When kids show up at school/home each day and we tell them to "stop" with the aggression, we are basically telling them to hold it in, rather than teaching them to have a positive release valve.
- We can create conditions that encourage and model care, but we can't make a kid care. Those conditions are crucial.
Defining Play (What Play Is)
- Play is not work.
- Play is where children digest and process their lives.
- Play is where children find release. (If it doesn't come out here, it WILL come up somewhere.)
- Play is engaging but not necessarily fun.
- Frustration and tears can come from play -- this is engagement. Being able to work through this is what rewires the brain and teaches us to deal with life.
- Children (and teenagers) are hardwired toward frustrating play and play that is not "fun".
- The play itself wires the brain. There should not be an adult standing there saying "Good job!"
- Brains are like snow hills. You go down on a toboggan and create a rut. The next time, you are most likely to go down the same path. If you want to change that, you can, but it's going to be tricky and messy the first few times.
- What we can do:
- Loose parts playgrounds
- Kids dragging the log into the lake on the beach
- Direct play into play that used to be found in their neighbourhoods
- High School: hormones change everything
- Offer clubs where kids can fall into deep mentorship with a caring adult
- Most successful teens are imbedded in hierarchical relationships.
- Impulse control: Kids can have two opposite feelings at the exact same time.
- Before impulse control (before ages 5-7), they feel one feel and all of one feeling at the same time.
- Once we develop impulse control, we will never feel joy, etc in the same way as a preschooler again.
- In order to help a child who doesn't have IC, we have to bring them to their feelings -- specifically to two of their feelings
- "Part of you is so frustrated that you...Maybe there was another part of you that..."
- The wisest of us live in grey, not black and white, otherwise we lose the ability to care for people who are different from us.
Supporting Families
- Technology/screens are not bad! When families have a plan for how it will be used, that's fine. It's when we use it as soothers that things become problematic.
Anxiety
- When we're anxious, our digestion system slows down or stop working
- When students are anxious, they can't bring themselves to safety -- we need to know how to bring them to rest/safety
- We need to know as educators what drives us crazy about our students. In order for us to reach those students, we need to translate this into the fact that these are children who don't feel safe.
- Parameters of Attachment: whatever was invited in you as a child, it's likely you have trouble with in your students
- Ex: "My mom was great with Sad Hannah. My mom was great with Silly Hannah. But my mom had zero room for my anger.
- Children have two main drives: attachment and authenticity. Sometimes these are at odds, at which point they will put away the authenticity part because attachment is so strong.
How we feel CONNECTED determines how we experience SEPARATION
- The roots of anxiety for most children and teens lie in attachment alarm.
- Six Stage Model of Attachment (for children, but also shows in couple relationships):
- Newborn - First is through senses. Physical "with you"
- Age 2 - Sameness: start to model after their attachments
- Age 3 - Belonging & Loyalty: "my family", "my parents"
- Age 4/5 - Significance: "do my teacher's eyes light up when I come into the classroom?"; social media plays into this. We want to feel significant.
- Age 5 - Love: kids wanting to marry their parents, live in the backyard, start to draw cards for teachers, give away their heart for the first time
- Can hold onto their attachments without being in the sense for about 2-3 hours at a time
- Tween - Being Known: can I be myself and not be rejected, etc? Can I have attachment and authenticity? Deepest level.
- For many children, school is home. It's where they take off their mask and can be themselves.
- Attachment alarm is the threat of not be with/not being liked/not belonging/not mattering/not being loved/not being known
- What if you can't be with someone or you have to pretend to be like the others even though you aren't like them -- like their jokes, their music, etc.
- We can help students reach their authentic selves by modelling our quirky selves for them. Gives them gentle permission to think that they could get to that point one day.
- When we post something on social media and don't get a like, our brain (on MRI) lights up in the same way that it would if someone turned and walked away in the middle of our story.
- Nervousness and anxiety are different things.
- Anxiety is all the feelings, but not knowing why. Comes from things you can't see.
- Nervousness is all the feelings because of something you know is coming up.
https://www.amazon.ca/Alone-Together-Expect-Technology-Other/dp/0465031463
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