Ch. Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.

The Podcast:

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

Okay, we’re really excited to be here today for our podcast about working with students with special abilities and this is really a guide for parents who want to help their kids excel. And we’ve covered quite a few topics. I’m really excited to have senior masters, Laura Sanborn here. Thank you for being here, ma’am.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Pleasure sir.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

And Mr. Dwayne Flees from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Thanks for being here, sir.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Thank you sir.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

And I’m Greg Moody, and I’m happy to be here. And here’s a few things about me and the team here. So we’re really excited to work on this topic. It’s a really important one for all three of us and all of our instructors because we work with so many kids, adults and students that have all kinds of different challenges. And what’s exciting about that is not just that we get to work with kids and adults and students and all of our people with that, sometimes come in with different challenges to start. And those are maybe pervasive challenges that are going to be lasting their own life, but also sometimes temporary challenges. And we covered in our last podcast in part one, kids with physical challenges and today, we’re going to cover this topic which is kids with cognitive Challenges.

So this is a really important topic for us because we get a lot of families and parents, number one, wondering can their kids do martial arts and can they succeed and get their black belt if they have certain cognitive challenges? And the answer’s going to be yes. And we’ll talk about that. And then what do they do when their kid has challenges, if any, while they’re doing martial arts? So let’s get started. So what kind of challenges are we talking about? What kind of challenges do we mean when we say cognitive challenges? Well, that’ll be any challenge that aren’t the physical challenges. So this would be somewhat of a permanent challenge that we would expect not to be just a miscommunication or something. They would be a learned skill that they have to get over. But it could be something like ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It could be autism, and it could be something like anxiety, which turns into, you might notice this as shyness or you might notice this as some kind of separation issues.

For example, we see this a lot now, this might be a temporary situation as well. And it shows up in with kids have had challenges with maybe they just moved somewhere and they’ve got a new location and they moved from a different city and they don’t have as many friends. Or maybe they’re in a blended family and a parents got divorced and so they’re having to go from place to place that causes some anxiety. Or kids could just be naturally shy, that’s okay. That doesn’t mean they necessarily have anxiety, but they could be related to anxiety and there’s a list of other things. Sometimes kids have conduct disorders, oppositional defiant disorders or something more that’s different that might be genetic related like Down syndrome. So maybe let’s start with ADHD and for you guys, when kids come in and they have ADHD, what do you notice when a child comes in and they have ADHD?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

A lot of times in their very first lesson you have a hard time getting their attention to stick with you for more than a second or two. It’s really us working on reminding them to look at us, eyes on me, pay attention to what we’re doing and keeping them engaged the entire time.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

And what we noticed too is that when they were with us for a while, sometimes kids come in, they might be even on some medication for their ADHD. But after they’re with us for not even that long of time, maybe a few months or six months, then whether they’re on medication sometimes gets reduced or whether the effects of the medication becomes more effective or how they do in school. We get really good reports from the parents about how they’re doing in school and they can understand what’s going on in school, better results from home. And what have you guys also found, I’m talking about this, but what other kind of positive results have you found when the kids have done martial arts long enough?

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Well, they have better self-control over their body. They’re able to stand still at attention stance for a minute without fidgeting and pulling on their belt or scratching and itching everything. So that’s definitely an improvement. And so, a lot of times you can see them actually self-adjust themselves where they realize, they see themselves in the mirror, they realize that they’re moving and they pull theirself back to attention spans.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

So one antidote for ADHD is improved and really could be for all these is self-disciplined which all the students that we teach do. That’s a big focus of what we do in martial arts, but particularly for kids with ADHD, having self-discipline is a really critical thing and we emphasize that a lot. And then this is something for the parents that are watching this because this is a guide for parents, that you can back up what we’re doing in the martial arts classes at home by following the same structures and guidelines that we have in the classes. And remember ADHD, it’s attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It can either be with attention issues only and not hyperactivity.

