It is hard to imagine our playful, spirited children gradually becoming permanently filled with rage and vengeance by the time they reach 20 something. It is even harder to imagine our curiosity seeking children, full of ideas and the excitement of their own personal what-ifs, gradually becoming vengeful enough to take up arms, walk into a school, and start shooting.
When we have a mass shooter, we pore over their history, their interests, their backgrounds, so we can profile them and add to our knowledge for how to spot future potential mass shooters.
Here is one similarity I am sure the mass shooters have probably all shared, but nobody has every looked for it. If you are a boy and you understand and interact differently with information and people in your environment, you are harder to teach in the classroom setting with traditional methods, so you are put on a behavior plan or subjected to some form of behaviorism in an attempt to make your responses and behaviors appear more like those of the other kids.
Molding a child’s responses and behaviors to be different than they are is not an innocent attempt to ‘help’ the child. Behavior management is a destabilizing and disorienting practice we need to re-evaluate for how and why it is done.
When you push back on a child for how he responds or behaves, you destabilize the integrity and coordination of his sensory, motor, and nervous systems. The destabilization that occurs to the kids on behavior plans day after day and year after year has the potential to be extremely destructive to their mental integrity and stability.
There are many internal dynamics that become destabilized when you have your responses and behaviors managed by other people. If you are an atypical learner, you interpret and understand cause and effect differently than the majority. You interpret spatial, temporal, and numerical information differently. You often have an atypical kind of visual acuity, depth perception, and eye-hand coordination. Often your receptive and expressive language is different than the norm. In light of this, you will consistently and constantly reach different kinds of conclusions and make different kinds of predictions for what to do in any given context than the majority.
When you think differently, you present different kinds of behaviors that reflect your capabilities for interpretation and intellectual organization. None of us can divorce our interpretations, thoughts, or our intellect from our behaviors. They work together and depend upon one another. They are a team.
Our human interpretations, conclusions, predictions, responses, and behaviors don’t magically generate from a vacuum inside of us that we can magically tweak and change according to the whims of our parents, teachers, friends, or anyone. Our brain is busy every moment we are awake handling the data points all around us and organizing those data points in ways we are cognitively able to do so.
When a boy who has a very atypical sensory, motor, and cognitive set of capacities with which to generate perceptions, thoughts, responses, and behaviors, these dynamics are all going to present quite atypically. Does this mean they are wrong and need to be modified or changed?
Unfortunately, in the classroom setting, often boys seem in the wrong when they present different responses or behaviors than most of the other kids. The responses and behaviors of these boys, instead of being seen as integral to how their nervous system is able to sense and process information, are seen as disruptive and inappropriate.
So, teachers, specialists, and counselors have one single option with which to manage and change the responses and behaviors of these boys. And that is with some sort of behavior plan. We rely on behavior plans for two reasons. First, they are the only option available to us as educators. And second, they are the only option available to us as educators.
This is why I can be so certain the mass shooters have been subjected to some sort of behaviorism. Behavior plans are perfect for educators because we are taught explicitly how, when, and allegedly why to use them. They are concrete, easy to implement, and give teachers a way to be accountable for ‘helping’ who they have been taught to view as behaviorally challenged instead of cognitively different.
Behavior plans look and sound good on paper. In reality, they are humiliating, destabilizing, and rage producing. Behavior plans are no different than corporal punishment. The brain responds to physical pain in the same way it responds to all discrepancies from what it was predicting. The brain responds to discrepancies from what it was expecting by cueing for anxiety. Anxiety destabilizes us in order to get our full attention so we can take steps to stabilize ourselves.
