Author looks to end child behavioural stigmas

By Tim Kalinowski on January 27, 2018.

tkalinowski@medicinehatnews.com @MHNTimKal

Author Cynthia Rodgers of Leader, Sask., will be signing books and holding conversations about children, education and mental health at the Medicine Hat Coles store at 11 a.m. on Feb. 3.

She will also be selling copies of her new book “Believe Children: Understanding and Help for Children with Disordered Behaviour.”

Rodgers spent 30 years in the public school system in the U.K. and Canada as an educator until recently retiring from her position as a student services worker with Chinook School Division in Swift Current. Rodgers said the book was born out of her frustration with how the school system deals with mental health issues within children.

“Just after I retired, I read a 2014 report from Canada Mental Health that talked about how 80 per cent of children who need help do not get the proper help in our Canadian school system,” she remembers. “I really want people to understand the link between trauma and neurological damage in a developing brain.

“The purpose of the book is to bring awareness to people that traumatized children, and children with mental health issues, need more education and help than what they are currently getting.”

Rodgers says schools still often punish kids for disruptive behaviours without trying to understand the root trauma or emotional causes of those behaviours.

“These kids are still subject to suspensions and expulsions,” she says. “A six-year-old that gets suspended from school, there is something wrong with that. The child is not being helped if the only thing they can do is say, ‘You have to leave; you can’t be here.'”

In the book Rodgers talks about her own experiences of abuse as a child, and she looks back on her 30 years in the education system dealing with the issue of mental health and trauma, a system she feels is still failing so many. She says she hopes the book sparks a conversation among those who read it.

“I would say definitely come down and have a conversation with me at Coles on Feb. 3,” states Rodgers. “I like the conversation and the questions. My purpose with this book is to try to educate people on the neurological damage, and also on what you can do differently to re-educate these children.”

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