Supporting the Individual Needs of Infants and Toddlers: Resources and Solutions
Presenters: Miriam Silverman and Cheryl Williams-Jackson
<SLIDE: PITC, Program for Infant-Toddler Care “Understanding Children’s Behavior: Supporting the Individual Needs of Infants and Toddlers, Part 2” Developed by Miriam Silverman and Cheryl Williams-Jackson for the PITC. PITC is a collaboration of the California Department of Social Services and WestEd>
Elizabeth Crocker:
So we welcome everyone to the second webinar in our series for Understanding Children’s Behavior. So we’re so glad that you came to last week’s, and if you’re new to us this week, we’re glad that you’re here. And we are going to hear first from Heather McClellan-Brandusa, our partner at the California Department of Social Services.
Heather McClellan-Brandusa:
Everyone, so glad to see you all here. As Elizabeth mentioned, I’m Heather McClellan-Brandusa, and I’m with the California Department of Social Services in the Child Care and Development Division. And I saw many of you last week at our first session. So for those of you who are rejoining for the second session or maybe joining for the first time this week ’cause they weren’t able to … We’re happy to have you, and I know you’ll hear some wonderful information from our speakers tonight. So, so glad to see you all here and please enjoy.
Elizabeth Crocker:
Okay, and next I’d like to introduce our two speakers. We have Cheryl Williams-Jackson and Miriam Silverman who are both PITC faculty and have served as mental health consultants to childcare programs for over 30 years each. And so they’re strong in child development, and they’re also strong and understand the importance of partnering with programs and providers so that you can find success in your work with children. So with that, I’m going to turn it over to Cheryl and Miriam.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Thank you Elizabeth and Heather. So if you were here last week, you heard quite a bit about the nervous system and the different states. And so what we wanna do before we get started is to ask you to answer two questions for us. And so a survey will be opening up for you, and we’ll give you a few minutes to answer the question. And they are yes and no questions. If you were not here last week, feel free to sit back or you can take a look at those questions as well because you may end up answering them later. It looks like they’re coming in fast. Ooh, we have some high numbers that as far as did you think about your nervous system states or the child over the past, or a child over the past week. And then the second one, Miriam, same thing. Did you think about or use the framework?
Miriam Silverman:
Yeah great.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
So beautiful.
Miriam Silverman:
So happy to see that.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Yeah, yeah, I just love the framework because I think it gives us so much to be able to work with, to have a frame in our minds. All right, so.
Miriam Silverman:
Well it’s helpful to know, too, that when we’re doing these trainings that, you know, people walk away and have something to think about, and it’s nice to see that people were able to make use, or at least in their minds about it. So that’s great.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Yeah, and for those of you were, that have, that did a no, thank you for your honesty. And so what I would ask you to do is give it a try, working on it, whether you’re talking with someone else about it, or you’re actually utilizing it yourself, as we know, you know, when you use and you practice certain things you begin to remember, and they become very meaningful to you. So even if you talk with someone else about it, but we have an overwhelming, 88% is a yes. And then the second one there’s a 90%. And so the poll has closed. Thank you all for participating, and I’ll give it over to you, Miriam.
Miriam Silverman:
Great, thank you. Next slide, please.
<SLIDE: “Cultivating Awareness, Mindfulness and Coherence for Easier Regulation. Mind Full or Mindful?” over a simple drawing of an adult and child, hand in hand with the sun above and a few flowers around them, thought bubbles above each head. The adult’s thought bubble is filled with simple drawings of multiple smaller objects. The child’s thought bubble reflects the simple space they are both currently in.>
Let me close the poll here. Okay, well just a really warm welcome back to the colleagues that we were with last week and to new colleagues this week. And so as mentioned, we did talk about nervous system states last week. And part of today we’re gonna get to do a practice that really helps us cultivate more awareness, more mindfulness, and can help us kind of achieve greater and greater state of coherence, which means our system, nervous system, heart, brain, organs, everything is working well together ’cause we’re a complicated system, and all of this makes regulation so much easier. So I just really love this graphic because you know, everything, mindfulness and all of that. And you know, most of us, I would say me included, has the mind full of all of the different things that we see in this. And then we see children. It’s part of why I love working with children so much that there is a little bit more space in their thought bubble, and they are able to live more in the moment. So my hope is that the practice that I’m going to teach you today very briefly is something that you find that you can do easily and that you really reap the rewards of quite a lot of research that shows that it’s very helpful.
