How to Collaborate with Educators for Your Child’s Specific Needs

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Hi everyone, welcome to the show. I’m Dr. Nicole. And on today’s episode, we are talking about a topic so many of you wrestle with daily: The educational needs and school-related issues for your child. As a former teacher, a psychologist and a mom, I have empathy for everyone on all sides of the equation when it comes to dealing with the very real practical issues of supporting all learners in a school environment. There are no easy answers, especially when it comes to kids with more significant dysregulation and needs. And especially in the context of the world that we are living in today and the needs that all kids have coming into school. What I do know is that we all need to be committed to working together to address these things, and to have compassion for the players on all sides. Someone who shares my passion for this and understands firsthand as a professional and mom, all of the pieces of this, is my guest today, Dr. Emily King. We are going to explore how best to advocate for our kids, while also supporting the teachers and other professionals who are working with that. Let me give a little bit of info about Dr. Emily.

She’s a child psychologist in Raleigh, North Carolina, who has worked with neurodivergent children and teens for the last 20 years. She received a PhD in School Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has worked as a school psychologist in Houston, Texas before starting her private practice in Raleigh. Dr. Emily is passionate about empowering parents and teachers to take care of their own mental health so they can be the best guide for their children and teens as they parents and educate. She and her husband are parents to two energetic boys ages 8 and 14, I know many of you can relate to that. She’s also the founder of Learn With Dr. Emily, where she shares online resources related to raising and educating neurodivergent youth beyond her psychology practice. She’s been featured on lots of TV shows, has written for numerous publications, you can find her on social media, which is actually where she and I first connected on Instagram, go follow her there, she’s amazing — in addition to her email newsletter, and lots of other resources that she has available. Dr. Emily, welcome to the show, so great to have you here.

Dr. Emily King

Thank you so much for having me, Nicole.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So much to dive in around this topic. This could be like a series of episodes. I would love for you to frame it up a little bit by just sharing your story of how you came to be a child psychologist, particularly focused on neurodivergent kids and the issues with them in school. Talk to us about how that came about for you.

Dr. Emily King

This takes me all the way back to being a student myself. I was a really “good” student, as in I did what I was told and jumped through all the hoops I needed to jump through, and school came naturally for me in terms of organization and doing what was expected. I loved school, I found safety and the routine of school, and I didn’t struggle with it. There were times where there are certain classes, of course we all have these classes, mine was chemistry. Not my deal. But in general, I enjoyed school. And then as time went on, I just really loved working with children. I thought I was going to be a teacher, I really loved learning, and I loved the psychology behind learning. And then I started to notice that not everyone learned like I learned, and not everyone was able to follow the pattern and education we are given to jump through the hoops to get the degrees to move forward. So I actually went straight into graduate school after college, and then straight into practicums and internships and postdoc, and then working as a school psychologist. So as that evolved, I, of course, as a school psychologist did a lot of evaluations, did a lot of identifications, of IEP’s, coming up with goals, and that’s when I was working in Texas. And then I moved back home to North Carolina where school psychologists mainly just do testing. And by that point, I had really fallen in love with the therapy side of things, and working with all the behavioral and emotional things that are also getting in the way of learning. At this point, somewhere in there, I also had my first son. So he was two when we moved back to North Carolina and started my private practice, and we started to see some concerns with his development. And so I will just say, anyone listening, who is a professional: A teacher, a therapist, a nurse, any type of professional that knows things, and then goes through an emotional experience of raising the child where you know what to do, but you emotionally are still on that same path of acceptance, and pivoting, and trying to figure out the best way to support the child right in front of you. So, I was a psychologist before having children. So, I had this kind of marriage of the two lanes, that I was kind of going parallel into my parenthood as well as my career. So, there were many things I learned in graduate school and practicum work and internship that helped me know what to do. And then I feel like my son taught me all of the emotional/mental health functioning ways of how to do it, and why it’s so important and why we have to have connection, and why we can’t do any of the things we have learned in school or we know until we have all of that connection and safety underneath it all. So I’m very passionate for both of those reasons, and I think that’s why when I talk to parents and teachers, I always come back to: Are we capable of doing the strategies? We know the strategies, but are we capable of showing up and doing the things that are going to make this role sustainable for us in a healthy way, so that we can continue being connected to our child, and they can continue feeling safe within their relationship with us?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So important, and I think that’s become probably the biggest, or one of the biggest, if not the biggest challenge right now in schools and for education professionals, is it’s not just kids identified as having special needs or labels who are coming in right now needing more of those foundations of connection and felt safety and all of that in order to learn. It’s the vast majority of kids, if not, arguably, all of them because of the world we live in, because of the last couple of years. And that can be a real challenge, as you said. The understanding of it, the helping educators understand the why of that, the need to connect first, that’s the easy part. The part that becomes more difficult is how do we actually implement these things in an educational world, where most of the time teachers don’t have a lot of say and control, where the powers that be dictate very different priorities than these foundations that we are talking about. And that really does impact, then, the mental health and wellbeing of the people who are trying to meet the needs of our kids in their classrooms, right?

