Helping Children with Selective Mutism and Their Parents

Book excerpt: Selective mutism, or refusal or unwillingness to speak in certain situations or settings, poses a particular challenge to educators and other school-based professionals. In many cases, school personnel are on the front lines of assessment and treatment for these children and must help them succeed in an academic setting. This can be difficult considering that many school-based professionals are pressed for time and resources. Helping Children with Selective Mutism and Their Parents: A Guide for School-based Professionals provides information that can help readers better understand and combat selective mutism. Written for guidance counselors, teachers, principals and deans, school psychologists, and school-based social workers, this book educates readers about the nature of selective mutism and its most common clinical manifestations (such as social anxiety, oppositional behavior, and communication difficulties). Offering methods to determine the form and function of a child's chronically mute behavior, the book provides evidence-based strategies to enhance a child's verbal participation at school and in other social and academic activities. The chapters provide advice for working collaboratively with parents, preventing relapse, and tackling special issues. Easy-to-read and conversational in style, Helping Children with Selective Mutism and Their Parents offers numerous visuals, handouts, case vignettes, and FAQs. The book is an essential resource for educators faced with children with selective mutism, as well as other professionals who work with this population, including clinical child psychologists and psychiatrists, social workers, and pediatricians.