This isn’t just for the teachers or peers’ benefit – this is for the child’s benefit.
“Bad behaviour” is a sign of trauma… it’s a trauma response (fight/ flight/ flex/ flop/ freeze/ fawn etc) to a toxic environment. That toxicity could be coming from anywhere (teacher, another student, the room, the noise, the work, the curriculum, their own struggles at home or anything else) – when you send them back into that environment after they’ve calmed, all you’ve done is retraumatise them – re-trigger them – re-introduce a traumatised person to the thing that caused that behaviour in the first place… you force them to behave ‘badly’ again and again and again. It’s not a choice – it’s an involuntary nervous system response.
Teachers complain that ‘badly behaved’ students are sent to the principals’ office, but the problem is that principals send them back without doing anything…. And I agree totally with that – but disagree with the teachers about what that ‘anything’ should be.
Teachers think that punishment is the ‘anything’ that is needed. That the child should be suspended, expelled or whatever, and in cases of purposeful violence and bullying I still agree with the teachers – there needs to be consequence for harm …. But you need to identify the underlying cause or reason before making biased bigoted remarks or recommendations like that.
My child’s bully needed punishment. I recently saw a post from teachers talking about how they can identify a true sociopath or psychopath in a child from as early as kindergarten. And I never agreed with that sentiment until I met this one boy. His parents were OBGYN’s (they felt entitled and made their child feel entitled, and could not/would not see anything wrong in their child, and refused to do anything about him) and yes – I talked to other parents about this child to see if I was the one being unreasonable or biased…. but we all agreed – this specific child is a complete sociopath/ possibly psychopath.
What he needed was different to a disabled child who is using behaviour to communicate an unmet need – this particular child was communicating pure joy in other people’s pain and humiliation – and revelling in getting away with it, but also revelling in being told off, displaying masochist type tendencies. That’s different and requires a different approach to what I usually talk about. That child (I have no doubt) will end up murdering someone and will likely revel in the deed and the aftermath. No, I’m not demonising children or sociopaths, I’ve only ever met one person like this before him and hope I’ll never meet another – I believe they are rare, but I also think that there is hope for most – but this one, no – I saw no hope for that child because no one was willing to help or to admit the problem.
If you are reading this – please know that I know those people do exist in the world – and that I know that my advice doesn’t work on them….. my advice is explicitly to help disabled children.
Yes, that specific child still needs help – not just punishments. That child also needs us to understand his underlying psyche and his needs to be able to help him….(the TV show Dexter comes to mind, but please don’t think I mean that – creating serial killers is not my intention or aim). The resulting way we help him is different to what I’m talking about here – for children that are ‘behaving’ in a certain way due to unmet needs – not children who act a certain way to get joy from pain. BTW – I think you’ll find the majority of ‘badly behaved’ children -are the ‘unmet needs’ kids (the kids using behaviour as communication, the kids who are having nervous system responses to their environment, the curriculum and to a world that was not built for them)– not the joy in pain kind of person. Sociopaths and psychopaths are a very minor minority: 1 to 4 % of the general population – if all “badly behaved” children came under these diagnoses – the figure would be more like 50% not 1 to 4 %. The figure is not 50 % – so you need to understand the real reason for the behaviour – not make a biased and bigoted assumption that they are all sociopaths or psychopaths.
All children deserve our very best but sending a child back to the same environment over and over again for doing the same thing isn’t helping anyone. Especially not the child. I think that’s what parents and teachers can actually agree on. That the current method of sending them to the principal and then back to the class is not working.
When a child is sent to the office for ‘bad behaviour’ it is usually because the teacher feels unsafe, or perhaps they feel ill equipped to handle the issue, or they have been triggered themselves, and need that time to process and calm. All are valid and have a need that is required (sometimes legally) to be met. The teacher also needs to regulate and feel safe, and sometimes sending the child away/ or removing the class from the room is the only safe measure available. But that’s not where it should stop.
As an adult you are the one who creates the environment. As the previous blog talked about – when you escalate, they escalate. To calm them, you need to be calm to. If you can’t remain calm, sometimes the best option is to separate… either the child from the environment or the environment from the child (eg: we walk away from each other – whichever way is safest and often quickest).
But once calm – that doesn’t mean you return, possibly ever – if the trigger isn’t fixed.
