The Brain Science Behind Children’s Behavioral Challenges

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Hi everyone, welcome to the show. I am Dr. Nicole and today, we’re going to talk about one of my favorite topics, getting to the root of child behavior challenges so we can support them appropriately. If you listen to the show regularly, you’ve heard me say so many times that kids’ behavior is just the tip of the iceberg. We need to look beneath those surface behaviors and symptoms that we see to understand what’s really going on and how we can improve things for our kids and for our families. My guest today is Dr. Mona Delahooke, and she has spent her career helping parents and professionals understand and support child behavior in developmentally appropriate and compassionate ways. So today, we’re going to talk about going beyond behavior and using brain science and compassion to understand children’s behavioral challenges. Could there be a better topic for this show, or what? 

Let me tell you a little bit more about Mona. She’s a licensed clinical psychologist with more than 30 years of experience caring for children and their families. She is a senior faculty member of the Profectum Foundation, an organization dedicated to supporting families of neurodiverse children, adolescents and adults. She is a trainer for the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health. Dr. Delahooke holds the highest level of endorsement in the field of infant and toddler mental health in California, as a Reflective Practice Mentor (RPM). She is a frequent speaker, trainer, and consultant to parents, organizations, schools, and public agencies. Dr. Delahooke has dedicated her career to promoting compassionate, relationship-based, neurodevelopmental interventions for children with developmental, behavioral, emotional, and learning differences. She’s the author of ‘Beyond Behaviors: Using Brain Science and Compassion to Understand and Solve Children’s Behavioral Challenges.’ I have been so looking forward to this interview, can’t wait to dive in. Welcome to the show, Mona!

Dr. Mona Delahooke:

Thank you so much, Nicole! It’s my favorite topic, as you know and I can’t wait to talk. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I’m so excited about this and I know that our listeners are just going to get so many wonderful pieces of information that they can think about and take back and do something with right away. You know, before we dive into the topic, I like to have guests just talk a little bit about how you got into doing the work that you do. So you’ve been doing this work for 30 years with kids and families, what got you into this? How did your career path take you to what you’re doing now?

Dr. Mona Delahooke:

Well, I had an interest in psychology as far back as I can remember. I think I was a teenager when I — I was in high school when I decided I wanted to major in psychology, so I went straight to college and got married a week after I graduated from my bachelor’s and I went straight into a doctorate program and I wanted to get my Ph.D. and become a child psychologist before I had kids. So I did it really fast and by the time I was about almost 30, I had my degree, I had my clinical license, and I had this burning desire to be a mom. And I thought, “Wow, I’m so well-prepared! This is going to be great! I am good to go!”, and my own mother fueled it by saying, “Well, you’re an expert in child psychology! Your kids are going to be so lucky!”. I even studied — for my dissertation, I studied attachment theory. So I thought I was really going to have an easy go of it.

Well, that was a dream that got blasted early on because my first baby was born prematurely and as she grew, I realized that there were quite a few limitations to everything that I was taught in graduate studies. So really big at the time was cognitive and cognitive-behavioral psychology, where we looked at behaviors as both the starting point and the endpoint. And when I was applying it to my child, and then, later on, my children and eventually some of the kids in my practice early on, I felt there were a lot of limitations. I began a journey backward, essentially. Once my kids were school-age, I went back to get some certificate programs in fields away from mental health.

So I began studying the brain-body connection and I looked at the field of neurodevelopmental health, which was just emerging in the 80s and 90s and what I came from changed my life, changed the way I parented and certainly changed the way I work with families and children for the better. It’s been an amazing journey ever since, so I’m really excited about what I see as a paradigm shift coming online. It’s only starting, but little by little, people like you and me were talking about behaviors in a new way, and we should be. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I love that. I always find it so interesting, people’s stories of how we came to be doing this work, and I think for so many of us in the field, our career path or the focus of our work really shifted around our own experience with our children or our families, I know for me that was the case, although you did it probably the smarter way of getting your doctorate before having kids. I did the whole let’s have three and have a fourth on the way and then start my doctorate program type of thing! 

Dr. Mona Delahooke:

Wow! You deserve a medal!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

But I think so many of us, our work comes out of our experience with our kids and going oh, wait — all of this stuff that I was taught, now I’m really living this and doing this, whether it’s in my own practice or with my own kids and finding the limitations of that and I certainly can relate to that and agree with you that it has long been time for a paradigm shift. I talk about going beyond behavior as beyond just looking at behaviors and kids through the lens of their behaviors and looking at the whole child and looking at this from a developmental standpoint. So the work that you’re doing is so, so important. I want to start out with — you talk about behavior in a similar way that I do — that sort of analogy of behaviors just being the tip of the iceberg. I want to have you describe to listeners in your own words: What does that mean? Why is that an important concept?