Dr. Emily King

Right. And I think so many of our teachers feel like they are all alone out there, thinking “Relationships are really important, but I’m asked to do PBIS, I’m asked to follow the data”, and the data is incredibly important to access services, to track progress, but there are ways that we can do the data alongside building the relationship, and I think that’s one of the things I’m most passionate about, is helping teachers look at what they are required to do and expected to do, and tweaking the things that we can, that are in their control. And there are many things that we can tweak: To work on collaboration with parents, to work on pivoting a certain task that’s going to hook in a child’s engagement and get a better outcome for learning, and it was just a little tweak that we can make. So all of these things, like you said, are completely case by case basis, every child is different. And it used to be that we have our general curriculum for everyone in regular education, and then we have individualized education plans for everyone in special education. But there’s also a lot of kids who can’t access the generalized curriculum without some sort of accommodation or without feeling safe at school. And there are a lot of kids that don’t feel safe at school right now. That doesn’t mean they need an IEP. It means that they need to feel safe in their classroom. So I do expect that there’s going to be somewhat of a lag in timing of some of the things that we are talking about, and these idea-based things, and even the research behind it. It’s going to take a little while for legislators, and funding, and administrators to catch up with these things, but I feel like this is my life’s work to keep talking about this so that we can make forward progress and help teachers feel like they can make an impact, even though they are working within sometimes a fairly rigid system of expectations.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah, it’s an interesting thing, right? Because, okay, we want to help kids feel safe and feel connected, because literally, those are the foundations neurologically that are required for higher level learning, and yet, the things that are dictated as what the priorities are in our school environments are things like the worksheets, the academic expectations; these pieces that you literally can’t help kids access and get to when we are not addressing those foundations. And yet, we are not providing the supports, the infrastructure, the things to allow our schools to do that. And so I don’t know how you feel about it, but I felt like we have been moving progressively faster and faster towards this tipping point, where it simply is not going to be sustainable anymore for our education department and schools, on a micro level, to be operating the way they have, because the needs of children and the needs of what’s going on in our society are just too great at this point. There’s just too big of a gap and a mismatch.

Dr. Emily King

Right. And we saw that coming out of the pandemic, and one thing I’ve been preaching this school year is that when we hear “Okay, they are behind, there’s a lack of skills.” Of course, there’s a lack of skills here. There was a lack of quality instruction for a variety of reasons, and to no one’s fault. This is no pointing fingers. This is just the reality we have been living in. And I’ve really challenged people to think about: What’s the goal here? What’s our timeline? If your child needs to take a gap year, let’s take a gap year. If your child needs that extra year to learn to read because they were remote for your first grade, then let’s do it. So I think in some communities, we are funneling a lot of pressure and funding into summer instruction — I don’t know if that’s the answer. I’m not a fan. I think that kids need to go play this summer, I said that every summer for the past three summers especially, they need to connect and play and recover from the stress that has happened. Kids’ brains will heal. Kids’ brains will come back and connect with teachers. The most important thing we can do right now is to help teachers and parents and children feel like they want to learn, like they want to come back to school in August, like they want to come back and say, “Okay, I want to do this again, and in my next grade, I can do this.”

