What Social Psychology Says About Behaviorism, and Five Things to Try Instead

0:00Well, let's try that one more time. I had disappeared. I was all trying to handle a technical issue. It looks like for some reason our stream is not working right now on Facebook. So maybe Courtney can help me out with that. But I am Guy Stevens. I am the founder and executive director of the Alliance Against the Collision Restraint. And I welcome you back to the Alliance Against the Collision Restraint podcast. We're excited to have you here today. We've got a fantastic guest and presentation in store for you today. We've got Dr. Arielle Silverman talking today and really fantastic presentation that I'm looking forward to. So more about that in just a moment. But before we get to our guest, if this happens to be one of your first times here, welcome. It's always great to have new people joining us from all around

1:01the world and appreciate the fact that you are here with us today. If you are someone that's been joining us on a regular basis or occasionally dropping in, I'm glad you're here. It's always great to have you. It's great to see the names of people that seem to join us week after week from again, just all over. I love seeing, you know, we get people from not only United States and Canada and Australia and New Zealand and the UK. It's great to see that we've got people to come in from all over the world to join us. If you are not familiar with the Alliance, who we are and what we do, the Alliance was formed back in 2019. Time goes by so quickly. Our focus is really about, you know, moving away from punitive and exclusion and discipline and outdated behavior management approaches, trying to curb the school prison pipeline, really trying to move away from approaches like restraining its occlusion and suspension expulsion and corporal punishment and really working to move towards better ways of supporting children, families, educators, and others. If you're familiar with the Alliance, a lot of our work revolves around what I call the five principles,

2:06which are our principles of what we should be doing instead, talking about trauma and form, neuroscience, align, neurodiversity, affirming, relationship driven and collaborative approaches. So welcome and thanks for being here today. If you'd like to let us know in the chat. If you're on Facebook or LinkedIn or YouTube and you can put a comment there in the chat, let us know who you are and where you're from. I'd love to see who's joining us. I'd love to even learn more about you. If this is one of your first times here, tell us who you are and kind of even the context, you know, are you a parent or are you an educator? What's your interest in our topic today? So let us know in the chat who you are and where you're from. A couple other quick announcements. I do want to share with you that we have this year a special sponsor who has been helping us to bring you the podcast. And that has been the Bowman Consulting Group. And I have had the opportunity to get to know Doris and Rick Bowman. They run the Bowman Consulting Group. They do a lot of work. It's very aligned with the work that we do here at the Alliance trying to move away from kind of punitive and exclusionary approaches into trauma informed and neuroscience aligned approaches. They

3:11recently published a book called Your FBA is a fantasy that focuses on functional behavioral assessments and better ways of supporting kids that are trauma informed that are aligned with what we know about neuroscience. So encourage you to check out their book. They actually have another brand new book that just just launched here as well. And that book is called Facing the Fantasy Finding the Way Forward. And that is a book really that kind of goes into some of the foundational neuroscience and getting into some of the trauma. One, and you encourage you to check out they have a special website that they've set up for our listeners. And it tells you all about their upcoming events. It gives you a discount code for their books and encourage you to check that out. Also tells you about events that they have coming up. They've got a training event coming up at the end of April called Facing the Fantasy Finding the Way Forward. That's on April 20th. It's a live virtual training event being held by Zoom. And you can check that out to learn more about it. You can also learn more about some of the other things that they offer. And if you want to, again, order

4:16one of their books, you can do that. Learn more about Rick and Doris as well. So great opportunity. We want to thank Bill and consulting group for being a sponsor for the podcast and supporting our work here. And real quick, I just want to mention again, glad you're here. If you want to learn more about the Alliance, always encourage you to check out our website. We have a lot of information there. It is nseclusion.org. You can learn more about our work. You can read. We're putting out articles on a regular basis. And things that are really meaningful, things that can really help in these journeys that we're on and addressing some of the things that we're seeing out there. So encourage you to check out our website. If you find the work that we're doing has value to you, you'd encourage you to think about joining the Alliance, you know, becoming a member. If you become a member, it helps to support our mission. We're very, very small and on profit. And without funding, it's hard to do the work that we're doing. And when you become a supporter, even for just $5 a month, it really helps us to do the things that we're trying to accomplish here. So with that, let's get to why we are really here today. I'm going to go and bring

5:18our special guest up here on the stage with me. And I want to introduce Dr. Ariel Silverman. Ariel is a disabled activist and social scientist who is passionate about improving public understanding of life with disabilities. Professionally, he spent 15 years conducting research on social psychology of disability. Personally, he spent a lifetime learning and teaching with fellow members of the disability community. You may have even seen Ariel's book as well, just human. We did a book study of this in the past as well. And I'm holding up a copy here and I would encourage you to check it out. It's a great, great book. And, you know, you've also in addition to all the other things that you've been doing. You've been a long time volunteer here and supporter of the Alliance and always appreciate the opportunity to see you connect with you and learn more about your work. And of course, you're going to be giving us a special presentation today that I'm really excited about. You're going to be sharing some of the research and theory from social psychology, explaining why behaviorism,

6:21kind of the rewards and punishment models so often fail to improve children's long-term behavior. You're going to be talking about five strategies to use in place of these kind of common behaviorist methods, getting into co-regulation, communicating clearly and reasonably about behavioral expectations, proactively solving problems, building a child's self-regulation toolbox and intentional role modeling. So we're really excited to have you here today. It's always good to see you and you've got a presentation on deck for us. So we will bring that up here in a second, but welcome and thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks so much, Guy. And thanks everyone for tuning in. Hopefully, the Facebook issue has been fixed because I have some family and friends who have expressed interest in this talk. And it looks good. It looks like we have a green check next to Facebook. So hopefully, Facebook is back up online. And again, you know, if you're joining us live, let us know who you are and where you're joining us from. And if you're on Facebook, let us know that too. I see Andy here in St. Paul's already jumped on and said, Andy's

7:24actually another volunteer, also a disabled activist and volunteer. So we know some people are already on board and ready for talk. So I'm going to bring your slides up on the screen. And as we talked about, you know, prior to this, I'm going to hang around, but I'm going to be muted and I'm going to advance your slides when you're ready. And we're going to go for probably about an hour or so with your presentation. And if you have questions or comments, be all free at any time to put those in the chat. We're probably going to hold off to the end for questions, just so Dr. Silverman can get through all of the content here as well. And with that, I'll just let you know one more piece of information. Gentelle has just jumped on and said, I'm on Facebook. So it looks like we're back up and running on Facebook. So hopefully, hopefully people are able to access it. So with that, let me hand the reins over to you. And I will just be here if you need anything from me. Sounds good. So before we go to the next slide and kind of start diving into the meat of the presentation, I want to present a case example that will be referencing throughout

8:30the entire talk, because I think a lot of these ideas are pretty abstract. But when you think about them in light of a particular person, even even a fictional person, it starts to make a lot more sense and feel a lot more intuitive. And although this case is completely made up with a little bit of help from chat GPT, I think some of you will recognize some of the patterns either from the perspective of the child or the perspective of the educator, or maybe both. Some of us might have both perspectives. So let's imagine that Lila is a six-year-old girl in a first grade class. And her teacher, Mrs. Alvarez, observes that a lot of times Lila is moving around some part of her body. She's tapping her pencil on the desk or she's playing with her hair. You know, she's rarely sitting still at the desk. And frequently Lila will get up and walk around, pace around the classroom, and sometimes