When we have the control over how to register and manage our anxiety, and stabilize the destabilizing occurrences that happen to us, it is no big deal. For example, if we sit on a tack, we quickly stand up. Problem solved. When we raise our hand and answer a math problem and are told we have the wrong answer, we have a quick shot of anxiety due to the discrepancy, but quickly see our error and manage our anxiety. When we prepare to buy pizza for lunch but find out the school cafeteria made a last minute change and is serving meat load instead, we have a shot of anxiety, but quickly readjust our expectations in order to manage the anxiety. This dynamic involving our brain making predictions for what will happen next and then cueing for anxiety when there is a discrepancy is what our latest brain research tells us happens all day long. But we have not reassessed our psychological explanations for human behavior to account for any new brain research.
Therefore, Anthony B., who has a brain that connects up differently from his peers, will suffer. We will not take into consideration the differences in Anthony B.’s brain connectivity and his nervous system because we still rely upon outdated psychological strategies for how to understand and manage this boy. We will use destabilization as a strategy for getting him to respond and behave the ways in which we want him to. This is cruel and unusual, particularly because the children routinely subjected to the most forms of behaviorism year after year are the children with the most easily destabilized nervous systems.
Anthony B. doesn’t have quite as much cognitive flexibility as his peers even though he is quite intelligent. He has trouble envisioning more than one solution to problems. So if a discrepancy occurs, he responds with more intense anxiety than his peers.
Once Anthony B. makes a prediction, he has trouble cognitively formulating new predictions to adjust for the discrepancies because he usually has fewer options that come to mind, and it takes him longer to arrive at alternative predictions and solutions because he processes information more slowly than his peers. For this reason, Anthony B. has more heightened anxiety responses when discrepancies happen, and his process for working through anxiety takes longer. While working through his anxiety, Anthony B. often needs to express exactly what is bothering him in any given context and why. Anthony B. can problem solve eventually, but it takes him much longer and his process isn’t quiet or neat or tidy.
Is it easier to let Anthony B. whine and complain for a minute or so when the cafeteria runs out of pizza and replaces it with meat loaf or is it easier to immediately threaten him with no recess if he complains too loudly or too long?
Well, it is way easier to threaten him with no recess. Mrs. Anderson has 25 kids in line. She believes, if every one of them went on and on about how upset they were about the meat loaf replacement, all chaos would break loose. So, she can’t let Anthony B. make a big stink.
Or can she? Robert Sapolsky, Stanford professor and one of the world’s leading neuroscientists says, “Often the biggest impediment to scientific progress is what we know, not what we don’t know.” What we ‘know’ from psychological theories is that children have to be able to roll with disappointment and the unexpected to be ‘normally’ adjusted. So when children don’t roll with the unexpected, educators are taught in psychology courses to take away a reward or apply a negative consequence to teach students how to adequately roll with the unexpected. Psychology courses teach us to compare childhood behaviors to standards of normal instead of thinking about each child as having a unique nervous system that manifests according to that child’s cognitive, sensory, motor, and nervous system idiosyncrasies.
If each child has a uniquely calibrated nervous system, then we can’t really identify what is a normal response and what is not. If we allow children to respond as they respond and stop expecting them to respond according to ‘psychologically normal’ ways, then we will stop constantly and artificially destabilizing their nervous systems.
Trying to micro-manage Anthony B.’s whining and complaining responses and behaviors to normalize them as compared to the other kids sounds good on paper and seems reasonable in practice. But if behaviorism really worked, teaching and parenting would be the easiest job in the world and we would be able to eliminate all the behaviors we are not fond of by the time a child reaches 2nd grade. If behaviorism really worked, we truly could produce designer children like Skinner thought we could. We could decide exactly how we want children to behave, manipulate positive and negative reinforcements, and then voila, perfectly normally behaving children would pop out everywhere.
Well behaviorism doesn’t work like this, and we know this, but we still use it as if it has been a scientifically verified practice. Behaviorism can work short term the same as corporal punishment can work short term. Whether we destabilize our children in order to coerce them to behave in certain ways through paddling, verbal reprimands, taking rewards away, or assigning negative consequences makes no difference to their nervous system. Destabilization is destabilization. It is always unpleasant and it is handled the same way by the brain regardless of how it occurs.