It can be with hyperactivity but not attention issues or it can be with both of them together. So there’s all those combinations. Sometimes there’s just attention issues and the children aren’t hyper, in any of those cases, self-discipline and repeated continual expectations of higher levels of self-discipline will help them a lot. And we see really great results that it’s not just we’re giving you those answers, but the parents give us those answers. Do you guys have anything to add to that or?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

I’ve actually had several families that never went onto medication because they came into martial arts and the families directly have said it that way, that we wanted to come and try this, we don’t want to go on medication. We want them to get self-discipline and be able to control themselves. And we’ve heard martial arts will do that and then they find that it does, so they never have to resort to medication at all.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

Yeah, go ahead sir.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Yeah, so we’ve seen that as well.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

Yeah, so that’s an example you see again and again. And it’s not to say that if you have a severe case and your doctor recommends ADHD medication, we wouldn’t argue with you or anything, definitely want you to do whatever your doctor recommends. But this is a treatment that works and additionally, it has all kinds of other benefits of course, that we think is very valuable for you. And behavioral treatments like this are also recommended by doctors for ADHD. One thing that’s really important I think, and you guys can talk about this, is for a parent of a kid with ADHD, and we’ll talk about it with the other cognitive issues to make sure you understand that during the course of their training, it takes about three years to get your black belt. And the course of your training to black belt and then on to second degree black belt, which takes another couple years.

There’s going to be cycles of ups and downs just like it would be for us as adults. And there may be times where they do really well and then they may have times where they backtrack. And I think for parents, they need to understand that when they backtrack a little bit, if they don’t do as well, that’s a time to even emphasize the training a little bit more. Sometimes that can happen because maybe you’re at a vacation and the kid kind of got a little bit off track. And so, it’s important to emphasize training even more that way. What would you guys have to say to that?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Almost anytime that there’s a schedule change of some sort. So the consistency of coming to class twice a week, keeping it in a schedule, in a pattern for the kids makes a massive difference for them in any of these ones we’re talking about. Frankly, even for kids that don’t have any cognitive issues, that consistency of coming to class twice a week, not changing your schedule every time some little thing comes up makes a massive difference on helping the kids.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

So being consistent is really important, which is really part of self-discipline as well. But for parents, remember all discipline starts with you. You be in discipline to help your kid and then they’ll learn self-discipline from that. That’s what we always want to mention. Okay, great. Well, for our time today, talk a little bit about autism, which is a different cognitive issue that kids can have and a different thing that’s going on. And it’s called autism spectrum disorder because there’s a lot of different characteristics of autism and if any, I think it’s been pretty well publicized now in the world about what some those characteristics are. There’s a lot of communication and sensory issues. So when a kid first starts with us, you’ve had, I know many kids that have been diagnosed with autism that have gotten started with us, maybe even some adults. What are some of the things that you guys have noticed with those kids?

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Well, sometimes they’re affected by loud noises. We have to make some modifications there. Either headphones or some kind of ear protection. If the uniform bothers them with the tactile irritations that they have with the shirt or something, we have to help them find some way to alleviate that so they can focus a little better. And just really being patient with the kid and getting to know them so that we can see these things and see the best way to work with them and help them out.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

Okay. Master Sanborn, what have you noticed?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

A lot of it that same thing about working with the parent directly. Maybe that parent needs to video every single class so the kid can review it constantly just so that they know exactly what they’re doing when they’re practicing at home. “This is what you worked on in class, now we’re going to do it at home.” It falls into the consistency, but it also falls into directly working with the parent at a lot of touching bases with the parents. Not just, “All right, now you’re in class, go.” And two months later, you’re checking in with them and trying to graduate the child. It’s constant, just touching bases. How are they doing today? What happened, they seem to be getting better at this particular technique. What did you do at home to work on them with it? And just really being aware and involved with the kids.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

So the one thing you guys didn’t mention is sometimes one of the characteristics of autism is verbal and communication issues. So sometimes there’s communication issues that come up and we do a good job of helping communicate with parents so that we can communicate with the children and the students really well. And understanding that we modify how we communicate or communicate by having them stand directly in front of us and position them in the room so that they can see what’s going on really well. Because it’s very much a visual thing that we do. They can copy the movements that we are demonstrating so that they can participate in class.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Yes. For sure.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

Okay. All right. So with autism, what we also notice is that one of the things is consistency and you guys add on to this. But we also see what we just talked about before, that it’s important to be consistent over a long time period. So the kid learns, the child learns all the different things to learn communication. And I’ll give you an example. The best example I have is my own son who was diagnosed with autism when he was two. And as he grew all the way now to fourth degree black belt, he’s one of our instructors, he learned communication through really a lot of our martial arts training including all the other stuff he did with school.

