Attention and behavior set the tone for summer camp

Barbara Corbellini Duarte / Asst. News Director

A line of cars forms while parents drop off their children for summer camp.

Counselors pick up the children from their cars and guide them to the patio of the school, where the children sit in groups of 12 to 15 for a morning discussion.

To outsiders these activities resemble a summer camp, but this program is not your typical camp.

It is the Summer Treatment Program organized by the Center for Children and Families at the University, and the children attending this camp deal with behavior and/or attention disorders such as ADHD, oppositional defiance disorder and conduct disorder.

“Parents are interested in putting their kids in a place where they’re going to get treatment instead of doing nothing,” said Daniel Waschbusch, professor in the department of psychology and investigator in the Center for Children and Families. “[Where] they’re not going to get kicked out of camp because of their behavior, and where they’re going to get their academic maintained, instead of going downhill.”

Parents of ADHD children encounter problems to manage the inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity of their children—traits that often result in bad academic performance and difficulty to relate with other children. On the other hand, parents of CD children struggle to control their child’s repetitive misbehavior towards others’ rights and societal rules, which can often lead to aggressive behavior.

Waschbusch explains that the program offers the appropriate treatment these children need, so parents can finally breathe a sigh of relief.

The program uses evidence-based methods and behavior therapy. Evidence-based methods are procedures that have been tested repeatedly and proven to be effective. Behavior therapy uses positive reinforcement and consequences of actions to change behavior.

William Pelham, director of CCF, started the program in 1980 at Florida State University and then at FIU three summers ago.

The program runs in three locations: the Biscayne Bay Campus, Pines Center and the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Elementary Early Childhood Center, which is located five minutes away from the Modesto Maidique Campus. The three sites host 240 children from pre-K to high school.

Throughout the day, the campers spend two hours in a classroom to work on their math, reading and grammar skills. For the remaining seven hours, the kids play sports, swim and go to art class.

“They are just having a good time, like any other kid in a summer camp,” Waschbusch said.

Each group of 12 to 15 children has one lead counselor who is a graduate student and four other counselors who are undergraduate; 120 students participate in the program on a paid internship basis. While half of these students are from the University, the other half are recruited nationally and internationally.

The children are on a point system for the entire day, where they lose points for misbehavior, and earn points for following the rules and for positive behavior.

“If a child loses points for complaining for example, there’s somebody writing all that data down,” Erika Coles, clinical director at CCF, said.

This data is also used to report to the family if the treatment is working, or in which areas the child needs improvement.

According to Coles, the intensity of the program is one of the reasons why so many counselors are needed.

Sarah Helseth is a lead counselor in the program and is working on her doctorate degree in the Clinical Science in Child and Adolescent Psychology Program at the University.

Before the first class begins, Helseth gives some feedback from the previous day to her group of campers.

“Something very important happened yesterday, nobody earned points,” she said. “I hope today everybody tries super hard.”

She asks the students to drum roll on their desks while she gives away two awards from the previous day.

“Best sports award goes to Trevor!”

Trevor proudly grabs his best sport button and places it on his shirt.

“I like to see the kids succeed, and enjoy themselves, and feel like they accomplish things because they get a lot of negative feedback,” Helseth said.

Teachers and counselors are trained to pay little attention to opposing actions and pay more attention to positive conduct and improvements. Campers receive constant feedback and are often reminded of the point system.

If a child misbehave constantly or acts aggressively in purpose, he or she gets “time out,” when they are placed out of class for a couple of minutes, so other children won’t be distracted or follow the behavior of the first one.

To encourage the children to behave well, they can exchange their points for prizes by the end of each week. A 1000 points award could be a super ball, and a 20,000 points award could be a basket ball.

Campers can also earn points for Fun Friday, which is a day where children do not go to classroom and only do a fun activity, such as a dance day. If one of the campers does not earn enough points, he or she will not participate on Fun Friday.

During the program, parents also get involved, engaged and attend parent training sessions.

“It’s [a] really intensive engaging experience that can set people on a trajectory that we hope that [the parents] will continue without us,” Coles said. “It’s really 360 hours of treatment all condensed in an eight-week summer boot camp for parents and kids.”

Parenting training sessions are once a week. The counselors teach the parents the techniques they use in the camp and train them to apply the system at home.

“We kind of help them process the good and the maybe not so good things that are going on in their homes so that we can try and help them change the home environment by making it a little bit more structured,” Helseth said.

The camp is also home to various research projects, including one that has caught national attention. Waschbusch has been conducting research with children that have conduct problems and callous-unemotional traits, which made the cover of the The New York Times Magazine in May.

Both children with callous-unemotional traits or conduct problems can show defiant, argumentative or aggressive behavior; however, while a child with conduct problem will feel guilty after a misbehavior, a child with CU traits won’t. Children with CU traits also lack empathy and response to punishment.

“There’s a little bit of evidence that [CU children] may respond to treatment differently,” Waschbusch said. “So we’re trying to look at reformulating treatments that work better for these kids with CU traits.”

According to Waschbusch, it’s still too early to know if the system of reward instead of punishment will work just as well for CU children.

“We’re still in development here, so we’re collecting data this summer, and we’ll find out,” he said. “Some days might be great, working just like we thought it would, and some days might be exactly the opposite of what we thought it was going to do.”

Waschbusch explains that just like an introvert child can become an extrovert adult, a child that has behavior problems or CU traits can change as he or she grows up.

“I think that you are born with a range of these traits and you can shift them up or down depending on your experience,” he said.

Helseth stresses the importance of treating these children early.

“I’m a big believer in early intervention because if you intervene early you can change a child long term trajectory pretty dramatically,” she said.

Around 5 p.m., parents reform the line of cars to pick up their children and touch base with the counselors, but the day is not yet over for Helseth and the counselors, who stay in the camp for a couple more hours to input all the data from the day in a computer.

Helseth, who is working her third summer in the camp, always hopes to see the children improve in the long run.

“At the end of the summer you always [think], ‘I wonder what’s going to happen to this child; I wonder if their parents are going to be able to keep up the parent training we’ve discussed,’” Helseth said.

She is pleased to see children coming back to the camp and working hard to change their behavior.

“It’s really exciting to say on the first day of camp, ‘Hey, it’s nice to see you again,’” she said. “It makes the experience worthwhile because you can see the actual results of your work.”