Tics
What we call ‘tics” are involuntary movements or muscular twitches, usually in the facial area. They may involve, for example, blinking your eyes, wrinkling your forehead or wrinkles around your mouth. Tics can also occur in your shoulder area or on your hands, or they may be vocal, involving coughing, clearing your throat or sneezing by inhaling quickly.
What causes tics?
The precise cause is unknown, but most experts believe that they are caused by some type of dysfunction in how the brain handles motor impulses, in a manner similar to stuttering or stammering, disorders which also appear to result from some sort of disturbance in how impulses traverse our brains. People who suffer from tics cannot help it. Although deliberate attempts to prevent a tic from occurring can be made, such efforts often backfire causing the tic to happen more often.
What we call ‘tics” are involuntary movements or muscular twitches, usually in the facial area. They may involve, for example, blinking your eyes, wrinkling your forehead or wrinkles around your mouth.
Learning control is better than taking medication
Doctors often prescribe medication for children who suffer from tics but a wiser approach is to help your child learn ways of controlling them. The method described here is called habit reversal training (HRT) and is based on the idea that sufferers can learn to prevent a tic by voluntarily performing another, but less visible, movement just before the tic occurs.
Talk openly about the tic
An important element in helping your child learn to control tics is talking with them openly about what is happening. Ask them to suggest a word they can use to refer to the tic, and, if necessary, let them use a mirror to see what it looks like. With their permission, you can also imitate the tic to show them how it appears.
Count the frequency of occurrence
Count how many times your child’s tic occurs in a given time. This information is important and will help you monitor their progress. As a first step in helping them learn control, you can ask them child to deliberately increase the tic frequency: “You did eight tics in 60 seconds. Let’s see if you can manage 12 in the same time?” The idea behind increasing the tic frequency is to help them realize that their tic is not entirely out of their control, but that they can indeed exert some degree of control over it.
Predict when the tic will occur
The next step is learning how to feel when a tic is about to happen. This is possible because, in a manner similar to how you feel you are about to sneeze, people who suffer with tics usually experience some kind of sensation that tells them a tic is on its way. Learning to realise when a tic is about to occur is important for the following step, which is inventing a replacement behaviour.
Replacement behaviours
Help your child propose a replacement behaviour they can use to prevent a tic from happening. For example, if the tic is a spasm around their eyes, the replacement behaviour could be gently closing their eyes for a second or two whenever they feel the tic is about to happen. If the tic involves repeatedly uttering a sound that resembles them clearing their throat, the replacement behaviour could be breathing slowly in and out two times whenever they feel the tic is about to occur.
When choosing replacement behaviours, remember they should happen in the same body zone as the tic, but be less visible and less disturbing.
Multiple tics
Suffering from several different tics is not uncommon. If this is the case with your child, start off by selecting one and then helping them learn to control it. Once they have gained some degree of control over the first tic, use the same method to help them learn to control the next one.
Kids’Skills
To ensure that learning this new skill is fun and rewarding, use the Kids’Skills steps to help your child learn the skill of preventing tics by using replacement behaviours.
Apply the steps of Kids’Skills
When the question is not how to stop the child from doing the not-good thing, but how to get the child to do some better thing, it becomes possible to motivate the child using Kids’Skills. For example, you can discuss the benefits of learning to put aside more time for the better thing, you can ask the child to give a name to the skill, to pick a power creature, to recruit supporters, etc. It is also important to make an agreement with the child about how others can help them to remember to do it, how others can praise them when they do it, and how others can remind them in an agreeable manner if the child sometimes forgets to do it.
Synopisis
A method called habit reversal training (HRT) can be used to help your child gain control over tics. In this, you help them learn the skill of preventing the tic from occurring by deliberately executing another physical movement whenever they feel the tic is about to happen. More information on HRT is available on the internet. Use the Kids’Skills steps to make learning the skill of habit reversal fun and rewarding.
This article is owned by: Kids’Skills http://www.kidsskillsapp.com/