We can easily compile and massage statistics to show behavior plans are successful. We can just as easily show how corporal punishment can be successful. Destabilization works well for manipulating all mammals. Just because we can do it, does it mean we should do it?
For a majority of all children, we could do anything to them and they will learn successfully in spite of what we do. They have flexible and adaptable brains and bodies and can manage the constant destabilization and anxiety that behaviorism causes. It won’t be pleasant for them, but they can manage. Some children will not fare so well with any sort of behaviorism and the anxiety will eat away at them. They will develop hidden or not so hidden anxiety related problems. And some will grow up with unmanageable amounts of rage.
Even though many of our students appear to be un-phased from having their responses and behaviors commented upon throughout their school years for how appropriate or inappropriate they were, our statistics for ever increasing amounts of mental illness, addiction, and depression imply otherwise.
What if we just change how we understand the role destabilization and anxiety play in our nervous systems and factor these roles into how we understand and treat the behaviors of our students? Every single student in school is going to manage what they are predicting to what is actually happening slightly differently due to how they are cognitively able to understand information and make predictions. Every single student is going to have different amounts of destabilizing anxiety when their predictions are challenged. Every single student is going to express and work through their anxiety in different ways and at different speeds.
So when Anthony B. starts to cry and complain about the meat loaf, is it really that important to shoot him an angry glance and tell him if he doesn’t quiet down he will not be allowed to go on recess?
The Anthony B.’s of this world make different kinds of predictions and therefore present different kinds of behaviors than the majority. The Anthony B.’s are the boys for whom anxiety is more heightened and more troubling than their peers. The Anthony B.’s take longer to express and work through their anxiety. Because of this, they are the boys put on behavior plans to squelch their whining and complaining. Given they already have heightened amounts of anxiety that takes longer for them to work through, their responses to having their anxiety processing time aborted and replaced with negative consequences are going to also be heightened. The super heightened anxiety will quickly move into rage. What if the ability of the Anthony B.’s to understand, express and manage their anxiety becomes so twisted and warped due to these behavior plans that they begin to associate anxiety immediately with rage instead of anxiety abatement? What if these boys become the mass shooters?
What if all we had to do was reverse our position on behavior plans and behaviorism to decrease the destabilization and humiliation that leads to marginalization and unabated rage? What if we start to believe that the destabilizing anxiety, degradation, and pain of being paddled is the exact same as the destabilizing anxiety, degradation, and pain of having one’s behaviors managed?
The formula for changing the equation of destabilization plus humiliation equaling marginalization and rage is to simply treat the expressions and the behaviors of our students as valid, legitimate, and important. When Anthony B. has a fit when the meat loaf is replacing the pizza, what if we take him seriously and treat his disappointment as completely valid instead of trying to make him appear more normal?
What if we replace the very negative and demeaning psychological verbiage of throwing a fit or having a temper tantrum, with the term destabilizing anxiety. We can have much more patience for a child we believe is suffering from destabilizing anxiety than we can a child we believe is throwing a fit or having a temper tantrum.
Here is an example of how to help a child work through destabilizing anxiety. “Anthony B., I am so sorry for this last minute change from pizza to meat loaf. I know how much you love pizza and that meat loaf is not your favorite. I can understand why you are so upset with this last minute change. Let’s ask the cooks when they will be having pizza next.”
Anthony B. is still upset, but much less so because he can see you are working with him and not against him. His anxiety is not disregarded or criticized, but taken seriously. If this kind of approach is always taken with Anthony B., he will be able to understand and manage his anxiety as a matter or course like all the other kids. He will likely become more upset more frequently than the others due to his unique nervous system, but if he eventually works through his anxiety whenever he has it, what the heck? Why not work with his nervous system instead of against it. As he matures, he will become more efficient at working through the unexpected. If we work against his nervous system with behaviorism, however, he will never learn how to manage HIS personal nervous system on his terms, and he will become a walking time bomb waiting to go off.