If you are in a job, and you have a fight with your boss. You both attend HR and HR mediates to find a solution. And if there is no amicable solution, one party usually leaves the job or the parties are separated because there is no meeting of the ways, and neither party quits and often HR has no grounds to fire either one.
But in schools there’s no equity like this, there’s no understanding or mediation. There’s often no point at which the child is treated like an adult and asked why – and believed, and the problem fixed. The child is usually told it’s their fault and told they are the ones who must change. There’s only blame. Either the child/parent makes a complaint and the teacher is fired – or the child is expelled or forced to return to that toxic environment (which is now toxic for both teacher and child). That’s not the real world. Schools live in a bubble of their own fictional making.
When I was in year 8, there was a girl that the boys liked to pick on (bully). We had a pottery building with a kiln. One day, one of the boys went too far bullying this girl. The girl lost it (quite understandably in my opinion)… but what she did stepped over the line. She had a scalpel in her hand (for cutting the clay); she put the scalpel through the boys’ hand – in a downward motion into the table. The girl was expelled immediately, but there were no consequences for the boy (or other boys that led to this incident) or for the teacher who had been listening to the bullying but did nothing. That’s not fair. That’s not just.
If the school and teachers had listened to the complaints by the students, and this girl and her parents – this event wouldn’t have happened. It wasn’t a ‘decision’ on the girls part to do that – it was visceral, it was a nervous system response. It was her fight response to protect herself from the barrage of bullying that she had been enduring for a long time.
I might even say that given the same circumstances – anyone might’ve done the same/ similar. When we don’t ask why, when we don’t listen, when we don’t observe, when we don’t care – we cause these types of issues. And I mean Cause. I felt at the time (and still feel like) the school and the boys caused this. I still feel for that girl and felt she was treated unfairly, because she was. She didn’t deserve being bullied, no one does. But it’s often the bullies that get away with it and the victims that are blamed and kicked.
If just one teacher had stepped in prior to this and asked why she was always mad and always had ‘bad behaviour’ they would’ve known what the rest of the students knew – that she was being bullied and that behaviour was a display of trauma. If they’d stopped the real bad behaviour (that of the boys bullying her), then she wouldn’t have had a reason for her trauma, and therefore the display of ‘bad behaviours’.
Behaviour always has a reason. Even with my child’s bully – that child had a reason, a nefarious one, but a reason. When I used to act out in class I had a reason – the curriculum didn’t meet my needs, I was not challenged and bored out of my brain, and I was also being bullied.
When one of my kids started yelling and hitting things (not people) and crying hysterically at kinder, he had a reason – the teachers were talking down to him like he was incompetent (they were infantilising him and they were causing the other children to do the same by modelling that behaviour for them). My child was ‘acting out’ because he was non-speaking at the time, and couldn’t tell them to stop. He used his fists and tears to communicate that something/ someone was harming/ hurting him. But no one listened – they just assumed he was bad tempered or naughty. Which he wasn’t – the previous year he had been the model student. His behaviour changed in response to his new toxic environment.
When children hit, it’s a last resort after being ignored and gaslit and bullied and abused, and everything else. They hit their limit – so they hit back. There are always clues or signs beforehand, but teachers are not taught how to identify those cues. Instead, they are taught to view those cues as signs of disrespect, or naughtiness, or not being disciplined, or of ‘bad behaviour’, Those early signs of those things are your cues that your teaching is not fitting their need, or the other students are bullying, or something in their environment is triggering that violence etc etc etc.
Step back out of yourself. Step back from this nonsense training and societal stereotypes of bad children. IMO there are no bad children, only adults that do not understand them or how to help them (even that child I assume to be a sociopath could be helped and possibly turn it around – but only if people see that and start helping him). That’s not an attack on you, your teaching or your parenting. That’s an attack on society for teaching you those things… for teaching you that it’s a parental failing in parenting or teaching failure in teaching. It’s a societal failure in understanding and then spreading that misunderstanding everywhere.
When you send a child to the office, before they return to your class – ask them why? What happened? What triggered it? What needs to change? How to help them? How to make sure it doesn’t re-occur? Don’t tell them “don’t do it again, because I said so” because that’s not learning on your part – that’s authoritarianism/ dictatorship which incites more anger, more aggression, more violence and more of the same ‘bad behaviour’ – that’s you doubling down on stupidity and causing a repeat of the problems you hate. If you love drama, keep doing it that way with punishments and rewards, in you want an easier life AND job – ask why? And then work together to find a solution that is amicable for both.