Self-Reg

INTRODUCTION

I’ve lost track of how many children I’ve seen in my work across Canada, the United States, and the world. Not just thousands but easily tens of thousands. And among all those children I have
never seen a bad kid.

Kids can be selfish, insensitive, and even spiteful; refuse to pay attention; be quick to shout or push; or be disobedient or downright hostile. The list goes on and on. I know—I’m a father myself. But a bad kid? Never.

We all have moments when we immediately label children “bad.” We might say “unmanageable” or “impossible” or “the problem kid” or use a clinical label like “ADHD/ADD” or “oppositional defiant,” but no matter what words we use, our conclusions can be harshly judgmental.

One day I bumped into a neighbor walking down the street with his four-year-old son and the family dog. When I leaned down to pat the dog, it snapped at me, and the father smiled ruefully and said apologetically, “Alfonse is just a puppy,” but the little boy stopped to scold the dog and slapped it on the nose. The father exploded. It was okay for the dog to act up but not his four-year-old son. We’ve all been that dad at one time or another, reacting to our kids in the pressure of a moment in ways we wouldn’t if we were thinking more calmly and clearly.

These behaviors are expressions of a child’s inability in the moment to respond to everything going on in and around him—sounds, noise, distractions, discomforts, emotions. Yet we react as if these were problems with a child’s character or temperament. Worse yet, children come to believe it.

There isn’t a single child who, with understanding and patience, can’t be guided along a trajectory that leads to a rich and meaningful life. But stereotypes of the “difficult child” color our views, as do our own hopes, dreams, frustrations, and fears as parents. Don’t get me wrong: Some children can be a lot more challenging than others. But often our negative judgments of a child are just a defense mechanism, a way of shifting the blame for the trouble we’re having onto the child’s “nature.” This can make a child more reactive, defensive, defiant, anxious, or withdrawn. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It never has to be that way.

I once shared this thought with a conference audience of two thousand kindergarten teachers, and a voice piped up from the back: “Well, I’ve got a bad kid. And his dad was a bad guy. And his grandfather before him was bad to the core.” Everyone laughed, but I was intrigued. I thought, “Well, there’s always an exception to the rule. I really want to meet this child.” So the teacher arranged for me to come to the school and meet the little boy in question. And the second he shuffled into the room it was instantly clear that what she saw as misbehavior was really stress behavior.

He was sensitive to noise; twice, before he’d even sat down, he had been startled by sounds in the hall outside the room. What’s more, he was squinting, which suggested that he was sensitive to the fluorescent lights in the room or perhaps had a visual-processing problem. The way he squirmed in his chair made me wonder if it was difficult for him to sit upright or feel at ease on the hard plastic chair. The real problem was something biological. Under these circumstances, raised voices or hardened facial expressions would only make him more distressed and distracted. Over time, this kind of habitual interaction can make a child disobedient or defiant.

This is especially true with issues that run in families, as it seemed was the case here. Did his father and his grandfather before him have the same biological sensitivities? Had they met with the sort of punitive responses from the adults in their lives that can so easily set a child on a troubled path that eventually seems only to confirm the thinking “You see, I told you he was a bad kid”?

My immediate concern was for the child in front of me, and to help the weary teacher see and understand the significance of his behavioral cues. I gently closed the classroom door, turned off the overhead lights (which not only have a harsh glare but also make a constant buzzing noise), and lowered my voice. She saw him suddenly relax, her expression softened, and she whispered, “Oh my God.”

It’s a response I’ve seen and heard from every adult who has discovered that a child’s problem wasn’t irreparable. It had been so easy to see this boy as having a genetically flawed character. That changed the instant she saw his sensitivity to sound and light. This wasn’t his choice.

In a flash the teacher’s entire behavior toward him changed. Before she had been grim; now she smiled to the corners of her eyes. Her tone of voice changed from clipped to melodic, her gestures from choppy to slow and rhythmic. She was looking directly at him, not at me. The two of them had connected, and everything about his body posture, facial expression, and tone of voice mirrored the changes in her own.

This sort of transformation isn’t just a case of seeing the child differently or, for that matter, seeing a different child, but of changing the whole teacher-child dynamic. She had put aside her need for compliance, even her ego, if you will, and had seen the child—truly seen the child—for the first time. She now could begin to teach him; for his part, he hadn’t the first clue that he was so sensitive to noise and light, let alone that this made him difficult to handle. This was his reality, what was “normal” for him. Now she could help him learn when and why he was becoming hyper and distracted and what he could do about it to stay calmly focused, alert, and engaged in his own learning.


Looking from the Right Spot

There isn’t a parent reading this book who hasn’t, at some time in their child’s life, been in exactly the same place. Probably more than once! We try so hard to help our children, to provide them not just with material comforts but with the life skills they will need to be successful. Yet all too often we find ourselves failing to connect and understandably frustrated or angry. We know that what they are doing isn’t working well for them or isn’t good for them, and we wonder why we can’t get them to see it. Just like this teacher, we have the best of intentions, but that’s not enough. Self-Reg starts by reframing a child’s behavior and, for that matter, our own. It means seeing the meaning of the child’s behavior, maybe for the first time.


When I was in graduate school, my supervisor, Peter Hacker, an amateur Rembrandt scholar, once offered to show me around a Rembrandt exhibition. Arriving early at the gallery, I spent twenty minutes alone studying a self-portrait, and for the life of me I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. When Peter arrived, he asked me what I thought, and I said it just looked blurry to me. Peter smiled and walked away from the painting, staring intently at the floor. He pointed to a small dot on the floor and then asked me to stand on that spot and look at the picture again. What I saw was astonishing. The painting had suddenly sprung into perfect focus. Instantly I saw and felt the full force of Rembrandt’s genius.