9:31go up to other students at their desk and talk to them and engage in conversation with them during the class. And then this creates challenges for Mrs. Alvarez. So in order to try to resolve the situation, Mrs. Alvarez relies upon the behavior management strategies that she was taught and that have been adopted school-wide, specifically using a clip chart to depict the behavior of all the students in the class. So the clip chart is a poster with clothespins that have each child's name on them and the clothespins are arranged in color-coded sections where everyone starts out in the green section. And then if they have any behavior that the teacher finds problematic, they go to the yellow section and eventually to the red section. And once they end up in the red section, a student is penalized by having recess removed for that day. And so when Lila starts to walk around the classroom and distract other students, Mrs. Alvarez

10:36moves her clip to the yellow and then eventually to the red and she has recess removed for the next recess period. And Mrs. Alvarez observes that when this happens rather than immediately kind of sitting back in her seat and staying in her seat, that Lila will actually become more active after recess has been taken away, getting up more during the day. And after the third time, her clip ends up on the red and she sees her clip on the red, Lila bursts into tears and runs out of the classroom. And so Mrs. Alvarez realizes that something is not working right or at least she needs more support. So she consults with the principal and the principal decides to bring in a behavior specialist. And the behavior specialist does some observations in the classroom with Lila and concludes that Lila's behavior is attention seeking. Because she notices that when Lila

11:36stands up from her seat that the teacher will tell her to sit back down and that sometimes when she talks to other students, the other students will engage with her. And so the behavior specialist concludes that the purpose of the behavior is attention seeking and in order to eliminate the behavior, there needs to be a different strategy. So she recommends a strategy that I'm sure many of us have heard of called planned ignoring recommending that when Lila gets up from her seat in the future that Mrs. Alvarez simply look away, not say anything, not acknowledge her, and maybe even give extra attention to another student at that point in time. Lila is also put on a rewards program. So when she remains in her seat for five minutes at a time, she earns a sticker and then after five stickers, she's able to trade them in for a prize. And at first, this seems to work well. Lila is really excited about the stickers and the prizes, and she does stay in her seat for five minute intervals, pretty reliably. So the time is

12:41increased to 10 minutes, and most of the time she stays in her seat. But when the length of time increases to 15 minutes, Lila is unable to stay in her seat for that length of time and is no longer earning the prizes. And so again, Mrs. Alvarez is stumped and doesn't know what to do because students are continuing to be distracted. Lila is not participating in all of the lessons, and she realizes that the way she's doing things is not working right. And I think many of us recognize this pattern. We can go to the next slide where we're using these behavioral strategies that oftentimes that's the only thing that we've been taught or the only thing we know how to access in order to fulfill our responsibilities of keeping kids safe, helping them learn, and ultimately teaching them long-term to become good citizens, to have ethics and morals,

13:44and to interact well with their peers. I'm going to talk about over the next hour. So first of all, defining what behaviorism is and why it's so popular. We're going to discuss the reasons that behaviorism does not work well long-term, such as in Lila's case. And I know the title of this talk was about social psychology, and we will discuss some social psychology, but in putting this together, I realize that we need to take a more multifaceted view of the reasons that behaviorism fails. So I want to introduce kind of the neurobiological aspects, the psychological aspects, and the social cultural aspects of the problems with behaviorism. And then during the latter, 20 to 30 minutes of the talk, which I really don't want to run out of time for this portion, because it's so critical, we're going to talk about these five strategies that you can use instead of behaviorism, because a lot of parents and teachers realize that behaviorism doesn't

14:45work, but they don't know what to do instead. The strategy is being co-regulation, clearly reason expectations, collaborative problem solving, or collaborative and proactive solutions, Ross Green's method, filling the kids' regulation toolboxes and positive role modeling. So we'll go to the next slide. So what do we mean when we say the word behaviorism? So the science of behaviorism became popular in the early 20th century and kind of reached its peak between the 1920s and the 1950s before it was replaced by more nuanced forms of psychology, I would say. And a lot of the research on behaviorism was done on animals, on rats and pigeons, and so one of the major assumptions of behaviorism is that the ways that we can change animal

15:45behavior are the same as the methods that we can use to change human behavior. Related to that is the idea that observable behavior is the focus, and that behavior only is driven by consequences in the environment. So thoughts and feelings, because we can't measure other people's thoughts and feelings and we can't observe them, they are not considered a focus and are not thought to influence behavior. BF Skinner referred to thoughts and feelings as private events and basically treated them like behaviors of their own that don't necessarily drive the behaviors that we see. To change behavior, the theory is that you need to manipulate the consequences of what happens after somebody does something. So reinforce the behaviors that you like by making good things happen to the person and punish the behaviors that you don't like by making bad things happen to the person or taking away good things that the person had.

16:50One important note to make about behaviorism is that anything and everything can be a reinforcer. So the animal experiments, not surprisingly, almost always relied on food as a reinforcer. Food is given after a behavior that they're trying to increase or take it away after a behavior of trying to decrease and of course food for humans is often a pleasurable experience but we also need food to survive. Food meets one of our basic needs and that I think kind of brings up one of the main issues with behaviorism is that things that people need to live or to thrive can be given or taken away conditional on how people act. So not just food but also social reinforcers and social needs like belonging, acceptance, love, affection, connection,

17:51those things are all kind of lumped together under this label of attention. So when Lila was was thought to be attention-seeking, if she had been seeking connection or acceptance by her peers, et cetera, that was all kind of treated as attention-seeking. And so the idea is that if somebody does something we don't like, we should withdraw all of those social needs, the affection, the love, the connection in order to get them to stop doing something that we don't like or give extra of those social things when we see something that we do like. Next slide. So what does behaviorism actually look like in practice? Well, one of the most obvious things is punishment. So corporal punishment, which is still legal in about a third of the United States to practice in schools and is legal in as far as I know, all US states to practice in homes,

18:53you know, spankings, beatings, things like that, paddling, or non-physical punishments that are often today kind of ephemized as being called consequences. You'll notice that rewards are never called consequences, even though technically punishments and rewards are both forms of consequences. But when people say consequences today, they really mean punishment. Even if maybe they deny that, or they say, oh, it's just a logical consequence, like any consequence that an adult imposes on a child is a punishment, if it's not a reward. So things like, you know, taking away what we might call privileges, taking away fun activities, games, screen time, things like that, that again, in our eyes as adults, we might see as discretionary, like those are just fun things that can be made, offered conditional on a child behaving the way we want. But from the child's perspective, those things can be actually really, really important needs, meaning kinds of

19:54things, which when we talk about regulation, that will make more sense. Then we also have a type of punishment that I'm referring to here as forced isolation. And the reason is that I don't necessarily want to call it timeout, because there might be some cases where it makes sense to say separate two kids who are fighting in order to keep both kids safe, bringing one or both of them into a private space is, it could actually be beneficial. Or if a child, you know, especially young child is being unsafe with their body or with objects, going with the child to a private space and being present with them and co-regulating with them, which we'll talk about later, might make sense. And maybe that could be considered a technically considered a timeout. Force isolation is putting somebody in a private space, not allowing them to leave or at least telling them not to leave for the purpose of punishment of removing what the behaviorists would call removing reinforcement.