So we’ll do that first, and then we’re gonna move into working on a child-caregiver success plan for when we find behaviors that are challenging us in the little people that we take care of. And we’ll do that, we’ll walk through the case that Cheryl presented. She’ll remind us about that when we start that. And then we’ll wrap up with just going over some other resources that are available to you. So here we go. Next slide please. So, you know, as we discussed last week, and all of you who are new this week, clearly the work you do is so important for our world, and it can also be quite challenging. And I’m sure that many of you have children that you’re working with and families that you’re working with that have multiple stressors in their lives. And of course we have our own stressors, and all of this can impact the relationships that we have with the people that we’re trying to connect with. And so in order to respond effectively with kindness and understanding to the children in your care and their families and our own selves, we really need to kind of look at building deeper awareness. And so one way to do this is to practice awareness of ourselves, what’s going on inside of us, bringing attention to our own moment to moment experience.
But this attention is most helpful if it’s without judgment and self-criticism, which can be something that’s hard for a lot of us. And remember that we talked about emotion regulation earlier, so I just wanna look at this slide with you that with self-regulation, the inability to self-regulate is really central to most of the stress, health, relationship issues, and social problems that really plague our society today. And the most, I think, important strength that people can benefit from is building this capacity to more effectively self-regulate our emotions, our attitudes, our behaviors. This is very much what we’re trying to help the little people in our world, but we also have to really practice it too. And it’s wonderful because the reality is emotion regulation and being able to control our responses are skills that we can improve through simple practices. It’s kind of like, you know, we wanna build muscle, then we go to the gym and we pump iron, or we swim, or we do whatever floats our boat as far as exercising. And that’s the same thing, except we’re doing it to build capacity within ourselves. And these practices have also been found to reduce anxiety, negative moods, job stress, and at the same time improves attention, memory, and problem solving. Wondering if any of you are interested in those benefits, right?
So I would like to introduce to you one of the HeartMath techniques which helps us to de-stress, which helps us to access our intuition, and to navigate stressful situations with ease, and also to get in sync with ourselves so that we can also be more in sync with others. So I, and I wanna mention this word resilience, and you can switch to the next slide please. So greater resilience means that our inner battery has more energy reserves to draw on when we need it, including in more significant or long-term challenges. So having greater resilience enhances our ability to maintain our composure and to really be in charge of how we respond, not just reacting to this situation. So let’s think about kind of our energy as like a battery, and we have this inner battery, and I want you just to consider within your own mind when your inner battery is drained, are you more reactive where little things tend to bother you more, maybe get under your skin more easily? Is it more difficult to think clearly and stay focused? When your battery is drained, do you tend to make more mistakes? Does it affect how you relate to people? Are you more self-critical and have more negative thoughts? That’s me. Do you tend to be more judgmental or have a tendency to blame others when you’re drained?
So when our inner batteries are drained, it’s often more difficult to regulate and take charge of how we respond. And if that’s the case, it’s more difficult for us to be the best version of ourselves. So building your resilient capacity is a proactive way to reduce and prevent stress buildup, to sustain your energy, and to feel and perform better. So the HeartMath, this is just one technique from this HeartMath system, and it’s an effective technique to help stop the momentum of stress energy and emotional reactions that are happening in the moment. And it enables you to pause and choose how to respond rather than from reacting in anger, impatience, or frustration. Next slide please. So I want to introduce you to a simple method which can help stop this momentum of stress, energy, and emotional reactions. We’re gonna do this simple practice for less than a minute right now, and then we’re gonna come back to it in just a couple of minutes too. And I’m just gonna read the directions for you, and you can just follow what I’m saying. So I’d like you to focus your attention in the area of the heart. Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or your chest area. Can even put a hand there if that helps. Breathing a little slower and deeper than usual and really trying to have the in breath and the out breath be of equal measure. And find an easy rhythm that’s comfortable for you. And we’ll just do this for about 30 seconds.
Announcer:
Please pause the video to perform the activity, and then resume the video when you have finished.