I had wanted so badly to be able to understand why this painting was considered a stunning artistic achievement. I had read the notes about its history. I knew when and where Rembrandt had painted it. Yet I could have come to the museum every day for years to study that painting and never have discovered its secret. I would always have been standing in the wrong spot.

Self-Reg will show you where to stand: how to bring your child’s behavior into focus, respond to your child’s needs, and help your child help himself. It will strengthen your relationships. This is not about getting your child to “behave”—to stop doing or saying things that irritate you or others or create problems for himself. Self-Reg is about making a dramatic difference in mood, concentration, and the ability to make friends, feel empathy, and develop the higher values and virtues that are vital to your child’s long-term well-being.

This technique is the result of the scientific revolution in our understanding of self-regulation. The term “self-regulation” is used in so many different ways—hundreds, in fact—but the original psychophysiological sense refers to how we manage the stresses that we are under. And “stress,” in its original sense, refers to all those stimuli that require us to expend energy to maintain some sort of balance: not just the kinds of psychosocial stresses that we are all familiar with, like the demands of work or what others think of us, but, as was the case for that little boy I discussed above, things in the environment, like auditory or visual stimulation; our emotions, positive as well as negative; patterns that we find it difficult to recognize; the demands of coping with the stress of others; and for too many children today, the things they do or don’t do in their free time. If a child’s stress load is consistently too high, his recovery may become compromised and reactivity to stressors, even relatively minor ones, becomes heightened.

Self-Reg is a five-step method for (1) recognizing when a child is overstressed; (2) identifying and then (3) reducing his stressors; (4) helping him become aware of when he needs to do this for himself; and (5) helping him to develop self-regulating strategies.

It’s not easy to know when a child is overstressed or what counts as a stressor for a child, especially because children have to cope with so many hidden stressors these days. Too often we think that we just need to tell a child to calm down, even though that never works. There’s no simple recipe for what helps a child to self-regulate; children are all different and their needs are constantly changing, to the point where what worked last week may not work today. But by mastering the first four steps you’ll be able to experiment and discover what works for your child and what doesn’t. Most important, your child will too.

Since Plato’s time self-control has been celebrated as a measure of character. This assumption has profoundly shaped how we think about children and how they develop into adults of sound mind, body, and character. For adults too the assumption has been that willpower is essential to resist temptation and to persevere through challenge and adversity. What the classical philosophers and the generations that followed them didn’t know is that something much more basic is at work.

Self-control is about inhibiting impulses; self-regulation is about identifying the causes and reducing the intensity of impulses and, when necessary, having the energy to resist. This distinction has not been clearly understood; indeed, the two are often conflated. Self-regulation is not only fundamentally different from self-control: It is what makes acts of self-control possible—or, as often happens, unnecessary. Unless we understand this fundamental distinction, we run the risk of adding to the factors contributing to a child’s poor self-control, rather than helping him develop the self-regulation foundation needed to succeed in school and in life.

Self-Reg sees “problematic” behaviors as invaluable signs of when a child is overstressed. Think of the child who is highly impulsive or explosive, has trouble regulating his emotions, has frequent meltdowns or is highly volatile or irritable, can’t tolerate frustration, gives up at the slightest obstacle, finds it difficult to pay attention or ignore distractions, has trouble managing relationships or experiencing empathy. Behaviors that trigger our automatic thought that the child is “bad” or “lazy” or “slow” are often a sign that his stress level is way too high and there’s no gas left in his tank—no energy left to manage anything else. So Self-Reg teaches us how to figure out what the stressors are for that particular child and how we can reduce them. Then we need to help the child learn how to manage all this on his own.

Self-Reg starts with how well we can identify and reduce our own stressors and how well we can stay calm and attentive when we’re interacting with a child. Just like the teacher who raised the question at my talk, when we’re angry, worried, or at wit’s end with a child, we need to be able to say, “What is this really about? What am I missing?” Sometimes we’ll need to be able to say, “I was wrong.” That’s big. Nobody likes to do that.


I stayed in touch with that kindergarten teacher. She once told me that a lot more had changed that day than just how she interacted with that young boy and the other children in her class. Her whole life had changed. The way she treated her own family, her friends, and most of all herself had transformed. All of this, she insisted, had happened in that one split second.


Why? Had she been callous before, burned out on teaching or weary of working with this boy, ready to give up on him? Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, she was deeply compassionate and a devoted teacher. But despite this, she had come to the determination that there was “something wrong” with him. Such a determination is never right. Something is going on, certainly, but it is not “something wrong.” It is something else. This book is about figuring out what that thing is for your child.

There’s a method for doing that, for tackling these problems at their roots. It’s called Self-Reg. We created The MEHRIT Centre to teach parents and teachers Self-Reg and the results have been nothing less than extraordinary. This book will show you how to use this approach and teach your child how to do the same. But it’s not just a method for helping kids who have problems; it’s a method for all kids.

This is something that we all need to do. Now more than ever.

In times of great uncertainty, our thoughts invariably turn to our children: how best to keep them safe and healthy, ensure that they grow up confident, hopeful, and principled. However hard we may try to protect them from trouble and troubling times, these moments also afford an opportunity for profound psychological growth: our own as well as theirs. It all depends on how we respond to the situation: Do we seek refuge in denial or resignation, or set out to cultivate skills that will enable our children—and ourselves!—to deal with whatever the challenges that lie ahead.

Since the hardback publication of Self-Reg, I have been privileged to hear from readers—parents, educators, physicians, counselors, podcast hosts, bloggers, and policy makers—who have shared their own remarkable stories of the turnaround that has occurred in their families and schools as a result of practicing Self-Reg. In what follows we carefully take through you these five steps of Self-Reg. Our hope is that, like so many others, you will find it a transformative journey from the very first step that you take.