So those are things to keep in mind when you are making decisions kind of on the ground, if you’re an administrator or a teacher or a parent, it’s troubleshooting: What is your goal here? Is it about a skill for your child? Is it about a life skill? Is it about an emotional regulation skill? Knowing that they won’t be able to do any of that higher level learning until we establish the foundation of feeling safe and feeling connected, which is often how we need to start every school year by that parent-teacher collaboration and working together to help the student get off to a good start.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Let’s go with that a minute. Just to help really solidify for our listeners, we are talking about the importance of kids feeling safe, feeling connected, those relational pieces. And I think there are a lot of people in the parent realm, but certainly in the educational realm, because people who go into education, unfortunately are not given courses and training in a lot of these things, there’s a lack of understanding about why that’s critical, right? The thought process that is perpetuated, at least in the United States, and I know in many other countries as well is, well if a kid is having behavior problems, learning disabilities, isn’t learning, isn’t getting their academics down, then the solution is to do more intensive academics. The solution, as you said, is “Oh, we have a gap in skills because of COVID. We are going to put everybody in tutoring over the summer.” Or “The key is, if you are struggling with math and you are throwing a tantrum and ripping your paper every time, the key is to give you one on one instruction in math.” And yet, the data bears out that that way of approaching it is not helping and it’s not working. So I’d love to have you just sort of summarize for listeners, when we are talking about this important foundation of safety, of connection, from a brain standpoint, why is that important? Why does that foundation have to be there?

Dr. Emily King

Right. You and I both know from neuroscience: If we are not feeling safe and connected, we then cannot allow learning to happen because learning is a vulnerable experience. Learning is scary, on a small level scary. To a child who was faced with a really hard math problem, and math is really hard for them, their nervous system is getting alerted to a danger of some kind. And this is different for every student. It’s potentially not going to mean a traumatic level of danger, but for some students, when we see students shut down, or we see behaviors escalate, this is a student’s nervous system going into fight, flight or freeze when they are faced with an expectation that dysregulates them, and they don’t have the foundation of support to regulate. So the reason that the relationship is so important, it is what we talk about all the time, which is coregulation. So for anyone who isn’t familiar with it, my best analogy for this is just rocking the baby. When we rock the baby, we know what to do instinctively. But there are 5, 6, 7-year-olds that need to be “rocked” still in school, and that is getting to know them, that is maybe having a joke when you come in. Conscious discipline strategies do a great job with this: Morning greetings and morning meetings and having that safety-connection routine, where a child’s foundation is safe, it primes them for: “This is a safe room, this is a safe space, my peers in here are also learning. So when I’m faced with a task that’s hard for me, which is everything that’s new in school, is at some point a little bit hard for kids, I feel safe trying, I feel safe making a mistake, I feel safe guessing.” Lots of teachers will say “You need to guess two times, and then you need to ask a peer, and then you come and get my help.” So lots of teachers have a class-wide strategy, but those kids have to be able to feel confident and vulnerable.