Working with the nervous systems of our students is not what we educators learn about in psychology courses. We learn to identify appropriate responses and behaviors and how to elicit them. And we learn to identify inappropriate responses and behaviors and how to extinguish them.
Behaviors are highly integrated parts of a child’s capacities to sense, perceive, think, emote, and predict. There is no possible way to disentangle these dynamics from one another. Messing with a child’s behaviors is like pulling one wire from a car engine and expecting the engine to still run. We have much more understanding and patience for the integral nature of machines than we do our human nervous systems.
Messing with a child’s behaviors to achieve ideal or expected sorts of responses during school is an idea we can easily dispose of. If we could begin to work with the nervous systems of our students the way they are, instead of how we want them to be, we will find our classrooms become much calmer and easier to manage than they do when we use behaviorism of any sort.
It becomes clearer every day, every month, every year, and every decade that psychology does not have effective and reliable theories or strategies to help us understand or prevent the overwhelming anxiety and rage that leads to unadulterated violence and mental suffering. Our psychological theories are inadequate at best, harm-causing at worst.
We need new ideas. We need new theories. We can do better.
I believe we should heed Robert Sapolsky’s warning. “Often, the biggest impediment to scientific progress is not what we don’t know, but what we do know.”
What we think we know about our alleged human psychology is quite likely working against us, not for us. Our psychological explanations for human behaviors rely upon degrading, dehumanizing, and contradictory descriptions and verbiage. Psychological explanations for human behaviors were initially accepted without ever having been subjected to the scientific method. At this point, psychological explanations have been around for so long that nobody remembers how the ideas came about in the first place and nobody has yet bothered to double check them for accuracy and scientific validity.
Because all biological and neuroscience disciplines rely upon the foundational concepts of psychology to base all of their brain and behavioral related understandings and research, the inaccuracies, if they do exist, are woven deeply into the fabric of everything we think we ‘know’ about human thought, emotions, perceptions, and behavior.
I know we can do better. To do better, we need to take what we think we know from psychology and put that knowing on a shelf, let it rest out of sight for a bit, and try out some new ideas for how to understand and care for the developing brains of our children.
Children are not mannequins. Current psychological theories, when applied, treat children as if they are. Psychological theories believe we can look at behaviors separately from the whole child and tweak them however we want to ‘help’ our students learn to comply normally with school expectations.
Psychology teaches us we have to build the concept it has randomly and unscientifically identified as a character in each human child by expecting appropriate, normal, and moral behaviors from each child. Building character sounds great on paper. But the simplistic and fanciful notion of a character is an inaccurate way to understand and treat the highly integrated and complex nervous systems of our students.
Our students need to learn how to make optimal decisions as often as possible in as many different contexts as they might come across throughout their lives. Helping them maximize their abilities to organize information and develop skills to help them assess, conclude, and predict in the ways that can be successful for their cognitive capacities does not have to ever include the mystical entity we like to call a character.
If we treat the nervous systems of each child as important and valid and normal for who they are cognitively, sensorially, and motorically, then we will treat the responses and behaviors of our children as important and valid. We will stop viewing behaviors as having the capacity to be disordered or abnormal because this would no longer make logical sense.
Nobody has abnormal behavior from their own perspective and trying to convince a child or anyone their behavior is abnormal is rage inducing. Helping a child achieve a learning goal in a way that makes sense to the child does not require managing the child’s behavior, it requires managing the learning environment to match the child’s sensory, motor, and cognitive capacities.
If we change how we understand anxiety responses and behaviors of our children, we can change the equation for how we respond to their behaviors. (Behaviors + Responses)-(Destabilization + Humiliation) = Calm Nervous Systems. Nervous systems, to be calm, must be allowed to process the disruptions that occur to them in the ways that make sense to them. Artificially messing with this process for our own desired effects is cruel and unusual and causes some children to grow into adults with unmanageable amounts of anxiety and rage.
