Please consider the following prompt and craft a response that sufficiently captures all aspects of it from your unique point of view and original research. Please cite and reference any source(s) you use to help write this response in APA format. Notice that in addition to your Main Entry post, you will need to offer two substantive classmate response posts to complete this exercise. See below instructions that will guide your peer engagement thinking/posting. See syllabus or course calendar for due dates for both Main Entry posts and peer engagement.
Main Entry (Parts 1 & 2)
Part 1: As part of their training, child and adolescent psychologists hone very specific skills that allow them to connect with the inner worlds of the young people they work with – young people who may not yet have the words to truly express what they are feeling and thinking, or what they need or really want. In order to do that, they must also develop a baseline understanding of the unique and fundamental needs of all children. And what the struggling adult really needed during their younger phase of development that could have made life easier for them later.
Because they know that not all children who need help end up in a psychologist’s office, child and adolescent clinicians have hit the pavement, so to speak, educating anyone who plays a role in the development of a child (parents, teachers, other family members, researchers, other psychologists, policy makers, politicians, students of psychology, the list goes on) on what children really do need in order to blossom into a physically and psychologically healthy adulthood.
One of the ways they communicate this to the masses is through TED Talks – and there are quite a few of them on the topic of children and adolescents. Let’s do this:
- Do a search on TED.com or YouTube for a relevant talk and listen to it/watch it – anything that offers insight into the unique needs, challenges, and perspective/worldview of a child or adolescent. Offer a link to the talk and reference the speaker and title of it so that we can go watch if we’d like as well.
- Discern the speaker’s home message and summarize it for us. Pull out one or two mic drop* quotes from it to represent your legwork in executing this part of the exercise.
- Then, connect this take home message with something specific you learned in your learning resources this week. Synthesize these two pieces of information into one central point, born of your own integration of these two concepts.
- Draw your own conclusions about how psychologists (or anyone in a position to help a child) can take your “combined” insight and use it in their work.
Part 2: To this point you have learned a lot about the practice of psychotherapy. The same theoretical underpinnings, methods, common factors, and techniques clinicians use in the younger – middle aged adult population apply in geropsychology. However, given the unique needs of the aging population, traditional assessment and therapy accommodations should be considered.
Given what you have learned about the neuropsychological and mental health needs of seniors, what might some of these accommodations be? Prior to consulting a source, write down some ideas you have based on your personal experience of older adults. What would those people (the ones you know) need if they were to enter a psychological assessment or psychotherapy environment? Then, do some research and see if you can find any other professional sources that have identified and offer solutions for that same issue.
Peer Engagement
Remember to circle back and substantively respond to two classmates by the due date specified in the syllabus and course calendar. Your peer engagement posts must go beyond summarizing and praising. To aid you in this endeavor, incorporate one or more of the following lines of thinking in your peer engagement posts, ensuring both a hearty, meaningful conversation and that your work meets criteria for substance and depth:
- Synthesize the point you ultimately arrived at in your Part 1 with what your peer arrived at in theirs to coalesce a fuller understanding of clinical child and adolescent psychology.
- If you watched the TED talk they linked to, share your thoughts on it and what you identified as some important “mic-drop” moments.
- Share a story or personally resonant insight that corresponds with the points your peer made in their Part 2. Offer another method through which this issue could be addressed or another relevant source the peer might be interested in reading/watching as it bears on their Part 2.
*a mic-drop moment is any statement or action that is so powerful that it metaphorically represents the act of dropping a microphone and walking away, as if to say, “nothing more needs to be said or done because I just made the point as emphatically as it possibly could be.”
INCLUDE CLASSMATE RESPONSES: ATTACHED BELOW