Miriam Silverman:
Okay, let me talk a little bit more about this heart-focused breathing that you all just practiced. So breathing techniques have been around for a very long time and are widely used because they’re quite effective. I imagine many of you have probably learned breathing techniques, whether it’s in yoga, martial arts, meditation, lamaze for example, any of those. And in each case, these different breathing techniques have a specific purpose. Similarly, this heart-focused breathing also has a purpose, and I wanted to explain a little bit about that to you in order for you to and understand it better and maybe dive into it as a practice that you can do. So, what this heart-focused breathing does, it helps turn down and neutralize the intensity of an emotional stressful reaction such as being angry, anxious, or overwhelmed. It helps to really turn down the emotional intensity. And when we’re able to turn down the emotional intensity, we can save energy, and we reduce that energy drain on our inner battery. Refocusing your attention to the heart area can also help break the cycle of the repetitive thoughts and mind chatter. So another reason for focusing on the heart area is that scientists, they know that wherever we place our focus on the body, with practice, we can create a measurable physiological change to occur, which is the basis of biofeedback.
And actually with this practice that I’m gonna teach you, you are really gonna be able to over time move your heart and your whole nervous system into a more coherent state, just with these simple practices. And in fact, cardiologists even recommend this practice to many of their patients who come in with heart issues because they know the science behind these very simple practices that really help our heart waves go from this (moves hand rapidly up and down) to this (moves hand slowly up and down), which is a much more coherent state and has long-term health benefits for us. So by also focusing in your heart area, you start to bring in and draw more energy into that area of the heart. And that’s really what shifts our kind of chaotic state to a more coherent and in sync state. And an interesting fact that you may not know that might be new to you is that, you know, our brain and body, our different organs, our brain is sending messages all the time to different parts of our body. I think we all know that, through the neurons and electrical impulses, but the heart actually sends messages too. And what they found is that the heart sends way more messages to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. So we think we’re just gonna think our way into everything, or think our way out of things or problem solve, but it’s not separate from our body. And in fact our heart has a lot of intuitive capacity.
And so this practice can really help you get back in touch with this ’cause we all have it, it’s just a matter of remembering it and practicing it. Also, if we’re focused on our heart and doing those little deeper and slower breathing, then we’re not focusing on the thing that just got us really upset. And that means we’re gonna kind of come back to calm faster and become more centered before we respond. Okay, next slide please. So before I teach you the full part of this little method, I wanna take a moment to just talk about emotions. And here you see this term renewing emotions and attitudes, and we’re using that term renewing, re-energizing because we’re really thinking about our system, you know, as is the, is our battery being energized, or is it being depleted? And these, this slide is really a slide about feelings and attitudes, emotions that leave us energized and renewed. So calm, ease, courage, dignity, confidence, appreciation and gratitude, kindness, being optimistic, standing in line at the grocery store and being patient while you’re doing so, being loving and caring and compassionate, and having a sense of contentment, enthusiasm, joy, hopeful. These are all emotions and attitudes that fill up our battery. But there are emotions that either drain or create more resilience in us and charge our inner battery and give us reserves.
But you know, sometimes emotions are referred to as positive or negative, implying that some are good and some are bad. But really emotions aren’t good or bad per se, positive or negative, but they do have a positive and a renewing effect, or they can have a negative and depleting effect on our physiology. That negative depleting effect, not just, you know, may be emotions that are these depleting emotions, but they also long term really affect our physical health and our mental health as we know. And they can also really affect how we show up throughout the day and how we engage with others. So emotions such as patience, kindness, compassion, appreciation, these all create neurochemicals in our brain and body that regenerate our system and offset energy draining which can result in longer lifespan, better health, as I’ve said, increased resiliency, even improved memory and problem solving, enhanced intuition and creativity, and improved job performance and achievement. Who doesn’t want all of those, right? So renewing emotions really energize and rejuvenate us mentally, emotionally, and physically. So just take a second to look at those feelings and attitudes that I just went over, and you know, note which ones kind of you connect with, which are the ones that you can kind of have not just a thought about but an actual feeling of, because we’re gonna use that in the practice that we do. Give you a second to just take a peek at that. So next slide please.
