Understanding behaviours and emotions

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to our session about understanding behaviors and emotions. I’m Sarah Hanlon, one of the neurodevelopmental practitioners.

And I’m Hannah Sprout. I’m a care navigator.

So in our session today, we are gonna start off talking about what are emotions, what we mean when we say behavior. We’re gonna talk through some strategies to help you understand your child and also talk through where to find some further advice and help.

So first of all, we wanna start with what are emotions. When we talk about emotions, we mean the response inside us that we experience in response to events and situations.

So examples are anger, happiness, frustration, sadness, and there’s a scale. So there’s all sorts of emotions in between those. So reactions can sometimes be shown in facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice, but sometimes not. Sometimes we don’t show our reactions, and sometimes it can be difficult to work out how other people are feeling. Sometimes we might show our emotions by what we say, and sometimes by how we act physically.

I want to talk about what we mean by behavior as well. So often when we’re talking about behavior, we’re talking about negative behavior.

When we’re talking about our children, we’re thinking about how your child responds, and we sometimes talk about these actions that challenge you as a parent or actions that maybe put your child in an unsafe position. It might be things that hurt other people, and it might be things that make other people think negatively about your child as well. So particularly if you’re out and about, and they might be having a meltdown. One thing we always say is behavior is a form of communication, and it can tell us that our child is stressed and not coping in a situation. They are telling us that something is wrong, and they need help and support. And that is the bit that actually is quite difficult sometimes, particularly to know what to do in the moment.

One of the things we want to talk about is the science of behavior to help us give some grounding and think about what to start with. So first of all, the process of responding to a situation is similar for all humans, but the way our brain processes that information is different. So for example, one of the examples is food. So, you know, if you put a bowl of food in front of a group of people, they might all have very different emotions in response to that food.

Some of it, it might be their favorite food. Some of them, they might feel it’s really disgusting and not want to hurt, be it anywhere near it. And there’s all sorts of sensory experiences, smells, what things look like, and then also there’s what we talk about experiences. So, you know, when you’ve tried things before, you can remember.

And this approach applies for all sorts of different situations.

So we think a lot about emotions and behaviors being linked with our hormones, past experiences, and the hormones of past experiences, we can’t change those for our young people.

But what we can do is we can change how we support our children and how we help them learn to cope with future events. What we can also do is help try and prevent negative reactions to future events if we’re starting to kind of predict what’s gonna happen. And there’s a lot talk about preparation as a parent. So trying to prepare for situations which you anticipate might be tricky for your child based on what’s happened before. So the first step is really trying to understand them and understand what’s going on for them in various situations.

So if our brain perceives a situation as a risk or a stress, it goes into survival mode and prepares us and our body to respond. And we tend to group those different reactions into sort of three or four main areas. So there’s fight, flight, freeze, and you might also have heard of porn as well. Your child might have a different stress reaction depending on the situation.

So take the example of going to school. It might be a situation they do every day, and it might not trigger a particular response for you, but it might be there’s various challenges for your child. We know things like school or, you know, trips or visits to other people’s houses. There’s a lot of past experiences that they might be drawing on when they respond, you know, what happened yesterday, what happened last week.

It might be, you know, they don’t know where they’re going. If you’ve got a different route because of roadworks, that might be confusing. It might be taking the example of if you have to kind of pop to the shops before school, they might suddenly think, oh, I can go home afterwards, and you have to explain a little bit more. Obviously, part of this depends on the age of your child.

With an older child, you can talk to them a little bit more and communicate, and you can hope that they might understand what you’ve told them. But with a younger child, you might find that they forget what you’ve told them, or they might just not understand.

The other thing is, I’ve mentioned already about sensory systems. So just little things during the day, so what the temperature is, what food they’ve had, whether they’re wearing kind of clothing that’s a difficult texture can all trigger a different response and build up in terms of how they’re feeling. And then another thing is thinking about the overall state of your child and young person. Have they had enough sleep? Are they hungry?

Are they having a particularly stressful week because of something else? It can all contribute to that, how the brain processes information and the reaction.

So taking it into a little bit more detail.

In the fight response, this is where you tend to see the physical behavior from your child. So the hitting, the throwing, we sometimes see an impact in coordination. So they might be tripping over, quite clumsy. You might hear reactions in terms of the crying, screaming, shouting, and you might see quite quick changes of mood with them. So it might be that it sort comes out of nowhere. The other thing you tend to see in fight response is them pushing the boundaries, having quite high energy levels. So that impacts them at school in terms of difficulties concentrating as well.

