The New School in the Heights is pleased to share news about an exciting new addition to our program: a Neuhaus trained Academic Language Specialist who works on campus to help dual diagnosis children who have both dyslexia and an anxiety-based disorder that contributes to their learning difficulties. Now bright children with a diagnosed learning disability plus diagnoses like ADHD, sensory integration, OCD, and bi-polar disorder can be helped with both under one roof. Executive Director Diane Manning, Ph.D., said, "Having an Academic Language Specialist is particularly appropriate at our school because of the chicken-and-egg relationship between having a learning disability and the strong emotions that come with feeling different from your peers. When I was head of the Reading and Learning Disabilities Clinic at Tufts University, I dreamed of a school that could break that cycle. Today we are closer to reaching that goal."

Jenny Skjonsby was trained at the Neuhaus Education Center in Bellaire which has a national reputation for its highly successful programs for preparing academic language specialists. The curriculum Jenny uses is based on the well-researched and highly regarded Orton Gillingham program. She works with each child, usually 1:1, on a very individualized program to meet their specific needs and pace. She works with the students on handwriting, reading, spelling, and vocabulary. More specifically, she stresses phonological awareness activities that have to do with sound-symbol correspondence. Her approach is systematic, with a multisensory approach to teaching reading. Because she is on-campus every day, she is able to coordinate with the child's "regular" teacher for the rest of the child's day.

Jenny says of her experience with us, "I'm having a great experience here at The New School in the Heights. The students are all different, but I am seeing much progress."

This spring The New School in the Heights has added a daily Executive Functioning Skills class for our older students. While all teachers in all classes strive to help students with executive functioning at all times during the day, the purpose of a special class is to give extra support to those students who are most challenged in this area. The goal is to help students with planning, paying attention, solving problems, initiating and monitoring actions, and being organized. They learn that being organized means both learning how to organize one's work and also one's self. This training will be useful while they are students here, but also when they transition to mainstream high schools. One of the advantages of offering the class here at school is there can be immediate follow-up. Students who forget to complete all or part of their homework, for example, can be redirected and guided by the teacher using the specific executive functioning skills they are learning in class. We are pleased to be able to offer this special class as an expansion of The New School in the Heights' "wrap-around" services for children and families.

The New School in the Heights is the recipient of the Association for Child Psychoanalysis’ 2009 Award for Excellence. This award is given annually for exemplary work with children and families who experience emotional distress for reasons such as bullying, natural disasters, family disruption, illness or death. The New School in the Heights began as a Houston special needs school in 2005 to help bright children ages 5-14 who need more educational and therapeutic support than traditional settings can usually provide. It is unique among other psychoanalytic schools in that it is a school for children with ADHD, as well as a school for Asperger's and other diagnoses such as Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), Separation Anxiety, OCD, selective mutism among others. Using the expertise learned by helping their own students, NSH educators and clinicians provide free consultation to teachers at other schools who want to better understand the emotional needs of their own students. No school or child care center is ever charged for this service.

“Outreach into the community is an important tradition at The New School in the Heights. Houston has supported our efforts to build our unique school, and we want to give back to the community,” explained Co-Founder Arthur J. Farley, M.D. Dr. Farley is one of the clinicians who volunteers his expertise at child care centers and schools. In addition, Dr. Farley is President of the Texas Academy of Psychiatry and Past President of the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians. Executive Director Diane Manning, Ph.D., echoed his sentiments. “We can help a relatively small number of families in our own school, but by teaching others what we have learned in our own classrooms, our impact is exponential.” Dr. Manning has a strong commitment to educating teachers. Before moving to Houston and heading The New School in the Heights she was Chair of the Department of Education at Tulane University. Other clinicians working with area teachers are Monica Altamirano, LCP, Adriana Crane, LSMW, and Dr. Felicia Powell-Williams.

Previous winners of this prestigious award include The Anna Freud Centre in London, the professional journal Psychoanalytic Study of the Child journal, The Hanna Perkins Center in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Pacella Center in New York City. In citing the selection committee’s reasons for choosing the New School in the Heights for this honor, ACP President Kerry Kelly Novick noted the school’s generous outreach to child care centers, particularly those in the Heights such as the West End Service Center and the YMCA, and their assistance to vulnerable and needy families and professional colleagues after Hurricane Katrina.

Congratulations to our Cliinical Director and co-founder, Arthur J. Farley, M.D. for being named the "Doctor's Choice" for Top Psychiatrist in Houston.

What makes Dr. Farley's latest award so special is that he was chosen by his peers: other Houston psychiatrists.

