Editorials for Clinical Practice
CHADIS Co-Director and President, Dr. Barbara Howard is a regular contributor to the Behavioral Consult column of Pediatric News and an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Dr. Howard is a developmental-behavioral pediatrician trained by Dr. T. Berry Brazelton at Harvard University. She is a national speaker on child behavior problems and is a past president of the Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics. She was a contributing author for Bright Futures™, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Primary Care (DSM-PC) and Bright Futures in Practice: Mental Health and has served on national committees of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Learn how to manage your patients’ behavior problems
Publish date: September 11, 2017
Pediatric News
One of the presentations you’ll definitely want to attend is Dr. Barbara J. Howard’s “As Easy as A-B-C-G: Office Management of Behavior Problems in Children.”
She’ll teach you the A, B, C, and G of managing behavior problems:
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A = Antecedents/meaning
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B = Behavior
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C = Consequences
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G = Gap in skills
Dr. Howard, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, will use case presentations to show you how this model works in detail. She’ll describe how best to organize a session with a patient, how to engage the family, and how to approach the objectives of family interviewing.
Dr. Barbara Howard
In her case presentation of a 7-year-old boy with ADHD and oppositional defiant behavior, Dr. Howard suggests clarifying the meaning the behavior has for the child first. The next step is to educate the child about ADHD and executive function. It is important to screen and treat for relevant conditions, such as developmental delay, low cognitive functioning, learning disabilities, speech/language delay, social learning disability, or regulatory differences, such as sensory hyper/hypo reactivity.
Dr. Howard goes into much more detail, giving examples in each case, explaining how to assist the parent-child relationship, providing parents with bypass strategies for various issues, and teaching behavior modification for dysfunctional patterns.
That is just one case presentation. Others detail how to handle a toddler who refuses to go to bed, an aggressive 5-year-old, a clingy 9-year-old suffering from anxiety, and a 12-year-old who has recently begun wetting the bed and stealing from her mother.
At the American Academy of Pediatrics’ annual meeting in Chicago, Dr. Howard will be presenting Sunday, Sept. 17, from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., and Monday, Sept. 18, from 8:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. You don’t want to miss it!
Dr. Howard’s contribution to this publication is as a paid expert to Frontline Medical Communications. E-mail her at pdnews@frontlinemedcom.com.