In flight response, what happens is the body gets ready to run away. So you might see high levels of activity. So you might see running away. You might see hiding.

Very simply, you might see them covering their eyes or closing, covering their ears or closing their eyes. They might be ignoring danger, so they might do things like kind of running into the road, you know, not aware of their surroundings as much as possible. You might also see them being quite fidgety and difficulties kind of sitting still or settling with something, and you might see what we call avoidance behavior, so where they don’t want to do something. The other thing you might notice is that kind of agitated behavior that comes with that kind of avoidant behavior.

So finally, we’re gonna talk about freeze. So for young people, freeze can be one of the hardest stress responses to spot if you’re not looking out for it. This can be sometimes they might zone out or be unresponsive.

They might isolate themselves, so they might go to their room. They might try and get away from being around other people. They might come across as quite inactive or just wandering around.

Sometimes the word watchful or dreamy is used, and you might notice them doing some sort of repetitive activities as a way of kind of reassuring themselves, and if they’re not sure how to respond. So these are all different ways of responding. You might have a child that’s more likely to fall into one category than the others, or you might notice you’ve got a child that kind of falls into all categories. And it’s difficult to know, again, what to predict is gonna happen, but they’re all different ways that your child is communicating that something’s stressful for them.

So we’re gonna go on and talk about strategies to help understand the behavior and emotions. One of the most important things with this area as a parent, it can be really, really hard to understand what’s going on with your child and particularly how to help them. But the absolute first step is try and understand it, and it gives you a really good starting point to do the next stage and try and find strategies that are gonna help. So a commonly used technique is called the ABC chart, sometimes known as the ABCs, but it is a way of writing down and almost keeping a diary of what is happening with your child so you can start to process all the events.

So first of all, a stands for activity. So that is what was in the situation. So in the example I gave earlier, that was about going to school. So you can put in the details here, so sort of perhaps you’re kind of in the car or whether you are walking, a little bit more about the situation.

B is the behavior. So what was the reaction of your child? What did they do? So were they shouting and kind of trying to pull away from going in school?

Were they trying to walk in a different direction?

What were they doing?

And see is for conditions. So what was in the environment? So I talked a little bit about, you the temperature, thinking about, you know, is your child hungry? Have they had breakfast that morning?

Again, are there any changes that you need to kind of write down that were unexpected or unusual?

And then s is where we start to think about the solutions or the strategies. What could be done differently? What you could do next time? We know in the real world, you can’t plan for absolutely everything.

Sometimes you don’t know where the road works are gonna crop up or where there’s a road closure or if, you know, the lollipop lady is not working at school that day. So it’s really useful to think about how you can explain changes to your child, what level of language works for them. So as I said, younger children, you might just need to be really, really simple. Whereas older children, you might need to explain why or pre warn them as much as possible.

So one of the things that can be really, really tricky is when you have a child who has behavior that challenges you. So as I said, sometimes it often is negative behavior we’re thinking about.

It’s not your child that necessarily needs to change. That that’s that’s almost impossible for them to change. But what we can do is we can adapt the environment. We can change the strategies that are used, and we can try and make things a little bit easier for them. And it’s very much to see as a step by step approach.

It’s never a case of this one strategy that’s gonna solve everything, and sometimes you might find that you have to try multiple strategies. One of the things with anything like this where we’re kinda analyzing behavior and thinking about what to try is try and be consistent. And if you found a strategy you think is helpful, do try it for quite a long time before trying something new.

Okay. I’m gonna hand over Tanner now.

So here is another way of trying to understand our child’s behavior and emotions.

So we think of each person as having a bucket and that includes us as parents.

And during the day, that bucket gets filled up with balls that represent the things that cause us stress.

This might be small things like, today, my school shoes feel uncomfortable or bigger things like, I’m worried about being late for school or I’m worried about an exam or maybe I’ve forgotten something.

It can be useful for us to think about what creates stress and barriers for our children during the day.

As adults, we can learn ways to prevent these situations that cause our children stress, or we can try and help them relieve their load in their buckets by giving them strategies to cope and maybe time out to recover from the overwhelming emotions that come from having a full bucket.

So when you’re thinking about your child’s bucket, it’s important to think of the impact of certain areas that might be causing them stress.

Firstly, communication.

Does your child understand what’s being said to them, and are they able to let you know how they feel and what they want?

And then social situations.

Does your child have the skills to manage the social situations they’re presented with throughout the day, particularly at school?

And then there’s the environment. This can include lots of areas like sounds, smells, the textures of clothing and of food, maybe lights if it’s too bright, or maybe if they’re feeling hot or cold, and whether they’re hungry or they’re thirsty or whether they’re feeling a bit poorly. There are lots of things to consider when thinking about the environment.