And then on top of that, there could be some social anxiety coming in, there could be some inattention coming on board that makes the child realize: I can’t focus on what’s in front of me. I know it and I could tell it verbally, but I can’t write it. It can be a variety of things that could be activating that anxiety in a child, which is really just the dysregulation. So one great strategy that most teachers do in elementary school is kind of the “All about me/Get to know me” worksheet at the beginning of the year, where the parent is filling something out. I recommend a little bit of a different version of this that I’ve created, that I call the regulation roster. I kind of break it down into five areas of: I want a teacher to look at their roster, look at their class, observe them in the first few days of school, and ask the parents: Does this child like to move their body? Are they running, and bouncing, and standing while they’re listening? Or does this student need to be really quiet to focus? Or does this student have to tell me their opinion before they can get going? Or are they really social, or do they really need to know the plan, because they’re very point A to point B? As teachers get to know their students, this all can be observed and organized before you even begin with the reading and writing and math. So I love for teachers to think about their students that way, to collaborate with parents, because parents will absolutely tell you: My child needs to move, or they are not going to be able to focus. And it doesn’t mean that they have ADHD. It could mean that they’re 7 and their nervous system hasn’t really settled into being a student yet. And it could mean that they have ADHD. It kind of doesn’t matter. The label is there to gain access to services, and then when kids are older, the label is there to help them form their identity of themselves and kind of associate as a person with — or I’m an autistic person, or however they want to identify. But all along the way, in school, it’s really more of the strengths and weaknesses we need to be noticing and adapting to, and it is literally an impossible job for our teachers to figure all of that out on their own, or for parents to figure all of that homework out on their own. Parents are not educators, so that’s why we’ve just got to work together and just put all of our skills together, especially when we are getting to know each other at the beginning of the year. Let our kids know: Parents and teachers talk. You don’t have to worry about communicating back and forth. We are on your team, we have got your back. So when things do come from home to school, it feels normal. It doesn’t feel like anyone’s in trouble. Those are things that we can talk in more detail about, kind of when we do collect data on behavior and things like that. That’s why that regulation piece is so important to be the foundation, not just at the beginning of the year, but at the beginning of the day before any higher-level education and instruction is going on.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah, such an important point because literally the way the brain’s processing systems work, if there is a lack of felt security and connection those higher-level cognitive processes can’t work. That’s the thing that people fail to understand, is what you’re describing here, that without the foundations of the brain feeling safe, feeling connected, the brain literally will not then start to go into engagement mode around content and higher-level thinking. I want to spotlight something around this issue of safety, because I get a lot of pushback, both from parents in the home setting, as well as educators in the school setting. “Well, of course the kid’s safe. There’s nothing unsafe happening here. Are you accusing me? Like I’m doing something unsafe in my classroom or in my home?” It’s like, no, wait a minute. This is about the child or the person’s perception of whether they are safe, and you gave some great examples of that. I think it’s just important to spotlight, of course, we are not suggesting that you at home or teachers at school are doing things that are inherently physically unsafe for the child, but kids have their own — each of them has their own experience of what feels safe and secure and connected to them, and especially our kids who are somewhere on that neurodivergent type of spectrum. They are going to be, by and large, even more sensitive to some of those perceived threats and things. And so I think that’s an important piece for people to understand: It’s that student’s experience of whether they feel safe and connected or not.

Dr. Emily King

And I can just give a quick example of that. If you have a student or young elementary student who really does need to stand or wiggle their body while they are attending, and that’s met with a very traditional, “You need to be seated and look forward” approach, that child begins to understand what’s expected of them. It’s hard for them, so they are habituated to having this feeling of “I have to get up and go to school and do something hard, and sit there all day and try to listen”, and for many kids, that takes all of their energy. And that’s why a lot of kids will have smooth mornings and rough afternoons, or they will have a smooth school day and fall apart between three and five in the afternoon. They have left it all on the field. And they may not look like they are working hard, but they may be having dysregulation later. And so that’s another reason parents and teachers have to communicate. Maybe we need to let the child have lots of movement breaks, stand while they work. As long as they are attending, as long as they are doing their work to completion, that’s what we are talking about in terms of, “I’m not feeling safe.” Really what it is, is I’m not feeling like my teacher is letting me be me, and let my body do what I need to do”, within parameters. I’m not disturbing everyone else, I’m totally with you on that. But there’s kind of a range of flexibility we can give kids that will have a huge impact on helping them feel comfortable and connected and safe because they are not spending so much energy regulating themselves, they are able to then use that higher order attention and focus, which is all getting hijacked by that emotional dysregulation when it’s happening. But then that frees up that mental energy to do the learning.

 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens (Digging Deeper Promo)

If you have a child who is struggling with attention, anxiety, mood learning or behavior issues, and you want to try to understand what is at the root of those struggles, then I have got a resource that will help. My Digging Deeper workshop will help you understand the common underlying causes and contributors to these issues in kids. Why is that important? Because most treatments focused on surface level behaviors or covering up symptoms. But for real lasting change, you need to address the actual root causes. This workshop applies to kids of any age, and it doesn’t matter if your child has no diagnosis or a lot of diagnoses. I will show you the 12 main areas you need to look at to identify why your child is struggling. Each section gives you specific things to consider, investigate, talk about with your providers and take action on. Now, this is not a course about how to treat all of these things. It’s about helping you hone in on what’s really going on to contribute to the behaviors and the tough challenges. This is key because if you don’t know what’s actually going on, you can’t put together a treatment plan to properly address it. It will save you time, money and energy by knowing what you need to be focusing on. And I know many of you don’t have access to a practitioner in your area to help you with this, so I created this workshop for you. You can watch the videos or listen to the audios at your convenience, and they’re divided into sections that are brief. There are some handouts, and I have also included a resource guide so you can learn more about the issues you discover are relevant to your child and specific treatments that may help. I have heard from many of you who have gone through the workshop that it helped you uncover issues no one ever told you about, and that you had no idea could be contributing. This is life changing for you and your child. Go to drnicoleworkshops.com to get all the information. I can’t wait to hear how it helps you.