Dr. Mona Delahooke:

I find that often times, of course, it’s easy to look at something that a child or anyone, for that matter, is doing and make a quick assumption about why they’re doing it. And when we think about behaviors as just the tip of the iceberg, what I’m trying to do is separate a behavior from it’s meaning. And oftentimes as parents, we jump to making sure a: if the behavior is inappropriate or we feel like it’s not good behavior, we either discipline a child or talk to the child or do something about that behavior right away.

That of course, is what I did before I really looked underneath behaviors. When we do that, we eclipse a very powerful piece of child development, and that is that behaviors have multiple meanings and there are so many, there are millions and they are as unique as each child is but when we just judge a surface behavior as our target, in other words, we want to have our children look a certain way or our students behave a certain way in the classroom, for example — that’s taking a little tiny slice of child development, and what we need to do, in my opinion, now that we know about neurodevelopment and that is how the brain and body connection develops over time, through our early 20s is to expand our vision and expand our notion of what behaviors mean. So that’s why I call them the tip of the iceberg.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Well, I think that’s such an important point. As adults, we tend to look at the things that kids do, at least I find for myself and with the many parents and professionals that I work with, looking at them through our own lens and make, as you said, assumptions about what that’s about, right? Oh, they just don’t want to do something, or oh, they’re just trying to make my life miserable. We look at it through our own experience and emotions instead of, as you said, sort of separating and looking back and going — okay, what could really be going on here? It probably is not the case that my kid woke up this morning and just decided they were going to do everything in their power to make me miserable and unhappy, right? That’s probably not what’s going on here, even though it may feel like it!

Dr. Mona Delahooke:

That’s right, and psychologist Ross Greene, I’m sure you know his work, he says: “Children do well when they can.” And that is, again, we often assume that behavior is your child’s way to get something or to get out of something. In other words, we are trained, it’s drilled into us, in our culture, essentially that behaviors are motivated and incentivized. And you know what? That really misses a large amount of behaviors. Now, of course, there are times when children will be debating with us and they’ll be using their smart brains to get something or test limits, of course, that happens. But I found that with our children that are having DSM disorders for example, such as oppositional defiance or conduct disorders, it’s way more complicated than just having a behavior viewed as a child’s way of getting something or getting out of something. That just doesn’t hold water to brain science. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, and the problem is that we have, historically, in the fields of education, in the fields of psychology — addressed it as if it’s just motivated as getting something or getting out of something. And that has left, I feel, a large number of kids in our homes, in our schools really not having their needs addressed in ways that are supportive of helping them grow into being adults who are able to be emotionally, behaviorally, relationally regulated. 

Dr. Mona Delahooke:

I think so. And I should say early on and I’m sure you agree, this isn’t because everybody in our educational field or in the field of behavioral change doesn’t have the child’s best interest in mind — all of our colleagues do. So that goes without saying. This is not a blame thing, but it is honestly — the science of studying behaviors began in the 40s and 50s and we have learned so much since then. So what you just said about some of our most vulnerable children, especially — this holds true.

So if we attempt to modify the behavior of a child with a toxic stress or trauma history, for example, you may very well get an increase in what we would consider challenging behaviors and then under the older paradigm, you would consider, well, we just need a stronger behavior plan or we need a stronger reward and consequence system for the child so they will learn to control themselves, and that’s the problem. It’s not about deliberate control of behaviors. Many, many children, teens, and adults have difficulty controlling their emotions and their behaviors. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

And I think that is a perfect segue into what I wanted to ask about next, which is, you talk about top-down or bottom/body up kinds of behavior, so I’d love for you to explain that to our listeners, the difference between those. 

Dr. Mona Delahooke:

Okay, so many people don’t know the difference. I didn’t know the difference until a brilliant colleague of mine, Dr. Connie presented this concept in a study group I was in, over and over, in the early 90s. That there are actually many different kinds of behaviors, but two important classes that we need to understand of behaviors are top-down and body or bottom-up. Let’s look at top-down first. This is what we typically think everyone has once they can talk and walk.