And then there’s control.

Do they know what’s happening next during the day, and do they understand what might be coming next in their routine?

If you’re able to help get rid of any of the balls that fill up that bucket, it’s going to help.

For example, it might be as simple as providing a visual timetable so they know what’s happening next in their day, or it might just be making sure their socks have no seams in, or at the end of the day that they have access to a a quiet space in their room that has no sensory stimuli to help them to get over their busy day that they’ve had.

So have a think. What other things that might be causing your child to have an overloaded bucket? And if a bucket isn’t a helpful analogy for you, it might be more beneficial to think about an iceberg.

This ice iceberg idea has been used as a way of understanding children’s behavior for many years.

We can see the tip of an iceberg above the water, but often with icebergs, there’s a huge amount under the water which is hidden.

And that’s the same for our children.

We can see the reaction of our child. For example, like Sarah said earlier, they might be hitting or shouting or just refusing to do what we’ve asked them to do.

But as a parent, we can think about what might be the purpose of that behavior. What are they trying to communicate? What are they telling us? What will they get as a result of that behavior?

For example, are they hitting and shouting because they just don’t know what’s coming next?

Are they struggling to transition from doing something they’re already they’re really interested in and they don’t want to stop?

Or did they hear us when we told them what was gonna happen next?

Do we need to show them visually instead? So when we think about the iceberg, we’re trying to think about the things that are going on beneath the surface just as we were thinking about the areas that might be impacting a child, in terms of their bucket being full or not.

These are things that we can’t necessarily see but are probably causing the behaviors that we can see.

Firstly, the communication again. Can your child express how they feel and what they want?

And the social situation, are they feeling socially overwhelmed?

And the environment and all those areas that we mentioned already, Have a think about their surroundings and what their senses are experiencing, and then control a need for a routine. Do they feel out of control, or are they aware of what’s coming next?

So as Sarah has already mentioned, it’s really important to stop and collect information about our child’s behavior and their emotions first. So what are those things that are filling up their bucket? What’s going on beneath the surface of that iceberg?

Stop and take the time to reflect on those potential reasons for their behavior.

And then, as we said before, being the detective, armed with that knowledge, you can then begin to work towards some solutions and some strategies.

But just some points for for us to remember.

One of the most important things is to think about how you are coping yourself.

You will remember the analogy about oxygen mask, I’m sure, that when you’re on an airplane, you’re told that you always have to put on that oxygen mask for yourself first. It’s useful to check how you are doing and think about the strategies you can put in place for yourself before you help your child so you’re in a position to best support your child when they are finding things tricky.

The other thing about using strategies is to choose your moment.

If everyone is tired and it’s been a hard day, it might not be the best time to expect a strategy to work.

And finally, where it’s possible, do work with your child. Get them involved in different ways.

Maybe whilst you’re drawing a visual timetable for them, they can add one of the pictures or choose the colored pen that you use.

Or if you’re using, maybe a phone and making a schedule for your older child with them, get them to pick the emojis or have them add it on their phone.

And seek help if you need it for yourself, and we’re going to give you some places to go to for support now.

So where can we go for further support? This session has been just an introduction to introducing how we understand behavior and emotions. If you would like further support, we do recommend that you speak to your school, maybe some of the following places listed on these slides.

If you are in Wiltshire, here are some useful contacts.

You might like to visit your GP if you have concerns about your child’s health. For example, if you’ve got concerns about their diet or nutrition and sleep difficulties or a health issue that might be impacting their behavior.

You might want to speak to your school as we’ve already mentioned and find out what is happening from their angle and their perspective.

Often children behave very differently at school than they do at home, so it’s good to have everyone’s perspective.

You can also contact the Wiltshire parent carer council who are listed here who can provide further advice, support, and recommendations. They’ve got a helpline on their website that you can ring that’s open from ten till five every day.

And then we’ve also got the school nursing team listed here.

Your local school nursing team provide advice, support, and help with some of the strategies mentioned today, and you can call them on o three hundred two four seven zero zero nine zero, which is our single point of access.

Then if you are in Bath or Northeast Somerset, here are some useful contacts again. Once again, do contact your GP if you need further support for anything that might be an underlying cause of their behavior and the impact of on them, and also talk to your school.

A Baines parent carer forum is listed here. You can phone them.

The the telephone number that you need is listed on their website. They can provide further advice, support, and recommendations.

And the local school nursing team are also available to help with some of the strategies mentioned today.

Thank you for joining us today. We hope you found this video helpful.