We’re gonna go into learning the quick coherence technique, which you can do anywhere at any time. Doesn’t matter if you have your eyes open or closed, you can do it in a quiet space. You can do it in the middle of a busy classroom, sitting in traffic, on the train heading to work. No one even needs to know you’re doing it. So I’ve noticed of late, just an example for me ’cause I’ve been practicing this, and just when I start to get frustrated saying traffic or something like that, the other day I was a little bit frustrated ’cause there’s construction in San Francisco. Surprise, surprise. And I thought I was gonna be late to pick somebody up, so I was starting to get frustrated, and literally I just did that heart, the heart-focused breathing and kind of experienced kind of a patient state, and I felt so much better in a short amount of time. So it really is something that’s quite easy to do if you just have a practice of remembering to do it. Okay, so you already know the first step, which is the heart-focused breathing. And I’m gonna walk you through now the quick coherence technique, which has two steps, and we’re gonna do this for a little longer, maybe about four minutes or so, okay? And I’m just gonna read you the directions and you can just follow along. So focus your attention in the area of the heart. Imagine your breath is blowing in and out of your heart or your chest area. Breathing a little slower and a little deeper than usual and finding an easy rhythm that’s comfortable for you.
Announcer:
Please pause the video to perform the activity, and then resume the video when you have finished.
Miriam Silverman:
Next slide please. As you continue your heart-focused breathing, make a sincere attempt to experience a regenerative feeling such as appreciation or care for someone or something in your life. Try to actually re-experience the feeling you have for someone you love, a pet, a special place, an accomplishment, or focus on a feeling of calm, ease, kindness, compassion, whatever feeling feels right for you.
Announcer:
Please pause the video to perform the activity and then resume the video when you have finished.
Miriam Silverman:
So this technique is a practice that you can do, like I said, anywhere at any time. And the pairing of the heart-focused breathing with one of those renewing feelings is what they found is really helpful to bring our whole system back to a state of coherence. So next slide please. This slide just captures this technique in two quick steps, which is the heart-focused breathing, which you can do for a few breaths, and then activating a positive or renewing feeling. So before we move on to the next section, just take a moment to note how this practice was for you. You know, notice if you’re feeling any different than you did before we started this practice. When we’re first starting, you know, it’s totally natural that our minds will wander away from the focus on our chest or heart area, and that’s not a problem at all. When you notice that, you just go back to your heart-focused breathing. Or if our mind runs away from one of those renewing feelings, no problem. When you notice that, you just bring it back to a renewing feeling and the heart-focused breathing. And over time you, that’s why it’s called practice because we just practice and we get better and we have good days and bad days and focused and not focused. All is good for sure.
Also, what I want you to do is think about when you might have some time in your day to do this practice. Because what we know about habits is finding a regular time to do it, at least a regular time, then you can have extra add-in times whenever you want. Because if you’re able to practice the simple method, there are some profound benefits that await you. Can I have the next slide please?
<SLIDE: “Improvements in Mental & Emotional Well-Being” Below, a chart measuring before and after percentages of participants who responded often-always, before and 6 weeks after HeartMath Training, N=11,903. Reductions averaging 50% less shown in all categories: tired, exhausted, depressed, anxious, annoyed, and angry.>
This is the last thing I’ll tell you about this. There was a study done, it had close to 12,000 participants, which is a huge number for a study. And it was people before they learned HeartMath techniques. That’s in the gray on the slide here. And then after six weeks after their learning and practice of HeartMath is the blue. And what they were rating were their feelings of tired, exhausted, depressed, anxious, annoyed, and angry. And you’ll see quite dramatic decreases in every one of those depleting feelings with this practice. So I really encourage you with that robust scientific information, with a lot of people, to find some time in your day and experiment with that. So we are gonna shift gears now to review a research we can use to address challenging behaviors. It’s not, I mean behaviors that we as grownups find challenging as well.
It’s not only helpful for our work with children and family, but this plan, could you have the next slide please? This plan can also serve as documentation of all your up efforts that you’ve had of trying to figure out, you know, how to help this child have behaviors that fit in better with your setting. So this is the child-caregiver success plan and a follow-up plan. This is what it looks like. It’s in your resources. Same place that you went for the webinar page where you could download the PowerPoint. And I think they also posted a link to this resource, Child-Caregiver Success Plan in the chat. And what we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna have Cheryl remind all of us of the child that she presented last time, and then Cheryl and I are gonna walk through this plan and kind of go through it like we would maybe if we were sitting with a teacher, whether we were a colleague, another teacher, or a consultant, a friend. And then also bringing in the parent, the parent family piece of it too. So why don’t we stop the slide share, and Cheryl you can introduce our child and we’ll go from there.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Yeah, Miriam, thank you for that. And I have to just to let everyone know that, you know, the whole idea of that breathing, the HeartMath breathing, I have to say that making it a consistent thing for ourselves, it allows us to practice just like we have to, you know, practice CPR or anything else that we wanna make sure that we remember in time of when crises may happen or things may not go as we like them to go. I can tell you now that it’s a consistent thing in my life. I wake up with deep breathing. I know what time during the day, and Miriam, my love that you said, no one has to know that you’re doing it. And a lot of times people don’t know that I’m doing it at a particular time because I’ve gotten so used to doing it during the day, three times a day that really nobody knows that I’m doing it because it’s such a part of my life now. And what a great way to teach it to families and children. And I also thought about, there’s a video, and I don’t know if anyone’s ever seen this, but it’s where two little brothers are going to school, and I think one is in preschool and one is a toddler, and the toddler is really upset and his brother just stops him. Does this sound familiar to anyone? So I can’t, let me see, lemme change and see, anybody raising their hand over there that they’ve seen it. And so where he’s just telling his brother to breathe, breathe, and he’s doing this to get him to breathe.