So we think that children’s behaviors are top-down, meaning they’re controlled by our mind. So, what we think can influence our emotions and our behaviors. Top-down thinking is something that actually develops. It’s a neurodevelopmental process. As we know, infants are reflexive and they don’t have the ability — you can’t say to an infant, “Would you please tell me what you’re crying about right now, dear?” The infant can’t say, “Oh, my diaper is wet!” They cry. So we are born reflexive, and then over time, we develop the ability to have top-down connections from our prefrontal cortex, which is right in the middle of our top cortical centers of our brain that link to language and to emotional control of our emotional system or our limbic system and the ability to plan ahead, to have what we call executive function, to think — and it’s amazing. It’s a great thing to have your top-down, as Tina Bryson and Dan Siegel call it, your ‘Upstairs Brain’ is working, then you can actually have control over your emotions and your behaviors, but that is one type of behavior.

The second large type of behavior would be reflexive body or bottom-up behaviors, and that is when you are controlled by your instinctual reflexes and all of your emotions and behaviors aren’t deliberate, they aren’t thought about, but they are reactions to something very important that all human beings do all the time and that is perceived safety or threat in their relational environment inside of their bodies and in the physical environment. So that’s the answer to top-down and bottom-up, but there is a process. I wonder if you might want me to talk about neuroception at some point because that will help us understand the difference between the two, top-down and bottom-up. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I do. I’d love for you talk about that and even some examples. 

Dr. Mona Delahooke:

Okay. So when I say that human beings have this built-in ability to figure out if they’re safe in their environment or not, there’s, again, a scientist — Dr. Stephen Proges, and he is the developer of something called the Polyvagal Theory, and he went deep into the nervous system and described some new functions of the autonomic nervous system, which is basically that big brain-body highway that gets feedback from the body up to the brain and back and forth, it’s how we react, it’s what causes our behaviors and what we say, what we think. Anyway, Dr. Porges has developed a word and a concept called ‘Neuroception’. Think of it as a TSA agent that’s running in the back of our brains all the time making sure we’re safe. So it’s our personal subconscious TSA agent.

And through neuroception, infants all the way up to adults, until we’re 110 years old are always serving our environment on a subconscious level. And when a person detects threat in the environment, and it could be from anything, it could be from a look on someone’s face, it could be from someone’s tone of voice, it could be from looking at a clip chart in your classroom and seeing some other kids get their color go from yellow to red and all of a sudden feeling a rush of threat. Neuroception constantly informs our emotions, which constantly inform our behaviors.

So, for many children who have difficulty with behaviors, they are constantly being thrown into a sense of subconscious threat. So, they are not able to say, “Mommy/Teacher, I’m feeling really upset in my body right now and so I need some help, otherwise I’m going to explode.” No, that doesn’t happen. What happens is they may empty everything off their desk, they may have someone look at them and then punch them or poke them, and it’s not something they’re doing of their top-down thinking, it’s more of a reflexive protective behavior that happens through this subconscious process. And the problem that we have in many of our education systems, and for many of us who don’t know any better is we assume the child’s doing it on purpose and we punish the child when what they need is soothing connection, not correction, but connection, love, and support. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

That connection first to help ensure that feeling of safety and then looking at what may need to happen next, but the connection first, and I think that so goes against the grain of, as you mentioned earlier, what is just ingrained in us and in our culture, right? That something inappropriate happens and you clamp down on that and take care of that right away as a mom, as a dad, as a teacher — we can’t let that happen and it’s that correction and that assumption that all of these things are coming out of this top-down, that the child has intentionally processed and thought about this and is choosing to do this as opposed to looking at it as a bottom-up, subconscious process. So, so important. 

Dr. Mona Delahooke:

It’s kind of a mind-bender because I felt that as a parent, so much responsibility to make sure I was consistent with my discipline and let my children know when they cross the line because I felt like it was all dependent on how good of a parent I was. Was I going to be too lax? Was I going to be — was I going to raise them up properly? That is such a burden on us as parents. So yes, let me give you a little real-life example, one I remembered where I mistakenly took one of my children’s behaviors as something I needed to discipline, and that was that I had my two younger daughters and they were like eight and five or seven and four, they got invited to an elderly neighbor’s house, and this was the first time they got invited to a tea party because she had her two grandchildren there. 