20:58So preventing them from engaging in the fun activity or receiving the attention that they were receiving because of what they did. In schools that might look like seclusion rooms where kids are put that where they're not allowed to leave in homes that might look like setting somebody to their room and telling them don't come out until you've calmed down and requiring them to be alone in the space. Then on the other side of behavior is them you have all the different kinds of rewards. So there's a single reward or a bribe, you know, if you behave well, I'll buy you ice cream at the end of the day. There's reward systems where you can earn kind of symbolic rewards like stickers in order to receive actual tangible rewards that are of interest later on. Token economies that use money that can be traded in that's earned contingent on behavior and then traded in at the end for rewards. I suppose money is also a symbolic reward. Those are all different kinds of reward systems.

22:01Then we have clip charts like we talked about at the beginning here that publicly shame kids for not meeting behavioral expectations or perhaps praise them for going above and beyond. Systematic behavioral systems so applied behavior analysis or ABA which is used with autistic children and positive behavior interventions and supports or PBIS which is often used in a school wide setting neurotypical and neurodivergent kids and in both cases those systems will often perform assessments and collect data to try to figure out the function of a behavior which sounds like a good thing. You know if you understand the purpose of a behavior then you can help problem solve which we'll talk about at the end but when they when they do this it's not for problem solving necessarily it's typically just looking for voluntary goal directed reasons why a child might do

23:01something and usually it ends up falling in the categories of either seeking attention, seeking tangible so things that the child likes or avoiding something that the child doesn't like and the assumption is that those actions are voluntary and goal directed actions and because of that consequences like rewards and punishments are thought to be able to change those behaviors by making the child voluntarily actively want to do something different. Next slide. So before we criticize behaviorism let's talk about why it's so popular. I think one of the main reasons it's so popular is because it gives an illusion of control with very little adult effort. So if you think about it there's really very little that we can control about another human being even with babies we cannot force them to eat and we cannot force them to go to sleep.

24:05You know you can put them in the crib but you cannot force them to fall asleep. So if we can't even control whether infants are eating or sleeping how can we possibly control whether a toddler piece in the potty or whether an older child stays in their seat or plays with their own toys or all the behaviors that that we expect of them. Behaviorism offers this allure that if we just give the right reinforcement or give the right punishment that we actually can make kids do the things that we want or need them to do and it doesn't require a lot of effort beyond just maybe identifying what the behavior is what the consequence is communicating that consequence to the child and then enforcing that consequence. It also really have to do a whole lot and oftentimes the threat of a punishment or the temptation of a bribe does produce short-term behavior change. So I'm not going to argue against the idea that behaviorism can create the results that we might

25:11want in the short term not for every child but for a lot of kids. If you scare them enough they will probably stop rough housing and sit down and do what you want. If you tempt them enough with a reward they probably will in the short term do what you want them to do and so again sometimes that's enough sometimes adults just in the immediate short term they want some kind of a result and so they're willing to use behaviorism to get it. What I'm going to argue is that behaviorism is not effective in the long term and that's where I think a lot of us have misconceptions because I would say virtually all of us have grown up receiving behaviorism, receiving rewards and punishments and we normalize that behavior and we learn through intergenerational learning by observing our parents and our grandparents and talking to other people that kids need behaviorism in order to

26:12develop ethics and values and become productive and happy adult citizens. You know people make comments like oh she just needs a good spanking or oh you know kids these days they nobody disciplines them and so they just end up thinking that they can get away with whatever and so sometimes the lack of behaviorism is equated with a lack of expectations which you might also refer to as rules or limits and as we're going to discuss later on it is actually very important to have expectations of kids as long as they are responsive and flexible responsive to the kids needs and their capacity and flexible expectations are actually really important but you don't need behaviorism to enforce those expectations because kids are naturally wired to want to meet your expectations. So I'm going to argue that in the long term rewards and punishments don't actually produce

27:14the kinds of broad outcomes that we hope for and also that they're not necessary to produce the kinds of broad outcomes that we hope for. Next slide. We should be on slide six. So I'm going to start from the neurobiological explanations for why behaviorism doesn't work long term and the main reason is that behaviorism or more specifically operant conditioning which is rewards and punishments only works on voluntary goal directed behavior so the assumption is that the kid has some kind of a goal that they're trying to achieve and rewards and punishments will change how they feel about that goal and or help them find other ways of achieving that goal. But in truth a lot of the behaviors that challenge adults are not voluntary or goal directed. Most children have behaviors that are at least partially outside their control and we'll go to

28:15the next slide and this is a very oversimplified explanation of the neuroscience behind self-regulation theory, Stuart Shanker and Mona De La Hook and others their self-regulation theory. But basically we have in our brains and the outer part of our brains we have the cerebral cortex and specifically the prefrontal cortex and you don't have to memorize that term but we'll just call it the cortex. It's the part of our brains that's responsible for thinking, planning, goal directed actions and impulse control. Then we have in kind of the middle layer of our brain tissue we have the limbic system which is the emotional part of our brains and specifically the amygdala which is kind of a threat detector that goes off when we feel like we are overly stressed or threatened. Self-regulation is the process of managing your own stress levels and balancing your energy levels.

29:25When somebody is out of balance so when their stress is excessive or when their energy is out of balance they experience what we will call dysregulation or faulty regulation. So Lila isn't necessarily that stressed out most of the time but she definitely has more energy in her body than what the classroom environment calls for. So she experiences dysregulation in the classroom environment. Disregulation triggers involuntary behavioral responses so when people are very stressed or their energy is out of balance they do things that aren't entirely within their control and when the limbic system is going off and the emotional part of our brains is experiencing a lot of input and a lot of output it makes a lot of noise that drowns out the cortex so the thinking, planning, goal directed part of our brains. It's also important to note that

30:29children's cortexes do not fully develop until some people would argue until the age of 25. So a young child has very little capacity to control their behavioral responses to dysregulation. As they get older they develop greater capacity to control their impulses and kind of the links between or the behaviors that they engage in in response to stress but that is an ongoing process. It can also be disrupted in the case of neurodivergence where neurodivergent people may experience more stress and also may have less capacity to regulate, to self-regulate in the face of that stress. So people can't think, people of all ages cannot think, remember, learn and engage with other people when they are dysregulated because the noise from the emotional part of the brain is drowning out the cortex and then when you factor in the fact that

31:30a child's cortex is not fully developed they have even less ability to think, learn and remember and engage when they're dysregulated. So that means if you punish a child who's dysregulated it's not going to stick, they're not going to remember the consequence and how it associated with their behavior because of that underlying dysregulation. Next slide. So where does stress come from? And again, this is talking about people of all ages. Stressors can be sudden and big like, you know, wild animal is chasing you. That's the kind of stressor that our brains are evolved to deal with. But in the modern world usually stress is not a wild animal's chasing you. It's usually a bunch of little things that build up and I like to think of the analogy of a bucket where there's a whole bunch of hoses that are spraying in stress from all different directions. And I think many of us can can think of a few different hoses that are spraying stress into our buckets right now.