But what I can tell you is he couldn’t speak very well when he was three and a half, almost four years old. And a lot of the first words he learned were from the martial arts. So that’s a good example of being, if I didn’t stick with it, if I didn’t have him stick with it, he wouldn’t have learned all the things, he would’ve been behind in school. And what we know about autism is early intervention works really well. So if you start kids as early as possible, even the 3, 4, 5 year old range, then they can pick up things much quicker when they’re diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. What else would you guys add for that?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Goal setting and expectations, especially it seems with the autism children that if you tell them exactly what you expect of them, they try really hard to meet those expectations because they know what they are. So when we set a goal for them and we tell them, “This week we’re working on this,” they step up to the plate and they just do it because they know what the expectations are and that seems to be a major help with them. Again, communication, but communication with the parents, communication with the children. So the expectation and goal setting that we do all the time makes just a big difference on how they perform.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

Well, I guess, I would say this the way that you said it, but it may be a little bit different, but if parents can hear the message that if you have high expectations of what your child can accomplish, then they’ll accomplish those. If we take one of these things on the list and we say, “Well, because of that thing on the list, your child’s not going to be able to achieve what the other kids could achieve,” then you’ll be right too. But in our experience when a child comes in, we’ve got example after example of kids that come in with one of these kind of things, one of these issues, and they do fantastic.

And they achieve almost, I don’t want to say more than what the other kids achieve, but because of some of the challenges that they’ve had to overcome, the challenge is in and of itself more makes it more of an achievement when they get their black belt. It makes it more of an achievement when they get their second degree black belt. So it’s pretty exciting when those things happen. So for parents, have high expectations of what your kid’s going to do. And if there’s one or two things that maybe are a little bit of a challenge, that’s okay too, but we’re going to still have high expectations of accomplishment.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Yes.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

Okay. Well, so now, anxiety for shyness and separation. Now that probably gets manifested, we already said in terms of shyness and separation. What would you tell parents that they should watch out for or do when they’re getting their kid ready for class or when they’re noticing their kid in class? What expectation would you have for parents then?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

For getting kids into class, it’s letting them know ahead of time. Don’t spring it on and suddenly, “Oh, it’s karate time.” All of a sudden when the kid is in the middle of something else. I like parents that start at the beginning of the day with, “Today’s a karate day. Here’s your uniform, we’ve got it already. Here’s your gear, here’s your stuff, we’re ready. We have karate after school today.” So that the kid is prepared from the beginning of the day and then pick them up from school and say, “Okay, we’re going to do this and this. We have karate today.” When they seem to spring it on them as the kids playing games, watching TV, doing whatever else they’re doing. And suddenly it’s, “Get your uniform, it’s time to go.” So much more anxiety, so much more just resistance to getting out there and then it’ll manifest, “Oh, I can’t go today because of this” or “No, can’t we not go today? Can we go tomorrow instead?” Preparation seems to be one of the major keys for that.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

Okay, that’s a good point. Mr. Flees, did you have anything to add to that?

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

No, I think that’s probably the best ideas. Make sure that they know a timeline and what the expectations are that today’s karate, we’ll be going there. And then just kind of running through what they’re need to remember when they come in the door so they have a little pre framing before they get in.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

Well, I think parents of kids with autism as well ought to do that because that’s one characteristic of autism can be that switching activities. I don’t think anybody loves to have their activities switched. If we’re in the middle of our podcast here and somebody bothers you in the middle, it would be jarring. I mean, anytime you change shift gears, it’s a little bit jarring. But a kid that maybe has anxiety about what’s going on around them in the world, it makes it even worse. If you’re worried about what’s happening in your job or in your life or you’re getting ready to do some presentation, then somebody tries to ask you some questions in the middle of that, that’s like, leave me alone. And I mean, I think kids get that way too, especially if they’re having some anxiety.