So I got them all dressed, I didn’t know this neighbor, so I was like, “Girls, this is a new neighbor, she’s elderly. Please just be really polite and remember your manners, don’t forget to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’”, all the basics. And I thought, “Oh, this is going to be great!”, and they knew to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. About 20 minutes later, way sooner than I thought, the neighbor marched them home and there was a look on her face when I opened the door, I thought, “Oh boy.”, and she said something like, “Well, they weren’t very well-behaved, and they were throwing grapes!”, and I went into the shame game like there was no tomorrow. I went into what I call the red pathway where I was so ashamed, that I grabbed my girls very roughly by the hand I apologized quickly, took them inside and I disciplined them and raised my voice, and I was not a happy mommy, I was kind of out of control with how strongly I said, “You know you should never do this at a person’s house! You weren’t being polite!”. 

The looks on their faces, I will never forget. And the guilt that I felt for getting mad at them after I found out what happened was unbelievably strong, but I didn’t have any other way to view it. What had really happened was that the neighbor was frightening and the way she talked to her own grandchildren was frightening to my own children on a subconscious level and so they began acting in ways that were reactions to their own sense of threat. And so I imagine that throwing grapes at the other children was something that they all did to feel safer, and it wasn’t because they didn’t know better, it was because their body-up, the bottom-up part of our brain that helps us stay safe took over, so it was actually adaptive. Anyway, that’s just — years later, I put the pieces together when I understood the power of neuroception and understanding that our children’s behaviors aren’t always, like you said, to make us crazy as parents or to do things that make us feel embarrassed. Oftentimes, there’s a really good reason that the behavior happens. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Absolutely. I love that example and I think so often, especially with our kids and teenagers and young adults who maybe are on the autism spectrum or have some other neurodevelopmental condition or learning impairment, cognitive impairment, the world is inherently — it feels less safe and secure to them because they are more overwhelmed by having to process everything that’s happening and I find that so often, whether it’s when I was a teacher in the classroom or in my clinical practice with kids and families or in consulting, what I find is that a lot of the “behaviors” that they’re exhibiting come out of this immense sense of overwhelm and just fear in the situation and maybe — is fight or flight another kind of — maybe that’s a term people are familiar with too, like kids almost go into that fight or flight mode of “I’m not safe here.”, and they’re just anxious and almost paralyzed from that. And I see that so often the behaviors that kids are exhibiting, particularly when they have those challenges, they get misinterpreted, they get interpreted as being intentional or top-down, when in fact, they’re coming from a place that you’re talking about, that body-up or that bottom-up rooted really in feeling afraid, insecure, unsafe in that moment. 

Dr. Mona Delahooke:

Absolutely. I just love the way you captured that. In fact, fight or flight is what we think about when we talk about the sympathetic nervous system, which is that protective part of our brains that goes into a movement, into overdrive when we feel threatened. And for our neurodivergent students and members of our community, children, including children diagnosed on the autism spectrum, the triggers of just being in the world — we can begin, I think to appreciate how great those sensory triggers are. There is a high amount of sensory over-reactivity and there is also sensory bombardment, there may be a sense of hearing everything and seeing everything, it’s just too much. So the body, again, protects itself and one thing I try to talk to teachers about is that behaviors in neurodivergent students can also be seen as a compassionate way for the student to stay in the game, to participate in the classroom.

So they may have movement differences, or they may be saying things over and over again that we describe as somehow pathological scripting or something, but again, behaviors are something that happens oftentimes subconsciously to ease the circumstances of someone’s life. So when we view behaviors in students with differences, we can also view them as reducing their distress, and so imagine what happens when a student is doing something that reduces their stress and they’re punished for it. I have a lot of clients, a lot of students that I’ve worked with where they will be sent to a back part of the room, maybe to calm down, or they’ll be asked to take a sensory break and walk around the room, in not a nice way, more of a kind of punishment way — well, you’re not behaving so you need to go do this, rather than, “Wow, I see your body is asking you to do this thing right now. Is there anything else you need from me honey? Are you feeling okay? I want you to know you’re not alone, I’m here with you.” So we can flip the lens from discipline to compassion pretty quick if we realize that behaviors aren’t our enemy, they’re our friend to understand the child better. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, I love that. To flip that script and to think of it in a compassionate way as opposed to a punitive way.  You know, it occurs to me as we’re talking, one of the things I’ve had parents and professionals say is, “Well, there’s nothing for him to be anxious or upset or feel unsafe about.”, and I think it’s probably really important to mention here that that perspective belongs to the child and whatever — or the individual and their experience of what may feel threatening or unsafe or whatever. May not be our perception and might not make sense to us, but that doesn’t mean that it feels the same way to them because I think many adults go, “There’s nothing unsafe about my classroom or about my home!”, your perception is your reality and what I hear you saying is we need to look at this through the perception and the experience of the child, rather than through our own. 