32:33And for kids it's no different. So a child is in a classroom. Maybe they're worried about something that's that's happening tomorrow and then at the same time they might be trying to understand a lesson and having some challenge with that. Maybe they had some kind of social stress like an embarrassing incident that happened earlier that they're still processing. And then at the same time maybe they're hot or they're cold or they're hungry or they have to go to the bathroom or, you know, a whole bunch of little physical things that might be building up. For neurodivergent kids you might add on sensory stress from noise or light or smells in the classroom and it all just builds up. When stress reaches a critical threshold, whether it's from one big stressor or a whole bunch of little stressors, the amygdala sounds an alarm. It says danger, danger, danger. And again, this is people of all ages. So we also experience this. We have physical responses that adrenaline rush with the racing heartbeat and the high blood pressure and breathing harder

33:35and sweating. And all this extra blood is flowing to your arms in your legs because your body is literally getting ready to either fight some kind of enemy or run away from it. That's how we're evolved to react, which makes a lot less sense when you're dealing with a bunch of little things than if you were dealing with a wild animal chasing you. So for the kids, it's the same way where they feel that this explosion, the amygdala is going off and all they can focus on is getting that amygdala to stop firing off. So the physical responses then translate into behaviors that have often been classified as fight flight or freeze. So for a young child fighting might look like throwing something or hitting or breaking something and fleeing might look like aloping or hiding under a table, freezing might look like flopping down on the ground. And then as kids get older, those behaviors might get a little more subtle. So instead of hitting, they might yell and slam the door. You know, they might go for a walk in order to get away from the situation, etc.

34:41Next slide. So there are three ways to regulate. So if you think of the stress as being a bucket, first way is to reduce how much stress is going in. And sometimes we don't have tons of control over how much stress is going in, but if we're working with a child who's overly stressed, we can help them reduce the amount of stress that's going in. Second way is to increase the amount of stress that's going out of the system by building in outlets and those are regulating activities like stimming or fidgets or reading a book or going for a run or, you know, there's lots of different ways that we regulate by letting stress out. The third way is co-regulation. So if you're using the bucket analogy, you might think of co-regulation as building a valve between your bucket and the child's bucket. So if you are well regulated and your stress is

35:46relatively contained and low, you can take away some of child stress by building in that connection. And indeed, the way that kids learn to regulate because we aren't born knowing how to self-regulate, we're born with very little capacity for self-regulation. But through repeated interactions with adults who are calm and through co-regulation, we adopt the calm physiology of the adults around us. So we learn how to slow down our heartbeat and how to engage in our parasympathetic nervous system, which is the opposite of the stress response. And so as kids get older, they have more advanced skills in that area. But the way that they develop those skills is by co-regulating with adults. That means that when we force a child to go into isolation because we don't like the fact that they're upset or we don't like something they just did and we tell them to go off somewhere by themselves, not only is that going to probably

36:50stress them out more, but it also deprives them of an essential opportunity to learn physiologically how to regulate themselves because they're not getting the benefit of the co-regulation with a calm adult when they're just sitting by themselves. The other thing about co-regulation is it's a double-edged sword because if you're calm and well-regulated, it can you can help another person regulate. But if you're stressed and especially if you're stressed by something the child just did, you're likely to actually add to the stress that they're experiencing when you build in that connection between your stress bucket and their stress bucket. And that's why it's really critical that before you co-regulate, you have to self-regulate. Next slide. So implications of this theory for behaviorism. Let's talk about three common reactions to rewards and punishments, none of which are what we're aiming for when we apply rewards and punishments. The first possible reaction is that the child

37:57gets immediately more stressed by the punishment or the reward. So in Lila's case, we saw that when her clip was on red, she got more stressed because she realized that all the other students in the class would see that she had once again put her clip on red and was going to get in trouble again. Lila was also stressed because she realized that for the third time she would have to miss recess. And she had begun to learn that recess was the one way where she could really get a lot of her energy out of as one of her main outlets for her stress bucket. And she realized that that outlet was about to be closed off. And indeed, removal of recess has actually been banned in a few US states and in many school districts precisely because it can actually harm children when they lose that opportunity for movement and unstructured activity.

38:57So in this case, Lila's stress increased and her behavior actually got worse because she ran out of the classroom. So there was a new behavior that was problematic that we didn't have before that was caused by the behaviorism. The second thing that can happen is that the child's behavior just doesn't really change. And that's what we see with the rewards not working after the 15 minute, 15 minutes that Lila had to sit still. Because the reward and the planned ignoring and the punishment, everything else, it didn't teach Lila anything about how to regulate her excess energy. She doesn't have the skills at this point in time to sit still for 15 minutes, regardless of how much she may want to at that particular moment. And so that's why the behaviorism didn't work. Oftentimes, kids also don't even realize that they're getting dysregulated.

39:57Introception is the process of recognizing your own internal states, including emotional states. And when somebody is starting to get dysregulated, especially a child who's has had less experience with introception, might not realize it. And so kids can end up in the cycles where they do a behavior, they get punished, or they get rewarded for not doing it. And then the next day, they do the behavior again, and they don't even realize that they're doing something they're not supposed to do until after it's too late. Because again, the behaviorism doesn't address the underlying reasons. The final thing that could happen, which is actually I think probably the most insidious problem, is after behaviorism, it might look like the child's doing better. But really what's happening is that the behavior is just being suppressed, and the underlying dysregulation is not going away. So let's imagine that the second half of first grade, Lila, is starting to sit in her

41:01seat for longer periods of time. And her teachers are all really happy because she's no longer being disciplined, and she's not disrupting other students. But her parents are confused because they're getting all these good reports from people at school. But they notice that when Lila gets home from school, she's bouncing off the walls a lot more. She's playing sometimes too rough with her younger siblings, and sometimes has meltdowns when it's time for her to go to bed. So what's happening here is that Lila is masking her responses. She's sitting in the class, and she's still dysregulated. She still has all this extra energy, but she's learned not to let it out in that particular way because she knows that she'll be punished if she does. So she's containing it, she's sitting still, but that dysregulation has to go somewhere, so that's why when she gets home, it all kind of comes out in terms of the rough housing and still having way too much

42:02energy when it's time to go to sleep. Because again, the root issue hasn't been addressed. And the sad thing is that a lot of neurodivergent kids who engage in masking can end up developing, and there's a lot of research on this, some pretty severe mental health issues, especially as they get older, if they start to internalize that there's something wrong with them, because the ways that they kind of are naturally inclined to behave are punished, or they're rewarded for behaving differently. And so they start to think there's something wrong with them. They start to kind of hide who they really are and develop these mental health issues. So just because it seems from the outside, like the behavioral strategies are working, doesn't necessarily mean that the child is actually doing better. Next slide. The time check here. So now let's move into the psychological realm. So we talked about the biological reasons why behaviorism can be counterproductive.

