Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Worry and anxiety › The cost of avoiding
A technique that sounds right is not the same as one aimed at whatever is holding the problem in place. Ask what the hours at home actually contain, who is there, what is gained and what is escaped. The answers point at the plan, and they save months spent doing something perfectly reasonable to the wrong target.
Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these (Quran 17:36). It asks you to find out before you act, and that applies to helpers too.
الإسراء
وَلَا تَقۡفُ مَا لَيۡسَ لَكَ بِهِۦ عِلۡمٌۚ إِنَّ ٱلسَّمۡعَ وَٱلۡبَصَرَ وَٱلۡفُؤَادَ كُلُّ أُوْلَٰٓئِكَ كَانَ عَنۡهُ مَسۡـُٔولࣰ ا
Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these
Qur’an 17:36read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
An updated meta-analysis of 60 randomised trials with 4,234 participants found the average effect of acceptance and commitment therapy was small, around 0.42, a more modest picture than its advocates usually give. That is a broad average across very different problems, so it says little about any single use of it. The point it makes here still holds: a well regarded method applied generally produces moderate results, which is an argument for aiming carefully.
Ost LG. (2014). The efficacy of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: an updated systematic review and meta-analysis.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Help only works when it is pointed at whatever is keeping the behaviour going.
Whoever is standing in the hall at half past seven needs to understand the trap as well as the child does. A plan agreed on a Tuesday afternoon will not survive a Wednesday morning otherwise.
Listen for the moment a young person starts explaining why home is better. A preference with reasons attached is much harder to shift than plain distress.
Missing school is not one thing. There is pleading that folds, pleading that becomes an hour of protest, arriving late, arriving and then sitting in the nurse's room by eleven, and not arriving at all.