Dr. Mona Delahooke:

Exactly. I couldn’t say it better myself. That’s exactly what — we need to look at it through the perspective of the child. And with a lot of, again, compassion to ourselves because if anyone’s listening and they have judged their child’s behavior by their own yardstick — yes, I do it myself!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Me too!

Dr. Mona Delahooke:

And so it’s a natural — our brains make sense of things, so we’re seeing — well, of course, the child is safe! It’s a good classroom, it’s a seasoned teacher, she’s got control over the classroom, they’ve got beautiful walls decorated with great stuff. This is a safe classroom. I’ve had this happen in IEPs where I’m trying to describe a child’s fight or flight behavioral responses as detecting cues of safety in a classroom, and the IEP team, bless their hearts because they’re trying really hard, but they will be saying, “No, this is a safe place.” And what Dr. Porges tells us is something super important. Safety is in the eye of the beholder. It’s not in the eye of the observer. So safety is subconsciously-driven, but what you said is really important, we can’t make assumptions based on a generic notion of safety. It’s all in — we have to have an appreciation for individual differences. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Absolutely. Really, what we’ve been talking about is this difference between deliberate behavior — things that kids are thinking about and processing and intentionally doing vs. stress responses, right?

Dr. Mona Delahooke:

Yeah, that’s the difference. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

And so, I’d love to have you share — because I think that this is such an important paradigm shift, a different way of thinking about this, I’d love for you to share with the parents and the professionals listening, what are some examples of ways that we can respond differently? What’s the difference between how we might respond to a deliberate behavior vs. how we can respond in a supportive way that is a stress response?

Dr. Mona Delahooke:

The first step is asking ourselves, are we top-down? Because if we’re bottom-up, if we are just about to lose it like I did when my children were throwing grapes, we need to take a huge breath and do nothing. We need to center ourselves first, as a teacher, as a parent, so the first step would be — think, are we top-down or bottom-up? If we’re bottom-up, don’t do anything, grab a lifejacket and put it on yourself and breathe and try to exhale longer than your inhale. That does something to your parasympathetic nervous system, especially if you can get two or three breaths in, it’s amazing, and it can just bring you back because we can’t help our children or the children we work with unless we are in what we call the green zone, we’re top-down, we’re thinking and we’re sane, ourselves.

So it’s a bit of a complicated answer because what we basically need to do is determine if a child’s behavior is one that’s going to need our nice, firm boundary. In other words, do we need more of a hammer, or is this a behavior that’s going to need a warm, soft, coming together with a child? So one of the ways, the different triage I have for that is by looking at the cue on the child’s body, and those cues are found in the eyes, the tone of voice, the gestures on their face, their body gestures, their body position, in fact, we can actually read the autonomic state of a person, whether it’s fight or flight, or calm, or disconnected, those are the 3 main ones, and we call those the red, the green and the blue zones. 

The green zone is when we’re calm and connected and top-down and able to kind of manage talking about or gesturing about or using technology to communicate, and the red would be when we’re fight or flight, and the blue is just when we are disconnected, blue’s very serious. When we’re disconnecting, I encourage teachers and parents to look for signs that a child has given up. When you’re fighting or moving or something, at least your body is doing something active, but when you stop engaging, and when you completely shut down and you stop trying to get help or to be with others, be in connection with others, then we need to pay attention to adding social engagement and cues of safety and warmth as quickly as possible.

So I think the short answer is: Understand, is your child in stress response or are they asking for limits and asking for verbal help? And oftentimes, I think what we find is that we talk too much and too soon, and there’s nothing wrong with talking. It’s great, but it’s kind of our go-to. You can talk yourself till you’re blue in the face. If the child is bottom-up, it’s not going to work, and you’re going to both be so frustrated. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, I talk about it like continuing to pour water into a cup that’s already overflowing, right? A kid who already is overwhelmed and bottom-up and in just that sort of fight or flight place, the more we talk at them and try to correct and verbalize to them, the more we’re just adding more water to a cup that’s already overflowing, they’re already not able to feel safe and manage the situation, and now we are compounding it in an attempt to be helpful. 

