Help for Billy: A Beyond Consequences Approaching to Helping Challenging Children in the Classroom

by Heather T. Forbes

Billy and the crying baby are more alike than what we have been able to realize in the past. Both children are “dysregulated” and both children are acting in the only way they know how in order to return back to being “regulated.”

Each is seeking to find happiness and peace in this world but is grossly ill-equipped to know how to do this with polite manners. Each needs the help, guidance, and nurturing of a regulated adult to move back to a state of calm and peace.

When a child is in a balanced state, in a state of homeostasis, he is “regulated.”

Some children, due to their early life experiences, live more chronically in a state of dysregulation than in a state of regulation.

Billy: As Billy was developing as a fetus, his mom was furious about being pregnant. Her boyfriend had lied to her about not being fertile. She tried to hide her pregnancy from her family but was discovered and kicked out of her home. She had no alternative but to go live with an abusive boyfriend. Billy was delivered four weeks premature, needed immediate medical attention, and was in an Isolette for the first two weeks of his life. Upon coming home from the hospital, his mother found a new job and placed him in day care at six weeks old. His mother had difficulty keeping employment and thus they moved frequently during the first five years of his life. He had multiple caregivers during this time. When his mother was home with him, she was quite unresponsive due to being overwhelmed, stressed, and without financial or emotional support. Billy had difficulty even in kindergarten, and by age eight his experiences in the school environment were more about being disciplined and punished than about learning and creating. He was the child the teachers dreaded having in class.

Billy has experienced childhood trauma of the worst order; he has experienced trauma

within the context of the parent-child relationship.

Trauma is defined as any event that is more overwhelming than which i...

When a woman is pregnant and she experiences stress, her body produces chemicals that become part of the growing fetus’s makeup. Elevated levels of the stress hormones cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine are released within the mother’s body and have a negative influence over the fetus’s ability to develop optimally. These stress hormones constrict blood vessels, resulting in a reduction of oxygen to the uterus.

their nervous systems were hardwired at an elevated level.

It is not a case of “won’t” but “can’t” sit still.

children will often find themselves in situations that are far beyond their window of stress tolerance.

Any situation or event that leaves a child feeling overwhelmed and alone needs to be considered trauma.

It happens unexpectedly. The child is unprepared for it. Someone has been intentionally cruel. The child feels trapped. The feeling of powerlessness prevails.

During the traumatic event, the impact is even greater if the child believes he is:

Unlovable Worthless Forgotten or abandoned Powerless ...

The last three—powerless, helpless, and hopeless—a...

childhood events that can be considered traumatic.

is the perception and the emotional interpretation

of the event that classifies it as trauma or not. It is about the feeling of being safe or not and it is always determined by the child’s perspective—not reality.

Whether or not the trauma is going to have a lasting effect on the child depends on the how well the fundamental needs of physical safety, emotional connection, and predictability are met for the child.

confident, well-regulated adult can take a child out of a fire and have less trauma than an anxious dysregulated adult conveying fear to a child who falls off his bike.”

An event is not traumatic for a child based on the event itself; it is traumatic based on the response to the event from the caretaker.

He was baked in cortisol before he even entered into human history.

He has an overabundance of high arousal experiences with a drastic shortage of calm arousal experiences.

Billy only knows chaos and fear.

Billy’s behavioral issues in the classroom are thus no longer behavioral issues. They are manifestations of trauma.

The challenge then presents itself to Billy’s educators and caretakers as to how to help, guide, and teach him to calm his nervous system.

A child who has not had the experience of being settled, loved, and nurtured during times of heightened stress (as in the case of Billy), has an internal regulatory system that is not equipped to self-regulate.

The infant is at the mercy of the caretaker to mold and develop its internal system of regulation.

relationship drives brain development

The baby needs the care, attention, nurturing, and calm presence of the parent in order to calm down his internal system ... he simply cannot do it on his own.

child can be taken out of trauma but not so easily can the trauma be taken out of the child.

The most effective way to change these patterns comes through safe, nurturing, attuned, and strong human connection. For the student in the classroom, it comes through the teacher-student relationship. The reality is, for Billy to learn and achieve academically, he must also be engaged at the relational level.

sound and musical rhythms could change a child’s bodily processes.

we must take the responsibility to create environments for children that are designed to externally regulate

them.

Billy has a very small window. He lives only moments away from his breaking point.

He is short on patience, is impulsive, has difficulty staying focused, and cannot comprehend why he cannot go to recess even after his teacher warned him three times earlier that if he did not behave he would miss his fun time.

His executive functions are not on line because he is too stressed out to think clearly and rationally. He is living from a much deeper emotional place of internal chaos, fear, and survival. He has a much smaller emotional range, and struggles by expending a tre...

“Plasticity” refers to the body’s ability to add and remove connections, even into adulthood.

Each positive experience allows for Billy’s window of stress tolerance to increase,

each time allowing new neuropathways to develop and new connections to be entrenched.

Unfortunately, for many students their window decreases over the school year, instead of increases. The stress of the school environment builds throughout the year, especially during the weeks around state testing; these tests determine whether or not the child is promoted to the next grade.

Traditionally, we have failed to realize that limited learning will happen if the emotional needs of a child are not met first.

Trauma alters to what the brain pays attention, so all of Billy’s resources are dedicated to safety rather than academic achievement.

Instead of asking children to make a better “choice” in their behaviors, it is time that we ask ourselves to make a better choice in the creation of their environments.

we have learned that the human brain is exceptionally sensitive to social stimuli.

Neocortex. The neocortex, also known as the rational brain, is the outer layer of the brain, and it distinguishes humans from other animals in the animal kingdom.