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

by Heather T. Forbes

is the largest area of the brain, taking up about two thirds of the total brain mass.

It is involved in the higher functions of human existen...

reasoning, conscious thought, self-awareness, imagination, logic, planning, reasoning, higher-order thinking,...

involved in executive control, delayed gratification, and ...

This is the part of the brain where morals and ethics reside along with decision-making judgments between right and wrong. The neocortex is flexible, malleable,...

Limbic S...

emotional center of the brain,

records memories of behaviors and experiences that produce agreeable and disagreeable experiences.

This area of the brain handles the next fifteen seconds of life and gives us moment-to-moment survival.

Reptilian Brain.

Vital life functions,

As in the limbic system, life happens in this part of the brain in the next fifteen seconds,

more intensely.

There is no future. There is no tomorrow. There is no next week. It is believed that mental health issues such as obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and panic d...

Who’s in Charge? Normally, the neocortex is in charge, keeping the limbic system

and the reptilian brain in check.

when a child is in survival, this top-down control fails and the limbic system becomes more powerful in guiding behavior than the neocortex.

explains why traditional behavioral techniques such as point charts and detentions do not work with Billy.

Consequences do not register in the limbic system or reptilian brain. Remember, life happens in the next fifteen seconds here.

The solution resides in settling Billy’s system back down from a heightened fear and stress state to a calm and balanced state.

Instead of addressing Billy’s behavior with fear-based techniques or logically based techniques that do not register in his limbic system, the focus becomes addressing Billy’s ability to regulate back to a calm state.

Research has shown that the emotion of fear is processed in the right hemisphere, at the subconscious level, and trauma is all about fear.

The right hemisphere is essentially the brain’s “red phone,”1

Traditional disciplinary techniques focus on altering the left hemisphere through language and cognitive thinking.

An estimated 40,000 new synapses are formed every second in the infant’s brain.

Research suggests that the regulatory interactions between the child and caretaker during these primal years is essential for the brain’s synaptic connections to develop normally and for functional brain circuits to be established.

The child’s interpersonal neurobiology continues to crave connection and relationship throughout childhood in order to ensure healthy development into adulthood.

Dominant experiences of fear, loss, abandonment, terror, distress, rage, and indifference from the caretaker create ill-formed neurological pathways. Overwhelming amounts of stress in childhood create a student who is limited in his window of stress tolerance and ability to modulate emotional and affective states.

Interactive repair, or simply a safe relationship, is what it takes.

Individual educational programs (IEPs) are fraught with techniques that are far removed from human relational experiences and they continue to fail to help Billy over and over again.

Because of Billy’s perception of being threatened, even in what would normally be considered a typical school situation, Billy’s bodily response will typically be in the range of survival.

The limbic system releases hormones that prepare the body to take defensive action.

If it is determined that there is adequate strength, time, and positioning for flight, then Billy will run and make an exit.

Conversely, if it is determined there is not enough time or space to flee yet there is adequate strength to defend, Billy will fight.

There is also a third response, not yet mentioned, available to the limbic system: the freeze response, the least un...

the limbic system determines there is a lack of time, strength, and positioning and death is in the realm of possibilities, the body will freeze. While this is a state of complete helplessness, it is also a state designed to lessen the pain from the attack of the predator b...

The solution is not to ignite more of these responses by implementing a consequence, which will only be perceived as more of a threat by Billy. The

solution lies in calming the brain in order to move back to a state of calm and safety at the body

l...

Teacher: “Billy, this is going to be hard, but you’re not going to be able to go out to recess today because of what happened earlier.” Billy: “But that’s not fair!” Teacher: “I know. This can’t feel good for you.” Billy: “But it wasn’t my fault!” Teacher: “Why don’t you and I sit here and talk more about this so I can understand your perspective better.” The teacher could then spend ten minutes with Billy one-on-one to help him have a voice and to feel connected and understood. This is a “time in” with the teacher, used to regulate Billy’s system and help to move him back into a top-down control. The consequence still holds: Billy does not go to recess. Ten minutes is likely all it would take to keep him from moving all the way down into survival as seen in the actual event.

Additionally, giving Billy this emotionally attuned conversation is giving Billy the experience of what it feels like to be in a positive and connected relationship.

The more he experiences these types of interactions, the more he becomes equipped to handle stress in the future on his own, thus the more Billy has the ability to learn and achieve academically.

Products such as these pale in comparison to how drastically a child’s development is influenced in the early stages of life in the womb and during early childhood by the attachment relationship.

The brain is undergoing major structural development, and its maturation is experience dependent through the interactions of the parent and the child, not through the interactions of a video and the child.

The impact of early life experiences can be seen in six developmental areas: (1) cognitive, (2) language, (3) academic, (4) social, (5) physical, and (6) emotional.

Many times Billy can sustain himself the first few years of school, but when he becomes more challenged academically, these developmental deficits rise to the surface.

A student who once appeared to be on target and considered a “good” student can overnight turn into a “problem” student and become seriously behind in his level of achievement.