 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And this is really why so many of the predominant approaches that are used in educational settings to address these kinds of behaviors are problematic, right? Because the typical response, like you just gave the example of the kid whose body and brain literally needs to move in order to regulate and learn, and when the expectation is “Nope, sit in your seat, face forward, eyes on the board”, and the kid is not doing it, that the tendency, the typical approach, then, is to put the like external reinforcement systems in place, the clip charts, “You need to sit down and sit still and look at what’s on the screen or I’m going to move your clip, or I’m going to put you on red, or I’m going to call your mom”, or whatever. These are the predominant strategies that are still used in educational settings, contrary to what we know from the research in several fields: Child development, neuroscience, learning, all of that — contrary to what we know is effective, these are still the prevailing methods. And so I would love to have you comment on that, because I’m sure that you have run into that in all three of the rounds of doing work as a school psychologist, as a parent of a neurodivergent learner, and in your private practice, helping families around that. So I’m just interested in your thoughts on that, on those types of approaches.

Dr. Emily King

Absolutely. What this comes down to is internal versus external motivation. There’s a place for external motivation, and where it can be useful. And when I say external motivation, I mean the adult or the authority figure is going to reward the child for doing something that’s being expected of them. The only way that that will work without making the child uncomfortable or potentially emotionally harming the child, is if the child has the skill, but is not doing it maybe consistently, or not doing it across settings, but the skill is pretty solid. So all they need to do is have a little bit of motivation, and you are rewarding them for practice. They have got the skill, they can do it, they are competent, but they need the last little push. Where we don’t want to use external motivation, which is kind of like everything else, is when there’s a lagging skill. When you ask the child to sit, “You will get a sticker if you sit”, that’s external motivation, and you are making me actually ignore or avoid something that my nervous system needs right now. And then you are rewarding me for ignoring my body, and that’s where we get into a problem and a negative feedback loop of “I don’t like coming to school, I do it for stickers.” And at some point, with some personalities, kids will start to buck the system, because they get angry and they know that it’s not working for them. And they feel like they are not understood, which is if we are getting dysregulated behavior, we really need to take it all the way back to: What are the skills that the child has, and what are the expectations? So in some of the work I do, I will share this with you if anyone would like to see this visual. I will describe it because you can see it, where it’s like a ladder, and at the top of the ladder are the expectations, and at the bottom of the ladder are the child’s skills. All of the space in between is anxiety. So the farther away the skill and expectation are, that’s the size of the anxiety we feel when we are faced with something to learn. Now, a little bit of anxiety is a good thing. We know this as mental health providers. We know this, as psychologists who study cognition. I joke with kids, like “If we don’t have anxiety, you would see a bear in the woods and try to give it a high five.” And they all say “No!” How do you know that, right? How do you know not to walk out in the street? How do you know to study for a test? A little bit of worry about your performance, or a little bit of danger keeps us alive. The problem is when the expectation is so high, and our skill is so low, that space in between is so massive that we shut down. So one of the things we can tweak as teachers and as parents, is to support the skill and adjust the expectation until the anxiety is tolerable, till it’s in this tolerable space of “I’m motivated enough”, like the anxiety creates motivation, “I’m motivated enough to go to the next level.” So the reason that I don’t like clip charts — there are several reasons, but they tend to be uniform across the class, and kids’ skills are not uniform. So think about what I just said about adjusting the skill level. Someone over here is going to be on green all the time, and they are actually never getting challenged. They may be getting reinforced just for showing up, kind of like me in school. I did everything that was expected of me. And then you’ve got a kid that’s never on green. So the fact that they are uniform is a problem, the fact that they are public is a problem, that everyone can see. And I get pushback on this a little bit from people, because they are like, “Well, it’s good peer pressure, right? The student over here is doing really well, so doesn’t the student over here want to be like that student over there?” Well, let’s think about that student over there that is doing well, and how everyone’s jealous of that student, everyone is thinking “That student is the teacher’s pet.” There are all kinds of social ripple effects that are not positive, of always being on green.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Well it also assumes that the kid who is never on green doesn’t already want to be like that. Of course they do! Every kid who is struggling wants to not be struggling. They don’t need a public showing to say, “You should be like this kid”, they already want to be the kid on green.