And so you have that older one teaching the younger one. So I just wanted to bring that up as you were talking, and I just think that making it a routine in our lives and even with our, with the children that we are serving, and the families teaching them, I think is so important. So the story that I shared last week was, the name of it was the child that redesigned a room in less than a minute, meaning that the child was having some difficulties that, and they only showed up on Monday and Tuesdays where tantrums would happen, and the room would be become scattered at a particular time. And we at first couldn’t figure out what was causing the strong emotions to come up, what was happening there. So that pretty much I think was the snippet of what I was sharing around that Miriam, is that we saw the child go through that dysregulation. But now with teacher, with the teacher and myself to kind of figure out what do we need to do here? And even with the the aide, what do we need to do here?
Miriam Silverman:
Yeah, great, thanks for that reminder. And so, for those who were here last week too, we used this case also this example to go through the framework which looked at five different causes of behavior. And just a reminder, you know, we didn’t really think it was the particular environment. We didn’t think that it was, you know, she kind of was, you know, ready to learn but just didn’t have the opportunity yet. We didn’t think it was about temperament when we talked about it. There may be some developmental stage. She was the youngest one in the class at 2.9, and there was the idea that there was some unmet emotional need that could have been fueling that. So we’re gonna just hold that in mind, and we’re gonna walk through this plan, which I’m hoping will be useful to you all, both in conjunction with the framework. The idea would be that you would be using the framework, you’d be kind of trying different things, figuring it out, and then you’re coming and you’re sitting down and you’re having a meeting, the teacher, the parent or parents that are there. So that information all goes down here. And what of course we wanna do is start with the child’s strengths. So in this story, tell us a little bit about what strengths that you or the parents and the teacher saw in this child.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Oh, definitely we saw that she was a, she had some wonderful friends that when she showed up in the classroom, she just loved seeing them and run to them to go and hug them and when we’re on the playground. And yeah, had a very good relationship. Also had a good relationship with me and her teacher as well. So definitely there was this enjoyment of being in the space that we were in, and the learning environment that we were in. We definitely saw that. Her, the fact that she was so kind, you know, even though being the youngest one in the room. Of course the other students saw her as baby, but they didn’t call her that. But you can see that. And she recognized that, you know, so I think in the, the other thing is, oh, and she loved reading and she would read, we had, what was the name of a turtle, I forget the, Tuck the turtle, you know, and she would go over and read to Tuck, you know, her books to him. So yeah, she loved reading as well.
Miriam Silverman:
Great, so that’s a lot of strengths. You know, I’m hearing that she was social and really enjoyed her friends and being at school, she enjoyed reading, she was happy to kind of be there. She was kind. Were there, I don’t know if you, Cheryl, had experience with the family or if the teachers talked about that. Did the parents or the family members have ideas about her strengths as well?
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Yeah, they said that she truly enjoyed cleaning and so…
Miriam Silverman:
Good ’cause she made a big mess. You could clean it all up.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
And so when the family would have cleaning days, she would be the one pretty much telling everyone what they needed to do. So then that was something coming from her mother. And I just remember her father sharing that, you know, she loved going on rides with him in the car, you know, and just looking at things, and she would follow around butterflies, you know, and things like that, yeah.
Miriam Silverman:
Nice, good. So the parents really could see strengths in her as well? That’s really nice to hear. Sometimes it can be very hard sometimes, you know, both teachers and parents, depending on the behaviors that we’re finding challenging, might really struggle to find strengths. So it may be something that, you know, you’re gonna have to work and with this child that’s not the case. They’re at the ready.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Yeah.
