Lesson 3 - The PICC Model

Welcome back! This week, we’ll review what your child is learning in Week Three of their Coping Power curriculum.

In previous weeks, your child learned how to recognize their emotions and the intensity of those emotions and started practicing perspective-taking by recognizing the thoughts and feelings of those around them.

This week, your child is learning the PICC model for identifying and solving problems. The PICC Model contains three main parts: problem identification, choices, and consequences, which we’ll break down for you here in this video.

The first step, problem identification, involves breaking down a problem or conflict into solvable steps. We’ll encourage your child to ask themselves:

When does the problem occur?  What are some of the specific difficulties I’m encountering? How often is this happening? When is this happening? Is something always happening right before the problem, that might be causing the problem? What is and what is not affected by the problem?

By asking these questions, your child will start to think about their emotion intensity and the emotional intensity of those around them, which helps tie together everything they learned in the first two lessons with this PICC Model.

Once they understand what the problem is, your child can brainstorm all of the different choices they might have as reactions to the problem. Your child should think through all of their choices first, without thinking of those choices as “good” or “bad”. For example, if someone is teasing them on the bus, they could ask that child to stop, they could sit somewhere else, they could tell the bus driver, or they could slap the child teasing them. These are their choices. It doesn’t mean they can or should do all of them.

The last step is for your child to think through the consequences each choice might lead to. In this example, slapping another child might lead to them getting in trouble - and probably is not a good idea - while moving seats might lead to the end of teasing and they might even make a new friend on a new row of the bus. Telling the bus driver might also lead the teaser to stop their actions. Once your child has thought through the consequences of their choices, they’re ready to make a healthy and safe decision!

As always, we’ll wrap up by giving you a few suggestions for continuing to practice these skills at home. For this week’s power practice, we encourage you to ask your child about a real-life problem that they are experiencing now, so that you can practice using the PICC model together. You can continue to encourage them to do this throughout the entire week as they face problems and encourage their efforts!

If you experience a problem that you’re comfortable discussing and sharing with your child, you could also model using the PICC model in your own life so that your child can witness their most important role model using these key skills.

Good luck, and we’ll see you next week!