43:06And then in terms of psychology, there have been a number of social psychology experiments, particularly looking at rewards. It's not really ethical to experimentally test the effects of punishment, although we do have correlational studies and longitudinal studies that have shown that corporal punishment in particular is associated with a huge array of negative effects on adults. But in the lab, the experiments have often looked at rewards, and the results have been really counterintuitive. So in experiments where kids are rewarded to do things that they already like to do, like they're rewarded for drawing pictures, which is something they already enjoy. And then the reward is taken away and they're given free time to do whatever they want. It's been found that these kids will actually engage in less drawing when they received a reward for it than

44:07before they received the reward or compared to a control group that didn't ever get a reward. One of the reasons that that's theorized to happen is the over-justification effect, which basically just means that when we do stuff, we tend to kind of look back at our own behavior and it influences some of our future behavior. And so the kid might think, oh, last time I read a book, I got a pizza. I don't know if I really like reading. It seems like reading must be kind of boring. If they had to give me a pizza to get me to read last time. So maybe I don't really like reading that much after all. It's also been theorized that rewards SAP intrinsic motivation. So we all have intrinsic motivation to do things like, you know, we have curiosity about things, we want to learn about things, we want to be competent and master things, and we want to express our creativity. But if somebody is rewarding us or paying us or giving us something in return for those things, they become less

45:12appealing because they're no longer intrinsically motivating. The main thing here is that when the rewards and punishments stop, the behavior change also stops. And practically speaking, it's really impossible and undesirable to make a child dependent on an adult giving them a reward or punishment throughout their entire life. Eventually, we want behavior change to be internalized. And that doesn't happen when somebody external is controlling the consequences. Because we really need it to come from intrinsic motivation in order to be long term. The other thing is that we all have a drive for autonomy. Autonomy is the sense of having control over our own outcomes, being able to make choices and have those choices respected, having control over our own bodies, etc. Self-determination theory is a social psychology theory that

46:14has postulated that autonomy is one of the three core needs that we all have. And kids have relatively little autonomy in the world, and kids with disabilities have even less. So if kids kind of catch on to the idea that somebody else is pulling the strings by trying to change their behavior, by bribing them or rewarding them or threatening them because of something they did, they might resist that in order to reassert their autonomy. And particularly people with PDA, with pathological demand avoidance, which people with PDA have renamed it pervasive drive for autonomy. Autonomy is really essentially important to those individuals. And so when it's threatened by somebody outside trying to change behavior, it can lead to kind of a resistance that increases the behavior that's being targeted. Next slide.

47:17So finally, let's consider behaviorism from like a social and cultural lens. Behaviorism promotes self-interest. This was a bid point made by Alfie Cohn, who has written about the follies of punishments and rewards. Behaviorism focuses on consequences for that child. So it teaches them to focus on what they'll get, if they do something or what they'll lose, if they do something, rather than how their actions affect other people or affect their environment. Next slide. So thought exercise here is it ethical to use behaviorism on adult loved ones like our spouses or our parents or our friends. If I were to say hide my husband's gaming computer somewhere where he didn't know where it was and tell him, first you need to finish fixing the

48:20garage and then you can play your games because he is actually working on fixing the garage. And maybe I decide that he's being too slow about it. So I take his computer and I hide it and I say first fix the garage, then you can have your games. That would probably be seen as pretty controlling. If I were to decide that I didn't like him talking about, say, cars at the dinner table. So when he started talking about cars, I would do plan ignoring with him. I would look away and focus on my dinner and just pretend that he didn't exist until he talked about something else. Would that be considered part of a loving marital relationship? I don't think so. And of course, if you take physical punishment, corporal punishment, put it into a adult relational context outside of consensual sex play, we're talking about intimate partner violence. So then why is it okay to do these things with children that we wouldn't do with other adults? Why is it okay to talk to kids in ways that we would never talk to other adults?

49:28We should note that even though behaviorism as a science was popularized in the early 20th century, of course, the practices of rewards and punishments go way further back than that. And one particularly evocative example is the beatings of slaves by their masters if they were considered underperforming or disobedient. So we have a history, a cultural history of using behaviorist methods to try to control people who are less powerful than we are. Next slide. So Alfie Kohn frequently says, rewards, rupture, relationships. I love that alliteration, so I added my own punishments, pummel, relationships. Rewards and punishments teach kids that relationships, especially their close relationships, are transactional. So you do something for me, I do something for you. So it's not really surprising then that we might see kids who have been

50:32treated this way, flipping script around and saying to their parents or to their teachers, you give me what I want and then I'll give you what you want. It's also wouldn't be surprising if these kids grow up and when they're in their own intimate relationships, continue to engage in those patterns of power seeking. When these relationships between kids and their trusted adults are damaged through repeated rewards and punishments, kids cannot internalize the values that those adults hold, which is one of the key drivers of children's development. Children's moral development is modeling their behavior after that of the adults that they look up to. So if those relationships are kind of turned into transactions, it undermines the children's moral development by preventing them from internalizing those values. I also just add here that, and this is probably

51:34pretty obvious to most of you, but one of the main reasons that spankings and other forms of corporal punishment are hypothesized to correlate with adults behaving in abusive ways is because they learn that powerful people can use violence to get what they want from less powerful people that becomes normalized. And even when punishments or rewards are not physical and not physically violent, they can still get the message that giving or taking away things that another person needs can be used to control them. Next slide. So I've argued here that behaviorism is ineffective. I also want to argue that behaviorism is unnecessary. So the idea that kids do well if they can is supported by what we know about kids' developmental drives. Kids are born motivated to imitate role models. That's

52:36a process that happens without even much conscious thought. Kids want to need to please the adults that they care about and look up to. They have a need to please the adults they depend on for survival. And they also have a drive to be accepted by their peers. So kids don't want to disappoint the adults that they look up to. They also don't want to behave in ways that might get them in trouble or might get the negative attention from adults in front of their peers. So if all those those positive motivations are in play and a child is still not meeting adult expectations, we have to assume that there are some reason the child can't meet the expectations. We don't need rewards and punishments to make them meet the expectations because they already want to. They already have all these different reasons that they want to please the adults. They want to meet the expectations and they can't. Next slide.

53:39I have another thought exercise here. What if we all treated a misbehaving child the same as a child with a fever or a broken leg? And I put misbehaving in quotes only because what we define as misbehavior is very subjective. It's very culture and person specific. But what if we took a child who wasn't meeting our expectations and treated them the same as somebody with a fever or a broken leg? Somebody who needs some extra support, who needs some accommodation, who needs some expectations to be adjusted. Rather than somebody who's bad, somebody we should shun, somebody we should isolate, somebody we should not be kind to because we don't want to, quote, reinforce their negative behavior. Next slide. Just really quick, I want to share this thing from the occupational

54:40therapist who has a great Facebook page. She's a parent and an occupational therapist and she shares a lot of examples that have really taught me a lot about some of the strategies that we're going to talk about next. But she has this question, how will he know it's not okay? And the answer is he already knows and right now he's not okay. So, you know, if you have a toddler and they hit you for the first time, you do need to tell them that it's not okay to hit people because they probably don't know yet. If you have an eight year old that you're working with and they hit somebody for the sixtieth time, you don't need to tell them again that it's not okay. They already know. You don't need to punish them to prove to them that it's really not okay because they already know and in fact, they probably feel ashamed and embarrassed guilty, all kinds of feelings about the fact that they hit somebody when they knew that they weren't supposed to. Sometimes you might also see behavior that is, quote, not okay because somebody is communicating the fact that they're not okay