Dr. Emily King

Every kid wants to be on green, every kid wants to be regulated. No kid wants to have a meltdown. They are in fight or flight or freeze when that happens, and are not in control of themselves. And so the only way that that external motivation works is when the child is motivated to do the thing, and the external motivator is really just a reminder, like, “Let’s get into a new habit of doing it. You can do the skill, but let’s do it every day, let’s maybe do it independently.” You are tweaking something about it at the end. Internal motivation is really what we want. We want a kid to come to school because they love learning. We want to get to come to school because they feel comfortable and connected, and they feel like their teacher gets them. They feel like “I’m not going to know everything, but when she gives me something to learn and I don’t know, I know what to do, I know how to problem solve, I know I’m safe, even when I make a mistake.” And clip charts do not make you feel like that.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And also, the underlying assumption with any of those types of systems, used the way they are typically used, the assumption is that “What you should be doing, you are capable of doing it, and you are choosing not to. And therefore, if I dangle either a reward or the threat of a punishment, you will then choose to do the thing that I want you to do.” But you are exactly right, those underlying assumptions are all false. Look, if kids knew what they should be doing and were capable of doing it in that moment, they would. So the underlying premise of that is really problematic. And I think this gets into the other big issue to touch on here, which is why teachers, educators more broadly, continue to use these kinds of systems, and I think it really comes down to: Number one, this is by and large how educators are trained. This is what their experience is, this is what’s been modeled for them in their practicums and student teaching. This is how they have been taught, very outdated models of behaviorism, behavior reinforcement, those types of things. And they are so stressed, burned out, overtaxed, under-supported, that that puts them in a situation of not feeling safe and supported, such that they could learn some new ways or explore how to implement that. And so I think really, there are some very important parallels between what we are talking about on the kids’ side, and what’s happening on the adult teacher side. I would love your feedback on that.

Dr. Emily King

Yes, you nailed it with that. That’s why I do this work. It’s such an ironic situation staring us in the face, right? We have a dysregulated student we are trying to teach. But the teacher is so overwhelmed, and stressed, and dysregulated themselves. How are we expecting two dysregulated people — not just one, but two dysregulated people, generally speaking, they adult is going to be better able to mask it and “suck it up” and make it through the day, but two dysregulated people trying to create this safe space for nurture and learning. It’s a recipe for stagnation and just getting through the year, and learning will not happen with that formula. So we have to start talking about teacher mental health. We are doing a great job, I feel, talking about parental mental health, especially when children have more complex needs. But all classrooms at this point are neurodiverse classrooms. You will have some neurodivergent kids in there. But they all come to the table with some difference in whether its ability level, or interest, or personality, or skill level. Teachers are having to look out at this really diverse group of kids intellectually, cognitively interest-wise, and then they are given the standardized curriculum, and they know, “I have got to tweak this”. So when again, the expectation is too high for the skill, of course, we get behavior. But you are absolutely right, most teachers get maybe one behavioral course, usually in behavioral management, which is reactive. It’s like when you see this behavior, this is what you need to do to improve or squash or extinguish the behavior, which is behaviorism. What we are talking about is starting all the way at the beginning of the year, beginning of the relationship, kind of rebooting the whole thing and saying, “What are this child’s skills? What are your skills as a teacher?” And tweaking that, figuring it out. If you are honest about the fact that let’s say you have a really loud, bubbly personality, and you were working with a very sensory sensitive child who needs a quiet voice and needs you to slow down your speech, just for you to recognize that and work on that is huge for that student. And so that’s something I have had to work on as a therapist. I am trained in DIRFloortime and there’s a lot of floor time where do you observe, you watch, you do not intervene, and I am a doer by nature, and I will never forget having to sit on my hands for the first few months of my play therapy training, because you want to jump in and help, and you are watching the child try to problem solve and work out their social skills and problem solving, but a similar observation in the beginning of the school year, of yourself as a teacher and educator, and gather information from the parent and observing what the child’s nervous system is bringing to the table in terms of — I like to think about kids as these little nervous systems walking into the school building: What do they need to ready themselves to learn? What do you need as an educator to ready yourself for another school year? And that’s a big loaded question right now for our teachers.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Absolutely. And it’s on my brain, this is perfect, I would bring this around to specifically the parents who are listening, how this is important for them on a practical level, because we just talked about how if you have a child who is dysregulated and struggling for whatever the reasons are in school, and you also recognize that the teachers and staff members working with them are struggling, most of the time, with their own overwhelmed dysregulation. Well, just like you as the parent don’t want the teacher or whoever in school handling your child’s dysregulation by setting unreasonable expectations, yelling at them, threatening them, whatever, if you approach the teachers, the administrators, the educators who are feeling dysregulated and unsafe — if you approach them by threatening and being hostile, whatever, you are also not going to get very far. Nobody’s needs get met there. And so I think the challenge for a parent, then, and we sort of talked through pieces of this for the kids and the educators, which is important for parents to understand, but then from a parent’s standpoint, how can parents use this understanding, then, to advocate for their kids, to work with the education professionals to help get their child’s needs met? What are some of the things you think are important for parents around that?