Miriam Silverman:
So you’ve said a little bit about describing the challenging behavior, so I just wanna make sure I get most of it, and then you can fill in the pictures ’cause I heard you say that Monday and Tuesdays it happened, last week you said like, wow, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, we could really see that it wasn’t temperament because you know, that was a whole different part of the week. So we know that this, the behavior that is challenging for us is happening on Monday and Tuesday, and that she is like taken everything apart in the room. Okay, so that’s kind of the what, we have the when, the where is the entire room. It seems like it’s happening weekly. Okay, now what we don’t know, which I think it was the like cliffhanger is, do you know if there are any preceding events? Because like that’s, you know, Monday and Tuesday, but then not Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Yeah.
Miriam Silverman:
There must, you know, maybe be something that’s going on.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Yeah.
Miriam Silverman:
Okay.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
And so the role that I’m in is the early childhood mental health consultant. And I’m not able to share with the teacher though exactly specific what is happening with the child, but that I can work with the teacher on what’s taking place. So I’m, and so I’m, I’ll just share that there’s something very stressful that happens over the weekend that her life has totally changed from spending time riding in the car with mom and dad, and it’s now riding in the car now just with dad, and her environment has changed. She’s in a very sterile place where toys are not there, but she’s able to be there with her mom, and so being there I think was the big preceding event that her life totally changed from the happiness of the weekend to now being in this very, not childlike environment, and but still feeling happy to be there because she’s with her mom, you know, and dad when she is there. And siblings, I forgot to say she’s the kind of the mediator for her siblings also, you know, if they get into an argument. And so she loves being around them. And so they will, you know, bring a toy or two, and they’re able to play with it. But I, for me, you know, and in the conversations I’m having with her, pretty much she’s missing that weekend of being able to just have the freedom to play, you know, and play with her mom and go for a walk with her mom.
Miriam Silverman:
Yeah, so it sounds like a really quite drastic change in how she spent, you know, the two days before she came back to school on Monday and Tuesday. And so that really was what was kind of fueling this different behavior. And so what do you think, because you know, we’ve talked last week about how all behavior, whether it’s children’s behavior or adult behavior, is communication. So what do you think this girl is trying to communicate to the big people in her life and at the childcare center through the behavior?
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Yeah, and I’ll say that it, what we found ourself having to figure out is first the emotions. What were the emotions that we were seeing at the beginning and also during what I call the emotional recovery or going back to being able to regulate, what were the emotions that we were seeing, and we would see both anger and sadness and you know, and so you would have to know the child to be able to recognize when there was this switch from one to the other. And of course one of the things that we noticed was, you know, if the anger came up, something else would be thrown or you know, but then when the sadness came up, it was the crying that would take place in that moment and then go back to, you know, that angry, and if you try to ask a question, which meant that she was definitely here. So asking a question, what that was gonna do is just bring up more anger and more sadness. So yeah, so I’m trying not to, I’m trying to make sure I don’t get what comes later, so I’ll stop right there, yeah.
Miriam Silverman:
Okay, well so it sounds like, there’s anger and sadness. So some of the behavior is a communication of the anger, the throwing and stuff like that. And then, you know, the sadness seems a little bit easier to say, I will say, you know, that’s not true for all children. Sometimes children might be feeling really sad inside, but what you see is anger.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Yeah. And I’ll tell you now. And it was the conversation between us, you know, because we just had a really good relationship and understood the importance of conversations. And so when I wasn’t there, there was things that she would see and there were things that I would see, and based on our conversations, we were able to, among ourselves began to understand it. But then in talking with the father to be able to understand it. So it was, it wasn’t just, you know, that we kind of, you know, just look and said, oh, that’s this and this. It really was the dialogue to figure it out.
Miriam Silverman:
Yeah and so you mentioned the father. What was his idea of what the behavior was, the communication of.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Yeah, it was be, you know, he was very, very good. He was working with a social worker to help the child to be able to make an adjustment that was gonna be taking place in her life and to figure out how to go about doing that. And he said that he knew what her anger looked like before, so he knew that that was anger, just hadn’t seen the intensity before.
Miriam Silverman:
I see.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
And he knew what she looked like when she was sad, you know, because he would sit and talk with her about, you know, that he was sad too and that she was sad, you know, he would have that conversation. So she had really good conversations with him, and he understood how to talk with her around it.
