Paradigm Shift for Dealing with Difficult Behavior

I wanted to share with you all about the most important social/emotional tool I've encountered as an educator. I have found it vital to my efforts, and it has changed not only the way I look at my role as a youth educator, but also how I handle difficult behavior in general, with people of all ages.

This last year, I worked with an energetic 12 year old homeschooler diagnosed with ADHD. Let's call him Allen. Allen could be a lot of fun to be around when he was comfortable - exuberant, joking, full of life - and he could be a real handful when he was out of his element.

Here's a picture his dad took of us on our boys' camping trip at the beginning of our homeschooling year:

One day, I wanted to take Allen to a lake. Once we were on our way, he started resisting. I asked him if he had suggestions for other things to do. Sure he did: watch a video, play laser tag, go to the skate park.

It's my job, I told him, to make sure he's learning and growing, and if he could show me how his proposals would do that, I would consider them. I thought it would be fun to go swimming, which I knew he loved, to connect with nature and learn about local plants and animals together.

He wasn't having it, and his alternatives were unhelpful, lacking the educational framing I kept asking for. I felt a responsibility to his parents, who were paying me to be his instructor. We were on the clock.

After going back and forth for 20 minutes, we just weren't getting anywhere. I had seen him argue like this to avoid doing things he thought he didn't want to do and was getting annoyed, feeling like we were wasting our time and thinking he'd likely change his tune once we got to the lake, as so often happened.

When your parents ask us what we did today, I want to have something to tell them that they'll see how you're learning and growing. You haven't shown me how your suggestions would accomplish that, so we're going to the lake, I said. It's your choice to have fun or to carry on with your crummy mood, and I think you'll have fun once we get there. He tacitly accepted this, being stuck in the car with me and not having much other choice. We listened to music, and talked about other things.

Once we got to the parking lot, Allen threw a tantrum. He refused to get out of the car, calling me names and threatening with what he would tell his parents, even inventing bodily excuses for why he couldn't possibly go, taking his histrionics so far as to pretend to hyperventilate. I wasn't buying it; this was not the first time I'd seen him try to get out of something by acting out like this.

It felt like he was testing me. I had made the final decision and he, an extremely independent and stubborn kid, could not accept that. It seemed like he was battling me to reassert his control over the situation-- and over my authority in our student-teacher relationship. Grrrrr.

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It's easy in a situation like this to get stuck in a battle of wills, him-versus-me. There's even a psychiatric diagnosis adults use to pathologize this kind of behavior in kids when they feel that their authority is being threatened: Oppositional Defiance Disorder.

This kind of oppositional thinking only perpetuates cycles of harm between adults and children. It makes it harder for parents and children or students and teachers to act in mutually respectful and beneficial ways. At it's worst, it results in labeling "bad kids," who eventually get sent to juvenile detention centers or youth prisons.

Not only do these facilities not help the situation, they make it even worse-- and at great cost to society. As @jockey noted, "there are over 1 million children languishing in prisons worldwide".

Here's the thing: the thought pattern "this kid is acting out because s/he is challenging my authority," is just not useful.

Regardless of whether or not it is actually true, and even if it is true, interpreting someone's behavior in this way just doesn't help. It only sets up a power struggle that makes the situation worse. What we need is a different paradigm.

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What if Allen's behavior at the lake actually isn't about me at all? What if it's actually all about him?

Allen's tantrum is his unskilled way of expressing that his stress levels have elevated to a point where he is in fight-or-flight mode. His mounting anxiety has reached a boiling point and now he's being flooded with chemicals telling his body that his survival is at stake.

If you've ever been in this place yourself - which you certainly have - you know that it is nearly impossible to act conscientiously. When you are truly feeling unsafe, you are beyond reasoning and no problem solving can happen. The only helpful thing to do is to come back to a bodily sensation of calm and safety first.

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The lesson of Self-Reg is this: what can appear to be "defiance" is often really someone asking for help.

Kids in particular don't have the bodily awareness or knowledge of self to know that they are experiencing physical stress. They can easily be pushed beyond their limits before they realize what is happening.

As an outsider, it's hard to know what another person experiences as stressful. Maybe the lighting, which seems pleasant to you, is harsh to them. Or there is too much sonic stimulation, or they are being triggered by a previous trauma, or social situations make them anxious. The important thing is to remember that, ridiculous as it may seem, their behavior is actually a sign of physical distress.

This helps you shift your own pattern of addressing the situation because it explains why their unpleasant behavior isn't about you. Now you don't have to take it personally. You can take a deep breath yourself and just help them return to calm and safety.

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So I removed any traces of annoyance and disapproval from my demeanor, and I calmly and gently reassured Allen that things would be OK, and that I would take care of him. I made sure that he got some food and water, and slowly we returned to a baseline of calm.

Once we were there, he revealed to me that he had once gone swimming at a lake and gotten bitten by a snapping turtle. It was actually the fear of this previous trauma, and the act of hiding that fear, that had led him down a path to freakout that I had thought was a showdown.

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Much of the research and methodology that informs this approach to child behavior and development was developed by Stuart Shanker, who calls it Self-Reg. His materials help us identify kids' stressors across many different dimensions, give us tools for de-escalating crises, and help build social-emotional aptitude.

Once you start noticing patterns in a person's stressed behavior, you can begin to identify the causes and you can begin to help them see those patterns too. Ultimately, the goal of Self-Reg is to help people understand their own stressors and to develop their own ways of taking care of themselves.

The bigger picture is that it's not just kids that don't know when they're stressed out, or what causes them to be so. In my experience, most adults haven't developed the awareness and skills to take care of themselves either, and end up acting in hostile, counterproductive ways.

When you begin to realize that, and you begin to realize that you never really know what someone's snapping turtles might be, you can take a step back from unhelpful conflicts, have more compassion, and, ultimately, navigate toward real solutions more effectively.

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I hope you found this interesting, helpful and maybe even inspiring. Please do let me know what comes up for you in reading it if you feel inclined to share-- I really value hearing about other people's experiences.

For more, check out my Steemit blog, where I write about my experiences as an educator, among other things.

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~Jared