nothin Miss Kendra Helps Kids Deal With Covid-19… | New Haven Independent

Miss Kendra Helps Kids Deal With Covid-19 Fears

Miss Erinn, a representative of the Miss Kendra Programs, beams over jaunty yet gentle piano music. She speaks directly into the camera. Oh! Hello! I’ve been waiting for you! Wow, it’s so good to see you. Do you know what time it is?”

It’s Miss Kendra Time!” children say. Miss Erinn’s smile gets even bigger. It’s Miss Kendra Time,” she affirms. Without losing her welcoming tone, she continues. Today we’re going to be talking about the coronavirus and the way that it has been affecting all the kids and families around this community and all over the country — even all over the world.”

The New Haven-based Miss Kendra Programs works in schools in New Haven and across the country to help students from kindergarten through middle school with trauma. The new video, aimed at kids in kindergarten to second grade, is one of a series of videos designed to help students from kindergarten to middle school talk about and deal with the Covid-19 outbreak — a topic many adults have trouble talking about. It’s part of the outreach and adaptation of the Miss Kendra Programs as teachers switch from teaching in classrooms to online.

Starting in 2018, one of the primary vehicles for the Miss Kendra Programs was a book called The Legend of Miss Kendra, which told the story of a woman who lost a child when the child was 10 years old, and began working at a school where she then connected with the children there by asking them about any troubles they were having. Over time, children began writing letters to Miss Kendra and she answered them. She gave them beads to hold to give them strength. As the book relates, sometimes when the children found a bright red bead in their hand, or pocket, or backpack, they remembered how strong they were to live through the hard times … that someone was watching out for them. And that thought will always make Miss Kendra happy, wherever she is.”

The program developed around the book — for Miss Kendra staff and for teachers — was designed to help children address their worries and fears by writing to Miss Kendra, knowing that Miss Kendra will always write back. The new videos have been made so that children can continue their relationship with Miss Kendra as a new fear sweeps the country.

The Legend of Miss Kendra has no author. It turns out that this goes straight to the heart of the thought behind it. We tried on purpose to create some sense of mystery to it,” said David Johnson, a licensed clinical psychologist, founder of New Haven’s Post Traumatic Stress Center on Edwards Street, and a founder of The Miss Kendra Programs. It’s not Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. What we want is for this to be a healing legend that lives in the imagination of the kids.”

Johnson pointed out that a lot of the details of the story are left vague. We don’t really know where she lives, or how the child died,” he said. This is intentional. Poetry and art are places where things are removed from the real world to allow children to project themselves into that world.”

When Miss Kendra staff present the book in classrooms, Johnson said, the gaps in the story tend to draw the students in. Kids ask: what color hair does she have? What’s her favorite color? What does she like to eat?’ Our staff are taught to answer: great question — what do you think?’”

The same sense of inviting mystery then lets the students into the next part of the program. When the kids ask in the classroom can she come and visit us?’ we say, well, we’re not exactly sure where she lives, but would you like to write her?’”

The content of the story and the way it’s presented draw on decades of research about trauma in childhood and its neurological effects, as well as how traumatized children can be helped. We began with the idea that we wanted to allow kids to express their worries and address their fears,” Johnson said. All the neuroscience research has shown,” he said, that one good relationship with an adult can buffer children against trauma.’

Some children don’t find that in their parents, so they’re in a position of needing a more stable, trustworthy presence,” Johnson said. That presence can be a teacher, or another adult family member, or someone in the community. To a certain extent, it can also be Miss Kendra. She is imaginal,” Johnson said, but the beautiful thing is that she doesn’t go on vacation, she doesn’t have paperwork, and she doesn’t get sick.”

The counselors are the substantiation of Miss Kendra” for the students, Johnson said. By extension, so are the bus drivers, the teachers, the staff in the school — they’re all Miss Kendra, adults who care about their safety and want to listen to them.”

About eight schools in New Haven use the Miss Kendra program with their students. Miss Kendra is also in schools in New Britain, and farther afield, in seven other states across the country, with schools in three more states in the works. All told, that means about 50 schools, and between 20,000 and 25,000 students. This year there’s going to be 100,000 letters written to Miss Kendra, and 100,000 letters are going to be written back,” Johnson said.

A Better Understanding

The Miss Kendra program draws from advances in neuroscience and the study of trauma that, in the past couple decades, have helped academic and medical professionals better understand how trauma works in children and what can be done about it.

Starting 20 years ago,” Johnson said, the advance in our understanding of the neuroscience brain was that toxic stress was influencing brain functioning.” As we may remember from biology class, the brain has essentially three areas; one of them is made up of the limbic structures, which process fear and emotion. When someone is under stress, the amygdala — part of the limbic system — sends this to the cerebral cortex, where consciousness is — I’m aware of what I’m thinking and feeling,’” Johnson said.

Johnson.

Among the cortex’s functions, Johnson said, is cognitive inhibition” — the brain process that prevents you, for example, from telling someone they’re an idiot just because you may think they are, or in a more general way, the process that allows you to compartmentalize stress and focus on another task that needs to be done. Stresses, whether multiple or prolonged, can affect the frontal cortex’s ability to inhibit behavior. All of us have a threshold where we can’t do it any more,” Johnson said.

Understanding that, Johnson said, has led to understanding why we have the achievement gap” in school systems. It’s not because they’re bad kids; it’s because their brains have been impacted” by stressors in their lives. It’s a real thing that’s impacting the child’s brain.” These stressors can range from domestic violence and abuse to, at extreme ends, the effects of growing up in a war zone.