Miriam Silverman:
Okay, so, you know, we have that anger, we have the sadness. It sounds like the adults were on the same page about, you know, those behaviors. So I wanna ask, you know, because we talked last time, the fifth possible cause was unmet emotional need, and you referred to that. So usually anger and sadness come from something, underneath that they’re kind of secondary emotions, right? So do you think that there was a need that she was conveying also through the behaviors that you were seeing?
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Yeah, I think just not understanding the world because you know, being in certain situations, many of us, even as adult, we don’t understand, you know, it’s the why, why. And so you have a child here who you know, is probably asking over and over again, why are you all telling me this? Why has my life changed?
Miriam Silverman:
Yeah.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
And what do you mean that my life is gonna change for the rest of my life? They didn’t say it that way, but I’m sure that that’s what she was trying to process. And it’s something that no child, you know, I think that any child would have a problem trying to understand, you know, this whole process of life.
Miriam Silverman:
Yes, yes. So I’m hearing a few things underneath, which I’m just gonna add my own 2 cents about it.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Yes, feel free.
Miriam Silverman:
You know, one is predictability. She was going along in her life with, you know, her mom and whatever, and dad and whatever. And all of a sudden it has changed, how things go, change dramatically. So predictability is really important for all of us, but especially for young children.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Yeah.
Miriam Silverman:
So, and typically I think we can see that, we can see that with kids whose parents end up getting separated, and now they’re going between maybe different houses and things like that. Predictability can, or the lack thereof can really cause lots of different kinds of behaviors in children, potentially behaviors that we find challenging. The other thing that I am feeling is loss. And that like, that’s a very, a 2.9-year-old, that’s a, I mean that’s hard for us when we kind of lose friendships and partnerships and people die, loss. And so there’s also kind of, you are speaking to that, like, my whole world has changed. So these are kind of unmet emotional needs maybe for predictability, for stability, stuff like that that fuel it. Okay, great. So we’re getting a clear picture, yeah.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Yeah and the consistency, what we realized was that it took her two days to be able to see it, but the predictability became that the morning, hello. So that routine, that morning hello for me when I came in, the fact that certain setups in the classroom or in the room looked the same. So there was a lot of predictability.
Miriam Silverman:
Yeah.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
But even in her home life, you know, there had, you know, this unpredictability had been created where other family members were spending time, and it wasn’t father because father was there with mom, you know? And so even that on the other days kind of shifted, but the consistency became, we’re in the room together.
Miriam Silverman:
Yeah.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
But it took her two days to get there.
Miriam Silverman:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and for children who are really in those kind of unpredictable places, often childcare is the most predictable place. So Cheryl, what I’ve heard you say, I’m gonna kind of speed up a little bit so we can do this.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Sure.
Miriam Silverman:
So there were things that you tried and you saw the responses. Like sometimes you would, the teacher would maybe try and talk to her when she was in this angry phase, and that didn’t go over well, she threw more toys. Or in sadness maybe she allowed herself to be comforted. That worked pretty well. So, those what had been tried and the responses maybe provided some clues to like the different support strategies that you were trying to implement. And like you said, there was a way of the teacher greeting her in the morning. Like that came out of, I imagine that, well what does she need? Like how do we really up predictability here and understanding? Was there anything else that you all put in place to kind of, you know, out of your thinking together? Maybe just in a couple of words.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
So Monday, I would say Monday and Tuesday one of us would be sitting in her favorite area in the classroom, and we noticed that she would just come over and just sit. We had this thing where we had glasses on to get us focused. And so all the children had their own glasses with no nothing in the middle. So she would just come sit down, and if I’m sitting there, she would put on, I already wear glasses, so she would automatically put hers on and we would sit, and I would wait for her to say something. And this is over time over the two or three weeks that we were able to get her to first start doing that. And so she would sit, but we made sure that one of us was always sitting there when she came into the room. And it would only take like 10 minutes, you know, because we had three of us in the room, the other two understood what was taking place. We knew that we just needed five or 10 minutes for the third person to just be over there with her. And we began to see things, you know, the emotional, that dysregulation begin to change.
