Collegiate Times

A child hesitates, because she knows what she fears most is behind a door at Virginia Tech’s Child Study Center.

It is the thing that has kept her from traveling to school and going out to play with her friends. She trembles while turning the knob, opening it only slightly to gather a peak into the room.

In the corner sits the focus of her trepidation, a calm but wiggly-tailed dog, held back by an undergraduate volunteer.

Thomas Ollendick, director of the Child Study Center and a university-distinguished professor in the department of psychology, said that the center runs two studies funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. These projects are called the Child Phobia Project and the Treatment of Oppositional Youth. 

In the case of phobias, intensive treatment, such as having a child interact with what they fear, is a normal situation.

“The phobia must be debilitating enough to affect the child’s life,” Ollendick said about patients who come to seek help at the center. “A child will not be able to go to school or function normally because they might encounter what they fear.”

Children being treated are placed in the hands of an experienced staff. Ollendick has been working in this field of research since 1971. His office contains bookshelves lined with not only pictures of his family, but also his publications. One of these is a fear survey that he designed for children that has been translated into 19 different languages.

Ollendick attributes his success to one small fact.

“I love what I do,” he said.

The Child Study Center is located at 460 Turner St. in a demure brick building adjacent to Foster’s Restaurant. Built in 2001, Ollendick himself actually designed the layout of the center to meet his team’s project needs.

Inside the sprawling center, special observation rooms allow one to peer through a one-way mirror and into the comfortably furnished rooms where diagnostic interviews between clinicians, children and parents are conducted. The team also uses video to document what happens in

the study. In this way, Ollendick and his colleagues unobtrusively gather information that will not only help the child they are treating, but the psychological community as well.

Although a main focus of the Child Study Center is to gain knowledge about the cognitive processes in children, the process of treating children is also very important.

In the Child Phobia Study, children from ages seven to 12 with disruptive phobias participate in an intensive three-hour treatment that asks them to interact with what they fear.

Phobias range from heights to spiders, even to costumed strangers such as clowns. Through interaction and desensitization toward what they fear, Ollendick said children heighten their “self-efficacy,” which determines how successfully a child handles a particular situation.

In one of the back offices, bulletin boards hold pictures of children smiling alongside what they once dreaded. They showcased kids climbing ladders, a child holding a Pomeranian and even one radiant little face beside the Easter Bunny.

Even these few little tokens of gratitude indicate the level of success the center has had in treating phobias. Roughly three-fourths of children treated improve significantly, and follow-ups ensure the efforts of Ollendick and his colleagues were truly successful.

The second project that the Child Study Center conducts is the Treatment of Oppositional Behaviors in Youth. Oppositional Defiant Disorder occurs in about 16 percent of children and is characterized by tantrums, repeated deviance against authority and an elevated propensity toward acting out both verbally and physically.

Unlike phobic children whose conditions only require them to have a three-hour session, children with ODD being treated at the Center are typically treated for a six-month period. With this project, the parents of ODD-affected children from ages eight to 12 are also part of the dialogue and are taught how to guide their child as they deal with emotions. By allowing the children to see their parents as supportive and encouraging, they begin to feel less threatened by them.

For both of these projects, the Child Study Center is currently looking for qualifying patients from all over the country. The treatment is always free so they can assist as many families as possible.

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A version of this article appeared in the Mar 26 issue of the Collegiate Times.