Episode 23 Note PART 2: Where do we go from here?
All right, everyone. So after the recording the last episode (Episode 22), I felt a need to also release a part 2 to that episode, because I think that being part of the change in our educational system really starts with the adults.
To be honest, I have always felt a sense of necessity and urgency around supporting adults to understand kids’ self-regulation and to understand why co-regulation is so important. Ever since I read The Whole Brain Child, by Dr. Dan Siegel and Dr. Tina Payne Bryson, back in 2018, I have been on a journey to really understand self-regulation myself – not only the theory of it, but also the neuroscience behind it. But also co-regulation, and why that is so important and necessary to build a healthy foundation for kids to develop self-regulation.
But really recently, my focus has started to include how important it is for adults to understand their own regulation. I am now reframing my perspective to include how important it is for you, as an adult listening to this podcast, to understand your own self-regulation, because regulation is a co-constructed need, it is a co-constructed experience. Our regulation impacts the regulation of others around us, and vice-versa. If we are not aware of our own regulation, we are ill-equipped to support kids to develop their self-regulation.
So this really kind of snowballed for me over the break. I was reading social media posts from a local police department and in the posts (that were just incident reports), there were hundreds of comments judging the individuals involved in these altercations, in these incidents.
Frankly, I am a police officer’s daughter. I understand, I’ve heard, and I’ve seen the really bad things that happen every single day. There are some really bad things that happen, and yes, I do believe there are people who are struggling in their own lives and make bad choices and have a very challenged state of mind when they do those things. So I understand, from that perspective, just how it looks from the outside.
But yet when you look at the research, when you look at the ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) of a majority of people who get labeled as criminals, a huge percentage of them were abused, molested, sexually abused, beaten, or had food withheld. Some really awful things happen to people who sometimes later on are called criminals or execute criminal acts.
Understanding that has really opened my eyes to the necessity of us, as a society, learning how to create a collective “we” again. Because I believe we have become a society that is ridden with “us vs. them” thinking, and I believe that the media plays a role in this tremendously. It’s become, “it’s either you get ahead or I get ahead.” That thinking really holds us all back, because it impedes our ability to make forward progress. And, transparently, we, the adults, have become judgmental, hostile, and accusatory. We are modeling behaviors in front of kids, to kids, and around kids that we, in the same breath, are telling kids it’s not okay to do.
If you read the trolling that happens on social media from adults to adults, and yet we’re going and telling kids and telling them that for them to engage in that same behavior is not okay? If you were a kid, that would be kind of confusing, right? The adults around you are telling you what to do, but then are in the same breath doing a completely different thing. I believe the way out, the way that we support kids, the way we actually change our future, is the way through – adults learning the hard skills of what it means to regulate using their own self-regulation skills.
I can’t tell you how many adults, sometimes after my professional development events, will come up to me and say, “you know, I don’t even think I’m aware most of the time of my emotional or energy states,” and I’ll nod my head and I’ll say, “absolutely!” It was not something that was a focus for us when we were in school. We had sticker charts, you know. If you look at the traditional models, a lot of the models of behavior compliance have not changed. And that’s the fault of nobody on the ground in our schools. Because this is a systems issue, way above the hands of the amazing people working in our schools. This is a systems issue.
But the things that we developed as reinforcement or punishment tactics are based on outdated studies done long before we knew about neuroscience, long before we knew about connecting the upstairs brain to the downstairs brain. And so, I believe the way that we support kids to refine and enhance the development of their self-regulation skills is by the adults learning about our own self-regulation skills, and learning about our own thoughts, and our own feelings or energy states about things.
This means creating systems in schools and communities where adults are able to prioritize and learn about their own regulation while the kids are doing the same thing. I think this is a huge societal shift, and I don’t think it’s easy. I don’t think it’s simple. In fact, I think it’s going to be hard AF. (I’m not going to swear on this podcast, but if I could, I would say I think it’s going to be hard AF.)
I think this is a huge change. But we can start to turn the ship now, because this is going to take a long time, as I talked about on the previous episode. We can pay now, or we can pay later. We can turn the ship now for how we talk about behaviors, how we develop self-regulation.
To be honest with you, if we don’t start paying now, if we don’t start putting the hard work in to become aware of our own self-regulation skills, our kids are going to have overwhelming taxes to pay in the future. And you and I both know that it’s not good for them. And you and I both are listening to this podcast because this matters to us.
So let’s start to create systems where we put the work in now, for the best of our kids. (And also, if you’re listening and can hear the squeak of a dog toy, I hope that gives you a little smile as I wrap up this podcast.)
All right, everybody – I’ll talk to you in the next episode.