Empowering Kids Through a Neuro- and Trauma-Informed Approach
Children’s behaviors—from sitting quietly with a book to throwing a book across the room—are easy to observe, but they can be difficult to understand. As parents, educators and in our pop culture, we assume that people have agency over their behaviors—and thus that we can presume their character, personality and intent from the things that they do.
Yet modern neuroscientific research reveals that in fact, behavior is a lot more complicated than that—particularly for children and adults who have atypical neurological development. This can be seen, for example, with sensory processing disorder, prior trauma and chronic medical conditions ranging from mast cell activation disorder and dysautonomia/POTS to Lymes disease and more. Neuropsychologists like Cajal Academy Director of Programs Dr. Steven Mattis have already identified myriad ways that hidden, neurophysiological events can influence or even determine behaviors as well as learning, social and emotional outcomes, and this is an active area of ongoing scientific research.
It is through understanding these hidden, neurophysiological drivers behind children’s behaviors that we can identify what problems they need our help to solve, and give them strategies they can employ themselves to gain agency over their own behavioral, social-emotional and learning outcomes. By coaching them in how to self-monitor, self-manage and self-advocate for their needs, this leads to greater independence, with a “toolbox” that they can use across a range of settings.
This new toolbox draws on a number of approaches to modifying behavior that have come before, while integrating important new neuroscientific understandings. For example, ABA therapy starts from the assumption that children’s behaviors are intentional, goal-oriented acts that can be incentivized or deterred. While this is true for all children some of the time, these techniques have only limited effectiveness where the behavior in question is instead either prior trauma, or an automatic reaction to an internal, neurophysiological event. As a result, these techniques risk shaming kids whose ability to respond depends on hidden events of which they may not even be aware, while missing the opportunity to help prepare the child neurologically to achieve a better outcome the next time the situation arises.
Cognitive behavior therapy and dialectical behavior therapy approach understands behaviors as the result of negative thoughts and feelings, and therefore focus on validating the feelings while changing the negative thoughts and behaviors. However these techniques are of limited utility where the triggering event is not a negative thought but a neurophysiological event, or where the trigger and reactions come so close together that the child is not able to leverage those tools to interrupt the cycle.
The trauma-informed schools movement has emerged over the last several years to address this disconnect with respect to one particular type of hidden neurophysiological driver: prior trauma. Danger—whether it is personal violence, chronic poverty or repeated academic failures—sends humans into a survivalist physiologic state in which non-essential cognitive functions like creativity and learning are shut down to preserve energy for more evolutionarily useful freeze, fight or flight reactions. When children experience significant or repeated trauma, their brains change physiologically to make them hypervigilant to danger—thus making it more and more likely that they will end up in this survivalist state. In trauma-informed schools, close caregiver relationships are used to help children attain and maintain a feeling of “safety,” so that they are physiologically available for learning.
At Cajal Academy, we are developing a third, more holistic approach that starts from the premise that children need an integrated and highly-personalized toolbox they can use to manage across the range of behavioral triggers and events that are relevant to their own physiological and emotional experiences.
This starts with a multi-disciplinary deep dive to identify which problems a child needs our help to solve—be they intent-driven social-emotional challenges or neurophysiologically-driven regulatory ones. We then leverage a trauma-informed approach to coach the child in a highly-customized, unified “toolbox” of personalized strategies that they can use to monitor, manage and advocate for their own needs. Incentives are used to reward the development of these scaffolded skills--not for the outcomes themselves--to foster the development of a growth mindset in the face of variable neurological resources. And we empower our very bright cohort of kids to have agency over the process by teaching them the science behind it all, thus giving them greater and greater ability to make these connections themselves.
The result is a whole new way to look at children’s behavior that puts agency in their hands to optimize their own outcomes, with the knowledge and tools they need to chart their own course.
Cajal Academy is a new, K-12 school in Fairfield County, CT for bright, gifted and twice exceptional children having very high fluid, analytical and/or creative reasoning skills. Contact us today to find out more about our work to develop new educational frameworks aligned with modern neuroscientific research about how children learn, develop, socialize and grow.
Join our 1st Community Educational Workshop to Learn More!
Join our first community-wide Educational Workshop to learn more about this ground-breaking approach, with Cajal Academy Director of Programs Dr. Steven Mattis, Occupational Therapist Heather Edwards and co-founder and Head of School Cheryl Viirand. RSVP for your link to participate.