Kids with autism have it a little differently. They just don’t like shifting activities without warning. And if you have a plan for them, they want to follow that plan. Now. The other thing I would recommend to expand on that, I would even make sure that if kids are playing video games or watching TV or they’re doing something fun, you need to make sure that’s shut off a few minutes before. Whether it’s going to karate or you’re going to dinner or you’re doing something else, turn that off before or you’re always going to have people or kids even maybe your spouse would not want to leave and turn the game off before you’re going to dinner or stop doing something before you’re moving on to another activity. Of course, nobody wants to stop their fun activity before they go on to a different activity, even if that activity’s more fun. So that’s really good advice and I think I would expand that into other areas.

Now these next two that we’re going to talk about, conduct disorders and oppositional defiant disorders, these are, I wouldn’t say they’re unusual. They do happen. They’re relatively common. It’s about 5% of kid population would be diagnosed with one of these disorders at some time in their life. It doesn’t mean all kids sometime in their life would equal 5%, but that’s about prevalence in the population. And so, you do see this from time to time and sometimes we get these kids coming to martial arts and they’re brought in because they’re having problems at school. What have you guys noticed if you see some of this behavior when they come into the school?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Most of the time… Go ahead.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

A lot of the times conduct disorders come along with some of the other ones that we talked about previously, that maybe they didn’t understand or they thought they were going to get to go again or their board didn’t break or they’re concerned about it. And that causes a little bit of behavioral change there for them for us to be able to recognize that it’s not necessarily their conduct that’s the problem, that they’re not doing it on purpose. It’s a result of something else that happened before and helping them get through that.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

Yeah, it’s a result of the other issues that are not getting managed well, that they have trouble managing.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Right.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

They have trouble self-managing. So they respond in a way that what we would guess, people would say is not appropriate, but it ends up being disruptive to the group.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Right. And they don’t have any other way to express it necessarily or they haven’t learned a different way and that’s the best they can do to try to deal with it.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

Yeah. This one reminds me a little bit about bullying because we’re experts at bullying and we’ve done so much training on that and that was what my doctoral research was on. That we get a very small percentage of kids compared to the general population, that do come to us with these types of real issues prior to coming to school because parents don’t want to have them start learning to do martial arts type activities if they’re already being disruptive. So I think when I asked you that question after I said it, I thought, well, probably it’s going to be that answer that you just gave. It’s other issues and then they act out not just purely conduct disorder or oppositional defiant disorder at the same time. Have you had any of these kinds of cases, Sr. Master?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

One or two. This one, I just don’t have that one that often, but I have had a couple where we end up with a lot of it is neuro lingual training too, is knowing how to talk to them and say. If you can redirect them into saying a yes to something, instead of everything being no, so that you can change the direction of where an off the wall conversation from them is going, where everything is just, “No, I can’t do it” or “No, I won’t do it.” I’ve done that several times where I’ve had to just change the conversation from nos to yeses to get them back on track of what we’re doing.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

Yeah, so that’s a good guide for parents, is seek out, we can help you with that and we can help you with reframing things so that it can change the way the child’s behaving into a new way. And some of this is learned behavior. Now, the last one here is Down syndrome and there’s some associated other things, Tourette syndrome and some other, we didn’t write all the different cognitive issues that kids can have down. But Down syndrome’s one that we do get quite a few Down syndrome students coming in. And what would you guys say our experience is when we work with kids with Down syndrome?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Oh, lots of success with building their confidence and being successful in, for one thing, going towards black belt. But being a little more independent because they know they can do things and that we trust them to do it and we expect them to do it. So they grow more confident and do things and everybody’s proud of them when they do stuff because nobody made the expectations so it wasn’t being asked before. And we have the expectation that they’re going to be able to do stuff.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

Okay. Mr. Flees, what would you add onto that?