55:45and that they need help. And just a really quick example that I heard from a doctor who was talking about work with adults with developmental disabilities and there was a non-speaking person who was going up and punching people in the chest. And nobody could figure out why he was doing this. And eventually they did a medical exam and they found that he was having chest pain. And that was his only way of conveying to others that his chest was hurting him was by going up and punching people in the chest. So any child whose behavior suddenly changes, drastically changes. One of the first things that should be done is a medical workup to eliminate, rule out any physical issues that they might be dealing with and that's their way of communicating it. But sometimes also for speaking kids, strong language like swearing or saying, I hate you, you're the worst and things like that, comes from a place of a child being very dysregulated and that's the only way that they know to tell you that they need help and they're not okay. So we can respond with, instead of getting

56:54angry and punishing, we can respond with empathy and offering our support next slide. So I have 18 minutes to get through these strategies. I will do my best here, but I would encourage you to look at the links that I have at the end of this presentation if you're not already familiar with these strategies in order to learn more and see some practical examples of each. First strategy being co-regulation, which we already talked about to an extent. And it's essential to regulate yourself before you try to co-regulate with somebody else. Because regulation requires the use of your cortex and when we are dysregulated, we can't access our cortex as we talked about earlier. The challenge is getting ahead of dysregulation. So regulating yourself proactively before something happens, keeping your stress load as low as you

57:56possibly can. And again, we often can't control the stress that's coming in to our systems, but we can let some of that stress out whether it's having daily exercise, meditation, talking to a therapist, talking to a friend, you know, adults need to co-regulate too with other adults. We all need to find ways of letting that stress out so that it doesn't bubble over. It's also very helpful to practice regulating yourself before you actually need to, so that when you do need to self-regulate, it'll come a lot easier and you won't have to think about it as much. So some of the easiest strategies for self-regulation in a stressful situation might include kind of the slow, deep breathing, especially extending your exhale because that directly engages your parasympathetic nervous system. And also things like singing and humming and laughing engage your parasympathetic nervous system. So even just like singing a silly song while you're

58:58working with a child who might be frustrating you a little bit, that can help you self-regulate and also maybe co-regulate with them. Other strategies might be repeating a simple mantra in your head like, I'm safe, we're safe, it's not an emergency, we're okay, you know, something like that, or even carrying something in your pocket that you can look at or touch to remind you of the support that you have in your life. Those are all really simple ways that don't require a lot of thought to be able to self-regulate. Next slide. And then once you have insured that you are regulated, you can co-regulate with a child in a few different ways. If a child is maybe engaging in some challenging behavior but they're not having a meltdown at, you know, they still have some access to their cortex at this point, you might be able to just offer a distraction or a diversion, say, hey, can you, can you come help me with something or, hey, why don't we do this other activity?

1:00:02Validate their feelings. Even if you don't agree with their feelings, just saying something like, wow, it sounds like you're really having a hard time, you wanted to go to the zoo and you were really excited about it and then the zoo was closed. I also get really sad when I'm looking forward to something and then I can't do it. You know, letting them know that you're on their side and that you support them by validating their feelings. That also has the benefit of teaching them to name their feelings and to recognize what they're feeling. Ask them if they want you to stay with them or leave and a lot of these other things, especially for kids who are having meltdowns, are very child-specific. So it's really critical to get to know that this particular child and to talk to them about what helps them when they're having a hard time. So do they want you to stay near them? Do they want you to leave but just be close by for safety? Do they want, say, deep pressure hugs? Does that help them or do they

1:01:06prefer not to be touched at all? Are there things that you can give them regulating toys or activities when they are very distressed that will help them let some of that stress out? So those are all things that you can plan in advance and then offer when a situation comes up or even just saying something simple like, you're safe, I'm here, can be helpful for a child who's in meltdown and may not be able to process a lot of language. And then, of course, keep everyone safe. That might mean having a separate space for the child who's melting down asking another adult to tag in if there is another adult available, which I recognize as often there isn't. But if there is, especially if you're dysregulated, it's okay to say, hey, I need to take a few minutes away. Daddy or mommy or this other teacher is going to come in for a little while. Next slide.

1:02:10So, strategy number two, communicating expectations clearly and with clear reasons. So there's two parts to this. One is clearly stating what you do expect the child to do. Kids tend to hear a lot of negatives. You know, don't do this. Don't do that. And negatives are harder to process because you have to kind of flip it around. Like if somebody says don't run around, it's easy to just hear run around. Yay! And it's a lot more helpful to provide a positive expectation. Like, please stay in your seat. Sometimes during unstructured periods, kids don't know what they're supposed to do. And so if they do something they're not supposed to do, they're not doing it on purpose. They just, they don't know what actually is expected of them. So making that really clear, you know, during this time, here's a couple of safe things that you can do. You can play with these balls, you know, maybe, and maybe you have to say, please only play with the balls outside, for example, in order to set a safety boundary. So stating in positive terms.

1:03:18And the second part is providing reasons. And I'm using Ross Green's term here of adult concerns because I think sometimes, sometimes adults don't give any reason why they said an expectation. Other times they give a reason, but it's like a really superficial reason. Like I remember when I was a kid, a lot of times adults would tell me to do stuff that I didn't really want to do, and I would ask why. And they would give me a reason, but it was like, like, they would tell me to go take a shower, and I would say why? And they would say because your hair is dirty. And to me, that almost seemed like a circular reason. Like, yeah, my hair is dirty. I know that. I understand that a shower will fix that problem. But why is that important? Why does my hair need to be clean in this particular moment? Why does this actually matter? Also, why do I have to take a shower? There's other ways I could get my hair clean. Why do I have to do this specific thing at the specific time? Maybe I'm in the middle of something. I wanted to finish. So the adult concern is

1:04:20that broader, deeper concern, that's not your original expectation, but that explains why you have the expectation. You can think of the adult concern as if the child does or doesn't do this, what will happen to them or what will happen to somebody else. So in the example of the shower, it could be like, I want you to take a shower because your hair is dirty and I'm worried that you might get lice or your head might itch or I want you to take a shower because you have some body odor and I'm concerned that other kids might not want to sit near you while you have the body odor. Those are just your concerns, but they're like the real reason that you have the expectation and not just kind of a superficial reason. Next slide. Some of the reasons why reasons are important, they provide predictability, I think especially for neurodivergent kids having this knowing why they're being asked to do things and knowing why people are doing things is very

1:05:24important to provide predictability and a sense of security. They teach about cause and effect. So instead of engineering consequences for kids, you can talk to them about realistically what could be the consequence if you run away, you know, if you alope or if you throw a ball in the house or a couple of examples. Reason's respect autonomy and I think that was part of my issue too is, you know, I wanted to do things on my own terms, but knowing the reason why something was important often made me realize that actually it probably is a good idea to follow this expectation on my own. And reasons also invite negotiation and a lot of traditional kind of parenting theory would say, you know, don't negotiate with your kids, you need to be in charge, you need to stay in charge no matter what. And that has been kind of debunked because negotiation skills are actually really important life skills to be able to self advocate, to be able to put forward your needs, to be able