There are some stressors you can’t tame,” Johnson said. When the environmental factors can’t be changed, or changed quickly, trauma experts have turned, then, to helping children figure out to cope. Meditation, skill building, and the concept of resilience — strengthening the host rather than getting rid of the toxin,” Johnson said.

Amid these leaps in understanding, however, what has not changed from the beginning — and will never change, in my view — is the difficulty of asking direct questions about what the kid is going through,” Johnson said. It is really hard to ask a first grader whether they have been touched inappropriately by an adult.” And it is absolutely essential” that it is done; universal screenings for trauma is the basis of a public health approach to trauma.”

What do we do about it? Can you engage with the kids directly in conversations about these difficult subjects?” Johnson continued. People have to be trained to do it. and the Miss Kendra program provides us a safe way to do it.”

In another sense, The Legend of Miss Kendra is employing, as Johnson put it, methods of processing trauma that have been going on for thousands of years. Grimm’s fairy tales are all about child abuse — children being eaten and burned up — and child protection.” As with what can happen when you talk to children about fairy tales, we’re providing space for kids to talk a little bit about what they’re worried about.”

Sharing The Pain

As the Miss Kendra program adapts to school closures by moving from books and in-person presentations to videos and teacher coordination, Johnson is also looking ahead to what happens when schools reopen — not only in terms of what the Miss Kendra may look like in the future, but how students, teachers, schools and society at large may deal with the aftereffects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This has never happened before,” Johnson pointed out. There’s never been a worldwide experience of shared social isolation and lockdown.” The previously disruptive pandemic — the 1918 flu outbreak that killed tens of millions of people — happened in a time of much different levels of communication technology. During the medieval bubonic plagues, as literature from the time illustrates, social isolation meant receiving no news at all from outside your door. By contrast, today’s media landscape allows many people the chance to know what is happening all over the world.

What does this mean for trauma experts? Our best guess is that we’re in the middle of coping with the direct threat,” Johnson said. When this happens, people call on every coping strategy they can call on.”

This goes for children as well as adults. Right now kids are dealing with this. This has not been a time for people to express their anxiety. They’re containing their anxiety.”

The phenomenon of social distancing carries its own complications and perils. it’s paradoxical — everyone’s talking about social distancing, but people are packed into their homes, closer than they’ve ever been before.” Johnson has found that some people are doing fine. There are some people for whom the isolation at home is reassuring. We have several patients who come to our center who are doing quite well,” he said. He recalled one patient who said that my agoraphobia used to be symptom. Now it’s the law.”

But other people are obviously being driven mad,” Johnson said. When people are forced to live together — like families — domestic violence rises. Tensions rise. There’s an increase in divorce.” In Johnson’s experience, it’s a society-wide problem, crossing all socioeconomic lines. They’re not allowed to go out — they’re afraid to go out— so they’re taking it out on each other.”

You can’t make assumptions about what any particular person or family is going to experience,” Johnson concluded. At the same time, he has his eye on the near future. I do believe that once the physical threat has dropped, you’re gong to see a widespread concern about people’s emotional health…. When things start to return to normal, there’s going to be emotion and stress that comes out,” he said. It may come out in creative ways.” But it may not. It’s going to be a lot of interpersonal strain.”

In particular, he said, when kids return to school — which will be six months after they left — schools are going to have to balance the reassuring structure of getting back to work and letting kids express what happened. I cannot imagine how a kindergartener is processing what they’re seeing and hearing.”

Johnson pointed out that there are positive aspects to a shared trauma. The stress on individuals is reduced,” he said. In fact, it can bring people together.”

At the same time, paradoxically, it heightens the loneliness of people who have had individual trauma,” he said. Kids who may have suffered domestic violence during the pandemic, for instance, may not feel that there is space for them to share their own experiences. It can intensify the negative effects for people who have been sexually abused, or emotionally blackmailed,” Johnson said; these things can become more toxic because of the attention to the collective trauma.”

The virus is a terrible thing, but people’s individual experiences unrelated to the trauma should not be ignored.” Johnson added. Counselors talking to children can’t ask just about the pandemic; as they would under any circumstances, they should ask about the things that are not shared.

Going Digital

For now, the Miss Kendra program is rolling out its videos for teachers to use in their own distance-learning curricula. The teacher is the main contact with all the children,” Johnson said. We’re providing these videos and there’s more coming — a Miss Kendra TV channel, really.” Johnson is confident that the program can continue to be effective in the jump in media. The videos are very gentle. It would be difficult for them to be misused,” he said, and we have a lot of trust in our teachers.”

More than trust, really; as Johnson said, teachers are unbelievable in their capacity” to adapt and use the videos. Johnson reported that teachers already involved with the program have come with various creative ideas” for how to keep it going. Quite a few teachers are still doing the letters; they’re just doing it over email now. Kids are still writing e‑letters to Miss Kendra, and getting responses back.

To be honest, I think this is going to be a permanent addition to the program,” Johnson said of some of the innovations that teachers and Miss Kendra staff are coming up with. We’ll produce additional videos and create a Kendra YouTube channel that will be available to the public.”

Johnson is hopeful that as so many social structures have fallen by the wayside” during the pandemic, teachers are being appreciated all the more for continuing to do the work they’re doing. Even under normal circumstances, he said, the way it’s organized in elementary schools, you have one person standing between 25 kids and their futures. What we put on them, and what is required of them, is overwhelming.”

So as the Miss Kendra program works with teachers in New Haven and, increasingly, all over the country, we’re going to be focusing on creating a national community of Miss Kendra teachers and basically be part of the larger trauma-informed movement. That’s really the important thing — it’s what we’re all doing together to address adverse childhood experiences.”

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