Dr. Emily King

I always challenge parents to start with what is scary to them about their child, either being dysregulated or acting out or getting sent home at school? What scares them about that? The answer I usually get is, “Well, what if they are doing this 10 years from now, and they are 15 years old and they are hitting people?”, which tends to not happen. If you have a four-year-old that’s a biter, at some point, they develop. So sometimes, I can help parents understand that the growth that happens in kids’ nervous systems over time is huge. But some kids don’t really learn how to be a student until they are seven or eight. And so those years of 5, 6, 7 are hard for educators, for teachers, and for parents, because we are asking a child to do something that’s too hard for their body, because we start standardized education at five. So it’s usually that window of time that’s the scariest for parents. Sometimes it can be later into adolescence, but that’s kind of a different podcast. So I always start with what’s scary to you, because usually whatever is scaring the parent will send them into a need for control. And whenever they feel a need for control when you go into these meetings, in your interactions at school, as a person who’s worked as a school psychologist and then a parent, no one ever feels open and collaborative when someone comes at them trying to control what they know and what they do. So the parent is the expert on the child, especially in the home environment. The teacher is the expert on students, on education, and the most accurate reporter of what they see in the school environment. And we have to bring those perspectives together and just be curious. Try to just push aside any defensiveness, any fear, and just be curious about, “Okay, why is it happening here and not at home?” Or “Why is it happening in math and not in ELA?” “What’s going on in the morning or the afternoon?”, because until we can just figure it out and problem solve together, no one is getting helped. And a lot of meetings sometimes get very contentious, and time is spent building trust and not helping the child. And certainly, we all need to build trust, but trust can be built outside the IEP meeting. You do not want the first time you work with your teacher to be in the IEP meeting. There’s so much you can do in terms of little things like volunteering, collaborating, helping in the classroom, getting to know them. We haven’t had enough of that of course in the last few years, but as we get back, hopefully, parents will get back into school building to volunteer next year. It’s so important to watch the teacher in action. It will help you build trust of the situation. Your child may surprise you, and this happens to me all the time with my own kids. I will talk to their teachers, and I’m like, “Who are you talking about? I don’t know that kid. That kid does not act like that at the dinner table!” But I wholeheartedly trust that that’s happening. I know there’s something about the structure, the social demands, and that situation where my child is rising to the occasion. And my question is “How did you get them to do that? I need to be able to do that at dinner!” So get curious and say, “Oh, so this works at home”, and have the teacher say “This works at school”, and my main question for everyone is “What’s working? And why is it working?” And if we can always start there instead of “What’s the concern? What’s going wrong? What’s hard?” We are all here because it’s hard, right? What is working? And it could be “My child is getting out of the car in the morning.” And that’s what we are getting. That’s all that’s working. And then from there, it’s hard. Well, let’s start there. So there’s always somewhere to start. And I know someone listening is like, “Well, my child won’t get out of the car in the morning.” I have been there. So there are all kinds of things to problem solve, but we have to stay open and curious with each other.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So getting that collaboration approach, for parents to approach it by working on regulating and managing their own fears and anxieties, and then approaching the team with collaboration, with curiosity. And I’m just going to give a caveat here because certainly some of you listening have attempted it all. After doing this work for 25 years, I know that there are situations that are not salvageable. There are some of you working with teachers, principals, systems, whatever, where it doesn’t matter how you approach it, it is not going to be workable, and the best thing you can do is figure out how to get your child into a different situation. But certainly, there are those situations, but I find the vast majority of the time, as you are talking about, Emily, when we can approach this collaboratively with curiosity — I’ll even sometimes have parents that I work with, I’ll say to them “You know? It can be helpful for you to just acknowledge to your child’s classroom teacher that you know this is hard. Just say ‘Listen, I get it. My kid is not an easy kid a lot of days. He struggles with X,Y, and Z. Boy, I can really relate. Here are some of the things that I feel at home as her parent.“ That’s a way of building connection and trust, and often then, that helps the teacher. It brings their guard down. And it’s like, “Oh, she sees me. That mom sees me and how hard this is. And also, now I can see her because God, I’m thinking about what it would be like to have this kid the other 18 hours of the day at home!” These are hard things. These are wonderful, amazing children, that sometimes it’s just really hard. And I think just to acknowledge that to each other can go a long way in bringing understanding and willingness to collaborate.