1:06:27to hear what somebody else's concerns are and then being able to come up with a mutually satisfactory solution, those are actually all really important life skills. So if a child tries to negotiate and says like, oh, well, why don't I put on deodorant and then I won't, I won't have body odor anymore, but then I don't have to take a shower. Then you, that's a solution that you can consider and you can think about, does this actually meet my concerns? Well, maybe it does. Okay, let's try that. We'll try that and see how that works out. Or maybe it doesn't and if it doesn't, you can explain why actually I have other concerns that the deodorant won't address. So allowing kids to negotiate helps them establish some autonomy, it helps them build those skills and it also improves your relationship with them. Next slide. So collaborative problem solving, I cannot possibly do this justice in like four minutes. So if you're interested in this method,

1:07:31please check out the lives in the balance.org website. But here's the basic theory. So kids do well, they can. And if they're not doing well, if they're not meeting an expectation that you have, first up is to figure out what is the unsolved problem. So what is the expectation you have that they're not meeting? And state it in concrete specific terms, lodged in time and place. And then ask the child, what's up? Ask them why or what makes it hard for them to meet that expectation. So let's go back to Lila and Mrs. Alvarez. Let's imagine that Mrs. Alvarez sits down with Lila and says, Hey, Lila, I noticed that yesterday afternoon you got up from your seat a lot during the day. What's up? And she might say, well, I got up a lot because I was feeling wiggly. My body was feeling wiggly. And Mrs. Alvarez will say, OK, your body was feeling wiggly.

1:08:34Is there anything else that made it hard for you to stay in your seat yesterday? And she might say, yeah, actually, I also wanted to tell my friends something, but I was afraid that I'd forget it if I didn't go talk to her right away. And so Mrs. Alvarez says, OK, so it sounds like it was hard for you to stay in your seat because you were feeling wiggly and also because you wanted to tell your friends something and you were scared that you would forget about it. Are there any other reasons that made it hard? And Lila will say, no, no, that's it. And then Mrs. Alvarez will state her adult concern, which is, well, my concern is that when you get up from your seat, it just strikes other students and other students don't always hear what I have to say. So I wonder if there's a way that, and this is like the specific wording that he suggests is I wonder if there's a way that you could feel less wiggly and you could also be sure not to forget what you wanted to tell your friend about, but at the same time not distract other

1:09:34students. And then they can go back and forth and think about solutions that might meet both sets of concerns. Solution that one possible solution maybe is for the wiggly part that Lila can do a hand signal. Mrs. Alvarez can kind of acknowledge it and then Lila would have permission to get up and move about the classroom without talking to other students. And then another solution might be that she has a journal where she can write down any thoughts that she has that she wants to share with other students so that she won't forget. And so those are solutions that meet both sets of concerns. Next slide. The other part of collaborative and proactive solutions is that you can only solve one problem at a time. A lot of times adults see the list of unsolved problems and they're like, oh my god, I don't know where to begin. And you just you can't solve multiple problems at the same time. It just doesn't work. So for the problems that are lower priority, he suggests what he calls plan C, which is dropping the expectation proactively.

1:10:39And sometimes that might mean letting go of a rule or a limit that just isn't really working out. Other times that might mean kind of changing things up so that the expectation no longer matters. So let's imagine that another unsolved problem that Lila and Mrs. Alvarez have is that whenever people bring treats in to class, even though Mrs. Alvarez tells every student to only take one cupcake, for example, Lila will have a tendency to get up and take a whole bunch more extra cupcakes. And that means that other kids don't get cupcakes. So one idea for plan C would be that Mrs. Alvarez comes in and distributes the cupcakes equally to everybody at the beginning. So Lila doesn't even have the opportunity to get up and take extra cupcakes because Mrs. Alvarez has just changed around the parameters so that that expectation doesn't even matter anymore. She recognizes that Lila doesn't always have the impulse control to only take one cupcake

1:11:42and accommodates that by changing the situation so that Lila is not in that situation anymore. And also so all the kids get the cupcakes that they are entitled to. Next slide. Strategy 4 is fairly simple. It's just the idea of giving kids self-regulation tools or at least recognizing what kinds of regulation tools work for them and then giving them ample opportunities to utilize those tools. So it might mean talking to a child or observing them if they can't tell you what regulates them in order to learn what kinds of things they find regulating and then being sure that those things are available as much as possible. So writing into an IEP or an EHCP or a 504 plan that a child will always have access to a particular fidget or a toy or even maybe a screen if that is a source of regulation for them. And also offering those things when you notice early

1:12:49signs of dysregulation because again it might not even realize that they're getting dysregulated but if you prompt them and say hey it seems like you're and come up with a term that is neutral that's not a shaming term to describe how they might be feeling like you know the wiggly for Lila was that was her term. So hey it seems like you you're a little wiggly right now. Do you want do you want this fidget or do you want to go for a walk? Not forcing it, not pressuring but just offering those things before anything happens and then of course offering them when there is dysregulation more obvious dysregulation and making those things freely available and never ever contingent on how the child behaves. Over time they will learn to recognize their own signs of dysregulation because they've been prompted about it and will also learn what helps them regulate and be able to spontaneously go and access those things. Next slide. And the final method here is intentional role modeling and

1:13:57there's a lot of evidence from social learning theory, Bandora's social learning theory about how powerful role models are and the fact that we emulate models without even recognizing it. And so model the traits that you want to see and not just the specific behaviors but particular traits, values, things like, you know, a love of reading, for example, instead of rewarding kids for reading books, just talk about what you're reading. Make reading a fun and collaborative activity. Also modeling some of the interpersonal traits like your own regulation, your own impulse control. It might mean that you narrate some of your mental experiences that the child can't necessarily see. So you might explain, oh, I'm so mad this guy who just cut me off in traffic. I'm so angry, I really want to yell at him, but I'm not

1:14:58going to do that. Instead, I'm going to take some deep breaths or I'm going to count to 10 or I'm going to put on some music or whatever it is that you find regulating. So they learn that adults also have dysregulation and stress and like the impulse to do things that could cause harm and then we resist those impulses and here's how we do that. Teach repair in your relationships by apologizing. We all make mistakes. We all get dysregulated and we say things that we don't mean. It's not just kids do that. So when you do that, apologize authentically and explain how you're going to repair and prevent that from happening again. So an example might be, I'm sorry that I yelled at you yesterday. I know that it scared you and I never wanted, I never want you to be scared of me. In the future, when I feel like yelling, I'm going to go in the other room for a bit, just as an example. And finally, find neurodivergent models for neurodivergent kids. So a lot of us

1:16:03grow up with disabilities. Our parents don't have disabilities. Our teachers don't have disabilities. We don't see how people with, especially like with our particular disabilities handle situations. Unless we have role models who have the same disabilities. So we will end by taking a final look at Lila, who is now in fifth grade. And after a lot of conversations between her and her parents and her teachers, things started to fall into place. And which probably won't surprise any of you. Lila was eventually diagnosed with combined type ADHD. I deliberately made her a female presenting because a lot of girls and women are not diagnosed when they have ADHD in particular. But fortunately, in this case, through the collaborative problem solving and through those conversations, she was able to be identified. She's now on a low dose of medication that helps