Miriam Silverman:
Great.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
And we all were like, wow, that worked. You know, we were kind of…
Miriam Silverman:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s great. That’s great. So you know, what I wanna point out here, like with these different strategies, we wanna talk to the teacher about it. We maybe wanna talk to the parent. We wanna know also what the strategies are for the teacher, the caregiver, and the parent in addition to the child. Because sometimes you might need support because of the behavior that’s challenging. And so, you know, we wanna consider all those, not just about the child. That’s why it’s called the Child-Caregiver Success Plan. And the parents are included too in that.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Always.
Miriam Silverman:
Now the last bit that I wanna just point out on this plan is that there’s a plan that you make on this plan for follow-up. Because it’s so important that like, okay, we are not gonna necessarily solve this in one go. Lots of good things happened around this, but also hard things could have happened, and you need to be able to have a follow-up. And there is, Keiko just dropped the link to that follow-up plan, which I’m gonna let you all look through that on your own time. But it really is to say, oh, we said we were doing this behavior, how did that work? Did it work, did it not work? If it didn’t work, what does that tell us about our idea of what was motivating this behavior, what it was communicating? ‘Cause we might not guess correctly the first or second or third time.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Exactly.
Miriam Silverman:
So this is so important. And again, this is your, you know, book of like, these are all the things we’re doing to be helpful to this child. Thanks so much, Cheryl. I just wanna, because I wanna just get a tiny bit of those.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Oh the other, yeah, yeah,
Miriam Silverman:
Yeah, the resources. I wanna also show you folks just really quickly another resource in addition to this plan. So if we can go back to the PowerPoint and look at the resources from the Infant (and) Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation Network. So if we can bring that back up, Elva, that would be great. And then I’ll just gonna breeze through this pretty quickly because you all can find this in the resources too. So we’re gonna go a couple of slides forward.
<SLIDE: Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation (IECMHC) Network list of resources and contact information.>
So I just wanted to point these things out. Anybody who is caring for a young child, birth to five, has free access to these services. And there’s different kind of tiers of services. The services are in Spanish and English right now. Hopefully they’ll be in Cantonese down the road. And I just wanna point out a few different things. There’s a helpline, you can call this helpline, the number’s here, and they’re available eight to five Monday to Friday. They say that you will get a call back within 24 hours, and somebody will be a thinking partner with you around this. You can talk about challenging behaviors, licensing, expulsions, developmental questions, administrators can talk about staff kinds of issues. You don’t have to provide your name or anything like that. And this is also the doorway to other services there.
So this is a line that is available to anybody, and it’s a consultant or you know, somebody with kind of the mental, like infant and early mental health kinds of things going on there. So you can really utilize this resource, anybody here. They also have these open door sessions, which are monthly drop-in virtual sessions with kinds of topic areas. You can build community talk with others, you can register for this on their website. That link is the page that you get to to register. Can I have the next slide please?
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Hey Miriam, I just highly recommend it. I know I just got the email sometime this week about the open door session coming up.
Miriam Silverman:
Yeah, I saw
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
And I drop in there. So yeah, I drop in sometime also. I think it’s really a good one for people to drop in on.
Miriam Silverman:
Yeah, great. So there’s also targeted services, which is a community of support series. This is a virtual meeting space. They meet five times with the same facilitator. There’s a stipend of $24 per session, which is great. They hand out the Connect, Reflect, Grow Kits. And it’s really a place to kind of problem solve, but also to celebrate and reflect. And there’s also consultation. You can request consultation. You can even say I wanna consultant who knows about autism or developmental delays or trauma. You can ask for a specific kind of thing depending on the challenge that you’re facing. And again, the link to getting these consultation services is right there in your PowerPoint. So please refer back to the PowerPoint, the very last slide please. This has a QR code which will also take you to their webpage. So I’m hoping that these, you know, last week, this week our framework, our ways to tune into our nervous system, our heart-focused breathing and our renewing feeling. The plan we just went through, the caregiver, the child-caregiver plan, and the follow-up plan, and along with this resource from the network all provide you with support for the incredible work that you’re doing day in and day out. And I just wanna appreciate everybody at PITC, WestEd, and Cheryl doing this together has been really a wonderful experience, and thank you so much for your kind attention.
Cheryl Williams-Jackson:
Thank you everyone.
Karen Charest:
Thank you, I’m Karen, and I wanna thank Cheryl and Miriam for this wonderful two-part series and its very rich content. Another special thanks to Heather and her department for making it possible to offer this free webinar to everyone, and especially to you registrants and those who have participated in this. We really appreciate you coming.