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Yeah, having the expectation that they can do something and then proving it to them in some way so they can see it for theirself and maybe making it a little bit easier for them to do at the beginning just so they see they can do it. And then raising the bar a little bit at a time so they’re not overwhelmed with the thought of a new technique or a board break. So once they figure that out, then they’re more likely to trust you the next time when we’re going to go and try something new and they’re be more willing to reach for that.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

Yeah, so if this really applies to anybody, for all of our students, whether they meet these kinds of criteria or not, once they achieve something that feels really like growth. I mean, they grow and they see that they can do something more better than they could do before, and then later they see they can do even more that they did before, then in the rest of their life, they feel like they can achieve more things. So I feel like I can do these whatever moves, but it means that I got my green belt or then it means I got my purple belt. It means I got my brown belt and then it means I got my black belt one day and that’s such a big achievement. Then I have confidence that I can do other stuff and it’s real confidence because it’s based on actual achievement.

So for all these kids, and we don’t give away belts to people, they have to earn them by doing them doing what we ask of them. There might be some modifications just like in the physical challenges, we’ve had students that literally didn’t have arms and so, those moves had to be modified. So if we have students with cognitive challenges and they might have some, let’s say hearing problems. In the autism case, they might have some hearing sensitivities, so we might have to modify how we do yells in karate, so we might have to modify how they experience yells. That would be okay, they still get to do everything else. So when they experience all the training all the way to black belt, even with some, maybe a little bit of modification, they feel confident that they succeeded. So that’s a big point that you guys made.

All right. Well, and one thing I wanted to mention also, Mr. Flees talked about board breaks. So for any parents listening, those are done in a safe environment, and they’re so that we learn techniques properly. Those are using boards that are designed so that the kids don’t have any… For the young kids that and all the way through adults that are designed for their body types and styles so they don’t risk any injury. So those are pretty safe and all the things that we do are designed for safety as a priority for the students. What else did you guys want to add for special abilities, for cognitive special abilities? Anything else to add?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Mainly just that I haven’t come across anybody yet that we couldn’t work with in some way and be successful with them. And just get them more confident than they were before, learning something new that they hadn’t done before and being successful at it. There just really hasn’t been anybody that I’ve ever had to turn away and say, “I’m sorry, I can’t work with you.” I haven’t had anybody yet out of all the kids that I’ve dealt with.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

Yeah, there’s a few different ways that we can work with students too in this way. Normally we do group lessons, but we also do private lessons for a temporary time so that they can work into our group. So sometimes when kids might have some small challenges, we or even large challenges, we’ll work as PR in private lessons until they can do a group lesson. And then on some occasions, we might do just more private lessons until they can operate in a group environment. Like if they’ve got hearing sensitivities or audio sensitivities, that might be a good example. Or maybe they need a little bit more training before they can be worked into the group environment. So we might do private lessons two or three or whatever number before they would work into a group environment.

We like students to work in a group environment because that’s part of their training so that they can get used to how the environment’s going to work in the real world. The real world has groups of people, so we want them to be able to work with those groups of people in the rest of their environment. All right. Well thank you very much guys. I really appreciate the time today and talking about kids with cognitive challenges. Next time, we’re going to talk about adults with special abilities and challenges and then we’ll move on to when we have temporary challenges, which we can all have injuries or different challenges and how we can still do training during those times. Anything else to add to finish up guys?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

No sir.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

No sir. I think we got it.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.:

Okay guys, thank you very much and again, we really appreciate you being here for our Students with Special Abilities and Challenges Podcast and thank you very much.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Thank you, sir.

Check out the Podcast!

P.S. This really applies to any cognitive / mental challenge.

In this podcast we’re referring to permanent cognitive issues – we’ll do a later podcast on temporary challenges and how to train and work through these. A couple helpful articles to read are this one and this one).

Cognitive disability indicates any limitations or disabilities that inhibit the function of a person that are not physical. It can be temporary or permanent. Some examples of physical disability are:

Childhood Mental and Behavioral Disorders

Dr. Moody is also a licensed psychotherapist and maintains a practice at Integrated Mental Health Associates (IntegratedMHA.com) where he specializes in couples therapy and mens issues.