1:17:04regulate the dopamine system in her brain, which reduces the extra energy that she often experiences in the classroom. She also has a group of peers and a few adult role models who have ADHD, who she can call upon to talk to about how they handle difficult situations. And she can observe how they handle situations and what they've done academically. And the best and the most important thing is that Lila recognizes that she is a good person, that she is good just the way she is, and that her strengths can be celebrated. Final slide are some links to learn more. I'm just going to verbalize them for the audio version of this presentation. So www.alphiconealfei. Let's have a double check. K-O-H-N.com. Alficone is a social psychologist who's done a lot of

1:18:05research related to the impacts of particularly rewards on behavior. www.mona-daylahook.com. E, at the end of hook, is a neuroscience who's done a lot of work related to self-regulation. www.livesandthebalance.org to learn about the collaborative and proactive solutions. And www.occupationaloccupl-y-t-i-o-n-l.com for the occupational therapist who has a lot of really good practical advice. Thank you so much. All right. Well, that was fantastic. Dr. Silverman, thank you so much for this presentation. I just saw a comment pop up and the comment is a really good way to share what my thoughts were. And this is coming from Nerdivergent by Nature.

1:19:05This has been a brilliant and comprehensive presentation for Nerdiverse affirming care over behaviorism. Thank you so much. And thank you for your comment as well. Yet, you know, I think probably very well, you know, my thoughts and feelings on behaviorism and the need to move beyond behaviorism into better ways of supporting individuals. And this was really a fantastic journey through all of this. And, you know, we have a lot of things that continue to be done that are not working and people continue to double down in these approaches that are not working even though the evidence should be clear that they're not, you know, that they're not working and not supporting kids. So we have a lot of a lot of work to be done to try to shift people kind of beyond these approaches. But I think this has been a fantastic conversation and I really appreciate your presentation. You're getting some love here in the chat as well. Nerdivergent model, lots of hearts here. Shantelle says, yes, I'll be sharing widely. So comprehensive. So you get in some

1:20:10great comments here in the chat as well. This has really been fantastic. And, you know, I was actually sending a text over to Courtney as you were talking like, oh, we need to have you have you back for the beyond behaviorism conference this year as well. We're actually going to do another event this year. We did one last year and it was yeah, yeah, it turned out to be a really good event. And, you know, I think we need more of this to get people kind of shifting into different approaches. So this has been great. More comments coming in amazing. Let's see, this was really awesome. Thank you. And thank everybody here for the comments that are going in the chat. So I know we've gone a little bit over time, but you actually, you know, we got in. You got all, I mean, you know, we wanted to make sure we got all the content and you got all the through all of it. And I know how a challenge in that can be. There's, you know, times that, you know, some of these things we could really drill into deeply, but I really enjoy the presentation. I think this has been fantastic. We don't have a lot of time for questions. So we'll probably wrap up here. But any other kind of overarching thoughts that you have in terms of, you know, we have,

1:21:15as you know, probably very well, an audience here that's made up of a lot of parents, a lot of self advocates, a lot of educators as well. Any thoughts or guidance to those in our audience in terms of how to continue to get people moving in these directions and away from kind of compliance and control and behaviorism. I was just going to say if people have questions, because I haven't been able to see the chat, but if people have questions, feel free to email me at ARIELLE71 at gmail.com. And if I don't know the answer to your question, I'll, I'll find somebody who does because the folks at AASR can help with that. Yeah, I mean, I, I think it's so difficult to figure out like it's one thing to change your own practice. It's another thing to convince other people to change their practice. And especially the people who make the rules about how other people

1:22:19practice. It's really hard. But I mean, I guess all we can do is just communicate our own successes using different alternative ways of problem solving. Because I think a lot of people, like, I mean, I think virtually, maybe not everybody, but almost everybody who uses behaviorism has good intentions. And even, even thinks it's negligent to not use behaviorism. So if we can talk to people, take people where they are at the point where they have good intentions and what they're doing, but they're, they also are having difficulty. What they're doing isn't working and start from that place and talk to them about like, okay, this isn't working. So is there anything else that you might be open to trying out? And once, I think once people try out other things and those things work better, they'll, they'll start to recognize what's different about the,

1:23:24the new practices. You know, one thing I would add to that is I think that part of this is about, you know, in a way, kind of practicing what we preach and what I mean about that is, you know, if we want to, you know, if we want to be able to work with someone to help influence a change, you know, we have to build connection with them. You know, we can't go in and put them instantly on the defense about what they're doing. We have to build connection. I think relationship is really critical to that. We have to follow, you know, the same things that we want people to do with children. We should be doing when we're trying to give us other adults. It's about collaboration, right? How can we collaborate together? And, you know, I mean, I found over the years that there's a number of things that people can do, but it's hard. Systems are not easy to change. And we have a lot of parents in our community, amazing parents, and I've actually seen a couple of them on here today, who are, you know, kind of bringing new knowledge to their schools and the facilities that are supporting their children and, you know,

1:24:26trying to influence change. And I know it can be hard and I know it can be frustrating, but it's, this is, this is work that's about keep going, keep going. Don't give up. I mean, this is really important. And certainly, you know, we can make progress. I mean, you know, I found with, you know, for instance, IEP team meetings, sharing with the team a copy of Dr. Monardello Hux book or leaving a, you know, copy of how it go and work, whatever the case may be, you know, the things that we can do to kind of build relationships and trust and then try to collaborate and go a long way, I think, but, you know, it's a, it's, there's a lot of work ahead of us for sure. We live in a, a world that focuses heavily on compliance and certainly within our schools. This is, this is what we're seeing a lot of. Yeah. Yeah. And unfortunately, it seems like we're taking a couple steps backward in that regard. I would agree. I would agree. I would agree. I would agree. And I think, you know, the, the interesting thing is, now more than ever, now more than ever, to a certain degree, like we, we need people to question compliance,

1:25:29right? We need people to, you know, kind of push back when things don't make sense or they're not working, you know, and it's important. I mean, you know, I mean, I say this a million times, but, you know, when, when we think about like our hopes, our dreams, our goals, whatever they may be for children, never do I hear somebody say, I really want a compliant kid. You know, I mean, yes, we need them to understand, you know, working together in, in, in boundaries and all of those things, but compliance should never be the goal. Unfortunately, if you look at our system, sometimes it is. Sometimes it really seems to be the goal. Yeah. Another comment here, we're going to wrap up just the comment here. Really useful stuff. Thank you, Dr. Silverman. So, you know, great to see so many people here today. And we're going to go ahead and say goodbye to everybody. Do you have any parting words as we, as we end the show today? I just want to thank everyone for listening and watching and please share. And I hope that at least one thing

1:26:30may be resonated or made you think about something a little differently. Yeah. Yeah. Trust me. There were many more than one thing that there was so much of this. It was a really, really rich presentation. So we're glad you're here. I'm going to say goodbye to everybody. And if you'll hang on for one second, I just want to thank you again one time as we get done. So thank you, everybody, for joining us here today. Appreciate you being here. We've got our regular scheduled show again, I think in two weeks. And then of course, we've been doing a couple of special episodes as well. So be on the lookout for new things that are going to be coming very soon. And with that, I just want to thank you and tell you that we will see you again soon. Thanks so much.