Dr. Brittan Barker has professional and personal experience with person-centered care and ADVOCATING for your child who needs extra support. Dr. Barker talks about how to advocate for your child, the process from assessment to intervention, and the REALNESS of how exhausting it can be.
Read MoreThe safe place may look similar to a time-out, but it feels so much different.
With time-outs, you may say, “do you need a time-out,” and force them in the room for a set amount of time.
With the safe place perspective, you may say, “do you need help calming down?” with the intention of using the safe space as a tool to help them calm down.
Instead of saying “I'm going to put you on timeout,” you may say, “I'm sorry. This is hard. Let's take a break."
So your child takes a break, they calm down their body and then return back to what they were doing. Instead this time, they have regulated their emotions and you're able to teach them in a green arrow moment. Instead of a time-out with the goal to wallow in your feelings, try the safe space where the goal is to develop emotional self-regulation.
Read MoreToday, we have an amazing guest and a friend that I met on the Instagram space, Wendy Bertagnole. I just love what she teaches what she stands for. She is a lot like me with — all behaviors communication, and we can't just ignore the junk and hope it goes away. We have to understand what our child's communicating and then support with support them with the new skills.
I’m going to share some of the super valuable things she shared with me in our interview. But if you want the full effect, listen to the podcast! “Sensory is this thing that I think everybody has a misinterpretation of a lot of people here sensory and they're like, oh, yeah our five senses. They think oh, yeah that's for kids with autism or that's for kids with sensory processing disorder or whatever. But really what most people don't know is that sensory affects all of us all the time."
Read MoreA lot of times as parents -- we are saying the right things! But we are saying them at the wrong time. It's not about what you're doing. It's about WHEN you're doing it. In the "green arrow" moments, we teach. In the "yellow arrow" moment, we prompt. And in the red, sometimes we prompt, mostly we STAY SAFE. I'm going to show you what this looks like with the situation with Charlie and his best friend in terms of SHARING.
Read MoreRead MoreEveryone needs to feel safe and secure.
Adults and children like humans need to feel safe and secure. When we talk about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, that is the very foundation. When people do not feel safe and people's needs are not met, they are going to do what they can to meet those needs, especially if it is one of those survival needs.
So I think that is what is happening here when we see things like the looting and the rioting that is happening. I am not condoning rioting. I am not condoning looting.
What I am saying is when people are trying to meet their needs verbally through protests, through kneeling, through peaceful ways and they are ignored, just as a parent or a teacher when you have ignored your child's needs, their classrooms' needs, especially if it is the need for connection or the need for safety, a lot of times there is a physical response to meet their needs.
All behavior is communication, so it's our job to figure out what our children are communicating. One child was especially difficult for me several years ago as a preschool teacher. This child sparked my LOVE for supporting parents with challenging behavior. Instead of writing it off, and expelling this child from preschool and giving up on him, we looked at it differently. And changed his entire experience. And frankly, it changed MY life.
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