Dr. Mona Delahooke:

That’s a great analogy. And as you add more weight to the water, what you’re saying reminds me of the concept of allostasis, and that’s loading. When you load more stress onto an already stressed system, they’re going to get loaded down, so that poor cup is just loading with water and it’s overflowing, and you’ll often see the child and yourself feel more distressed over time rather than less. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

And I think what you’re really giving parents and professionals permission to do is to just pause, step back, assess the situation — to not feel like we’ve got to get that hammer out and do something right then, but to really just center ourselves and say, okay — let’s look at what’s going on here and what’s going to be the best way to respond to this, and I think giving parents, especially, permission to do that, like it’s okay to take some deep breaths, to not immediately react, I mean obviously unless it’s a safety issue or something like that, and to just really assess the situation and not feel like a bad parent if you’re not immediately dragging the kid out of there or verbally correcting them, that it’s okay to pause and take stock and give yourself and your child just a little bit of time to bring that level down. How we respond then, whether it is with discipline if that’s what’s appropriate, or it is with connection, compassion — I just think that permission to just pause and not be so reactive is really powerful. 

Dr. Mona Delahooke:

So powerful. And let’s try to end public shaming of children who are tantrum-y and their parents. It’s dreadful! I hear these stories that break my heart from parents of things that strangers will say to them when their child is in a meltdown as if it’s caused by the parent. I was reading a study in the 0-3 journal and it said that in parents of children with special needs, they feel judged 99% of the time out in public, they feel judged. Which is basically saying they feel judged all the time. Thank you for saying that, kudos. Yes, as parents, let’s acknowledge that we can have a moment of compassion for ourselves, this is a difficult situation that I’m in and I might be getting a lot of stares right now, but let compassion and calmness take over and everybody — we’re okay, thanks for your concern, I’ve got this. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Absolutely. We could talk about this all day! So much important stuff here, but I want to give a chance for you to talk a bit about your newest book and about where people can find you, because what I love about this book is that you really talk about this paradigm shift, which is just so profound and so important, of moving from just looking at behavior as this outward thing that we need to squash, to looking at the underlying pieces, I think that’s just so powerful. So can you share a little bit about the book and where people can find it?

Dr. Mona Delahooke:

Oh thank you, I would love to! The book’s title is ‘Beyond Behaviors: Using Brain Science and Compassion to Understand and Solve Children’s Behavioral Challenges’, but you could just look up ‘Beyond Behaviors’, it’s available on Amazon. I wrote it because I wanted a hefty book, and when I say hefty, I felt like I needed to include brain science and neuroscience in there because I wanted parents to be able to take this book and use it in an IEP meeting or hand it to their pediatrician and say, you know what? There is a new of looking at behaviors. It isn’t just a good happy parenting notion, it’s brain science mixed with neurodevelopment. So the book is beyond behaviors and I love getting feedback from it, it’s been a joy to get feedback from it, it’s doing really well and we’re seeing it being read around the world and many people are resonating with it, I think because it’s feeling like taking pressure off of parents and off of professionals and giving them some ideas and some strategies and real techniques that are very different than what we currently have. So thank you and people can reach me at my website, monadelahooke.com and my Facebook at Mona Delahooke PhD, Instagram @monadelahooke and twitter @monadelahooke. So be connected, I would have to have conversations with as many people as possible about how this is working, how they see it fitting into their family life and into their work with children. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Awesome, and we’ll make sure that all of those links to the book, to your website, to your social media are included with the show notes, so everybody can access those, and I do just want to really encourage people to get a copy of the book, it’s so important, you include all those great references. It is something that parents can bring to the professionals involved, and the bottom line is, I think the time is right. We’re ready for this shift. We’ve been approaching things for the same way now in the field for a long time and parents are ready to hear something different than what they’ve traditionally been told, and quite frankly, a lot of people in our fields are ready to hear this, are ready to have some tools and some new ways of thinking about this to more profoundly help the people that we’re working with. So to me, the time is right for this and it’s the right book at the right time and I really encourage people to check that out and access all of your great resources. You’ve got an amazing collection of articles and just so many wonderful things on your website. 

Dr. Mona Delahooke:

Oh, thank you so much! Just a joy to talk about it all with you.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Well thank you for your time and for being on the show today, really appreciate it. 

Dr. Mona Delahooke:

Great, my pleasure. Thanks so much, Nicole. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Okay, everybody, that does it for this episode of The Better Behavior Show! We will see you back here next time.