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The Bottom Line: If you are not a mental health professional, but you work with kids, you may need to acquire a basic mental health background in order to fully understand your changing population, and to best serve their changing needs.

This background will also help you know when to access help from a mental health professional. There is no substitute for the expertise of a mental health worker, and if budget cuts have reduced this option at your site, that is quite serious. A class like our Breakthrough Strategies Workshop (http://www.youthchg.com/live.html) can help you get the basics, but with the incidence of severe childhood emotional problems apparently on the rise, it makes relying on that counselor, social worker, or psychologist perhaps more important than ever before.

If you are a mental health professional you may also want to check your skills too. We are always surprised at our workshop how many mental health professionals confuse conduct disorders and thought disorders, for example, two basic and essential mental health concepts.

We also need more groups like IYI in Indiana, and the Family Resource Centers in Kentucky IYI, the Indiana Youth Institute, brings hands- on training to everyone involved with youth including scout troop leaders, faith-based professionals, after school workers and everyone else involved with kids. Kentucky's Family Resource Centers are in just about every school in the state, ready to assist the student, family, teacher, counselor or anyone involved in the child's life to help that child succeed in school, community, family and life.

Sadly, most of us lack a Family Resource Center worker or an IYI to turn to. Your challenge becomes, how do I provide my service to a child with serious emotional problems? Here are a few key do's and don't's, but be sure to also upgrade your basic mental health skills if needed.

• ** Strike the Balance.
• Especially in this age of widespread, mandated education performance testing, teachers can feel pressured to get students to perform and produce. But tests don't "understand" that a child has a serious emotional disturbance and make allowances, but you can. Strive to balance your school or agency's mission with the child's special needs. Keep the goals, but don't accomplish them at any cost.
• ** When I'm Not Sure What to Do.

A good general guideline for anytime that you just don't know for sure how to work with a child, is ro ask the child. That child is the expert on that child. If you get no useful response, a fall-back plan is to consider what would work or not work with you if you were in that situation.

• ** But I Have to Be Fair.
• You may worry that if you give a troubled child extra time to complete a task, for example, that the other kids will complain that it is unfair. In the work world, bosses are required to accommodate employees' special needs from providing a ramp for a wheel chair to a sign language interpreter. The ultimate mission of most youth-serving sites is to prepare the child for the real world. In the real world, providing some accommodation is either legally mandated or a common courtesy. Most schools even attempt to give a bigger desk to a bigger student. Simple human courtesy and common sense should never be viewed as unfair.