Dr. Emily King

Yeah, and just small things like sharing a picture of your child on vacation with the teacher. Schools are doing a great job with technology and apps that still let teachers have boundaries, but that they can send pictures of a child working, or making a friend, or doing something that the teacher knows is a big deal for that child. And then the parents, they get it, they took a picture of that because they understand that that’s a big deal. And it’s all out of the connection and the communication of the parent and the teacher understanding where the child’s skills are so that when they surprise us or move forward, everyone’s excited about it, and we get to come together and celebrate with the child and say “You did it!”, and we are all super excited. And then to figure out, “Okay, why did that work? And how can we replicate it?”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So just like we want our children to feel safe and supported and connected in school, we have to do our role as parents to make sure that we are cultivating a sense of safety and connection with the educators working with them, in order to move forward. So many important things we have covered here, I know we need to wrap up. I want to make sure that people know where they can find out more, because you referenced a couple of amazing resources you have, I know you have got so many great charts and things you put on social and handouts, and all this stuff, and you are working on a program for educators around these things, so please tell everybody how they can get more of Dr. Emily in their life.

Dr. Emily King

Thank you! So you can just go to learnwithdremily.com, and you will find resources there for parents and teachers. I have a course for parents that’s most appropriate for parents right after the diagnosis, of understanding how you read through that report, shifting your mindset from a traditional approach to parenting this child right in front of you, and answering lots of questions about who are these players in kind of a therapy world and what all that is. And then I am working on a course for teachers. My plan is to offer it as a self-paced course during the school year, and then to have a program with live sessions with me that will be coming next summer, because teachers need community. And that that course will also have a private Facebook group so teachers can share stories and strategies with each other. So that will be called the neurodiverse classroom, and you can find more about it at learnwithdremily.com. If you are interested in downloading the regulation roster, it’s free at learnwithdremily.com/roster. And once you download that, you will be on my list to receive things, so you won’t miss anything with that.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Fantastic, and I want to get your Instagram handle too. Is Instagram a place that you are most…

Dr. Emily King

Mainly Instagram and Facebook. For both, I’m @Emilywkingphd.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I definitely want people to find you there. You post great stuff, so thank you for all of the work you are doing in this area, and really for the passion you bring to it. There’s not a lot of people in our fields who are really passionate about this piece, and yet, it is a piece that parents and kids are struggling with day in and day out, all year long. So thank you for your passion, your work around that. And thanks too for connecting today to share all that with us. We appreciate you.

Dr. Emily King

Thanks for having me and for lifting up this topic.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Awesome. And thanks as always, to all of you for being here and for listening. We will catch you back here next time.