We are fortunate to have such an eminent child and adult psychiatrist/psychoanalyst heading our school's clinical team.

The New School in the Heights was the host of a national conference on October 22-24, 2010. Clinicians who work in schools and other applied psychoanalytic programs from all over the country visited our school and learn more about our special approach to helping children and families. The Alliance for Psychoanalytic Schools which was founded by the Hanna Perkins School in Cleveland, The Allen Creek School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the Lucy Daniels School in Raleigh-Durham and The New School in the Heights, sponsors this annual event which gives "meeting doctors" like Drs. Farley and Manning, Adriana Crane, Cecilia Samish, Dr. Janet Schwind, Dr. Felicia Powell-Williams and Monica Altamirano a chance to learn from others and to share our own special methods with our visitors. The New School in the Heights is honored to be chosen as host for this important event. We are the only psychoanalytic school which helps children from kindergarten through grade 8. An important part of our mission is to share our unique and successful methods with other clinicians. This is the second time NSH has hosted a national conference. The first was last year's Regional Meeting of Child Psychoanalysts.

Disciplining young children is one of the key jobs of any parent - most people would have no trouble agreeing with that. But whether or not that discipline should include spanking or other forms of corporal punishment is a far trickier issue.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) does not endorse spanking for any reason, citing its lack of long-term effectiveness as a behavior-changing tactic. Instead the AAP supports strategies such as "time-outs" when children misbehave, which focus on getting kids to reflect on their behavior and the consequences of their actions. Still, as many parents can attest, few responses bring about the immediate interruption of a full-blown tantrum like a swift whack to the bottom. (See pictures of the evolution of the college dorm.)

Now researchers at Tulane University provide the strongest evidence yet against the use of spanking: of the nearly 2,500 youngsters in the study, those who were spanked more frequently at age 3 were more likely to be aggressive by age 5. The research supports earlier work on the pitfalls of corporal punishment, including a study by Duke University researchers that revealed that infants who were spanked at 12 months scored lower on cognitive tests at age 3.

"I'm excited by the idea that there is now some nice hard data that can back up clinicians when they share their caution with parents against using corporal punishment," says Dr. Jayne Singer, clinical director of the child and parent program at Children's Hospital Boston, who was not involved in the study. (Read "Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School?")

Led by Catherine Taylor, the Tulane study was the first to control simultaneously for variables that are most likely to confound the association between spanking and later aggressive behavior. The researchers accounted for factors such as acts of neglect by the mother, violence or aggression between the parents, maternal stress and depression, the mother's use of alcohol and drugs, and even whether the mother considered abortion while pregnant with the child.

Each of these factors contributed to children's aggressive behavior at age 5, but they could not explain all of the violent tendencies at that age. Further, the positive connection between spanking and aggression remained strong, even after these factors had been accounted for.

"The odds of a child being more aggressive at age 5 if he had been spanked more than twice in the month before the study began increased by 50%," says Taylor. And because her group also accounted for varying levels of natural aggression in children, the researchers are confident that "it's not just that children who are more aggressive are more likely to be spanked."

What the study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, shows is that outside of the most obvious factors that may influence violent behavior in children, spanking remains a strong predictor. "This study controls for the most common risk factors that people tend to think of as being associated with aggression," says Singer. "This adds more credence, more data and more strength to the argument against using corporal punishment."

Among the mothers who were studied, nearly half (45.6%) reported no spanking in the previous month; 27.9% reported spanking once or twice; and 26.5% reported spanking more than twice. Compared with children who were not hit, those who were spanked were more likely to be defiant, demand immediate satisfaction of their wants and needs, get frustrated easily, have temper tantrums and lash out physically against others.

The reason for that, says Singer, may be that spanking instills fear rather than understanding. Even if a child were to stop his screaming tantrum when spanked, that doesn't mean he understands why he shouldn't be acting out in the first place. What's more, spanking models aggressive behavior as a solution to problems.

For children to understand what and why they have done something wrong, it may take repeated efforts on the parent's part, using time-outs - a strategy that typically involves denying the child any attention, praise or interaction with parents for a specified period of time (that is, the parents ignore the child). These quiet times force children to calm down and learn to think about their emotions, rather than acting out on them blindly.

Spanking may stop a child from misbehaving in the short term, but it becomes less and less effective with repeated use, according to the AAP; it also makes discipline more difficult as the child gets older and outgrows spanking. As the latest study shows, investing the time early on to teach a child why his behavior is wrong may translate to a more self-aware and in-control youngster in the long run.