You might think about setting up your vegetable garden rather than laying down your garden. A fantastic substitute to the conventional rows in the dirt is a raised bed vegetable garden. A raised bed garden is planted in blocks above the dirt. Planting up saves space, gives you better control over your plants, and saves your knees and back. You have the basic foundation for a raised bed with a couple of cinder blocks, or an old timber, or even some old bricks.

A four-square garden is an above ground garden that’s divided into 4 areas with a nice centerpiece like a statue or tree.

Soil depth of 12″ is ideal for a raised bed garden. The soil warms up quicker in a raised bed system, which will kick off your garden earlier.

Add Some Style

The Kitchen Garden is the perfect garden for those who want more visual appeal. A Kitchen Garden mixes herbs and vegetables in a small garden that usually sits close to the kitchen. What makes this type of garden more appealing to the eye is design. Usually they are laid out in geometric patterns with stone or brick paths running through them. Sometimes Kitchen Gardens will be surrounded by hedges that are very well maintained. Picture a backdrop of lattice covered with beans and peas. In front are some fancy lettuce with their bright red hues and maybe a little curly parsley. Maybe add a few flowers, marigolds to keep the bugs away. That is a unique eye appealing garden that doesn’t lose its functionality.

Even More Option

The beauty of laying out your vegetable garden is that there are numerous options. When you’re dreaming of your layout think about your lifestyle, the space you have available for your garden, how much time you can devote to putting in the garden and then maintaining it. It’s perfectly fine to have an asymmetrical garden that conforms to your space. The beauty of the asymmetrical garden is there are no rules.

Final Advice

Keep a gardeners journal, recording things like how you fixed pest problems and germinating schedules. Your garden diary will be a help for you every year, who knows it may become a memento for your family. Regardless of which type of vegetable garden you choose to build, keep a drawing or blueprint of it in your journal. It’s true that your perennials will be left in the same spot year after year, of course, but you should rotate your annuals to keep the soil healthy and recharge the nutrients in the ground. It’ll take some experience to learn everything you need to in order to care for your garden, so be patient.