As long as behaviors are the attributes we rely upon to diagnose and treat children for psychological disorders or personality disorders, we will over-prescribe drugs and we will subject children to way too much psychological therapy. We need a third option. A third option requires a new paradigm for how to understand human behavior in relationship to human cognition.
A third option focuses intently and intentionally on maintaining the mental health and overall integrity of a child’s brain and personality. The current vague and non-specific psychological theories of personality teachers are taught to apply in the classroom do not allow children to preserve the coordination and cohesiveness of their own unique sensory, motor, and nervous system capacities.
Micromanaging the behaviors of a human being via drugs and/or therapy will have grave negative consequences for that person’s capacities to understand and organize information and orient himself in space and time in the ways that make the most sense to him sensorially, motorically, and cognitively.
Human behaviors allow and support the brain in its task of sensing internal and external information, assessing that information, and then forming conclusions about that information in order to make decisions for what to do next. Behaviors do not occur independently of the brain’s directives, but the brain is constantly cueing for behaviors to help it assess future information it predicts it will need. For example, a child about to cross a street anticipates a car might be coming so his brain directs him to engage in the behavior of rotating his neck left and right to position his eyes so they can take in the view of the road in case a car is approaching.
All human behaviors serve a purpose and reflect how a human is CAPABLE of and is in fact understanding and managing the information present in any given moment. When adult authorities arbitrarily decide which behaviors are acceptable and which are not, it is the same as taking the pain sensors out of his skin. A child uses his pain sensors to orient safely in space. Individuals born without pain sensors suffer gruesome injuries their whole lives because they have no cues for how to safely orient their bodies in space.
An individual’s array of behaviors serve many purposes, one of which is to allow him to safely orient in space. We cannot pick and choose for a child the behaviors he can or cannot rely upon in any given situation. We must help children orient their brains and bodies in our classrooms and other group situations using methods that do not require us to constantly modify and comment on their behaviors.
All we have to do to successfully teach children is present information in ways they are CAPABLE of understanding it. We have thousands of ways of presenting information we can try before defaulting into behavior modification, or shipping the child off to therapy, or drugging him.
Gently helping children understand what to do next at all times instead of identifying them as disordered based upon their behaviors and putting them on behavior plans will eventually change the field of psychology from top to bottom someday and will dramatically decrease mental illness.
Ironically, the emergence of artificially intelligent machines might help us treat the developing brains of our children with more accurate and humane methodologies.
For example, if an instrument of AI was programmed to scan and interpret genetic information and was intermittently inaccurate, nobody would modify the machine’s output, it’s ‘final behaviors,’ they would modify the machine’s processing capacities to make sure the machine understood how to move from one piece of information to the next accurately.
Conversely, I am a teacher and we teachers are taught how to modify the output of our children, their final behaviors after they have already sensed, assessed, organized, and decided upon a whole string of information that resulted in their final behaviors. We teachers are taught precisely how to modify our students’ behaviors when they exhibit inaccurate output of any kind. We are taught much more explicitly how to modify their final behaviors than we are to consider how they arrived at those behaviors in the first place. Every child behaves for reasons that make sense to him and that are important to him. When we modify their output to suit our own goals for them, we disorient them, confuse them, anger them, and I believe lead many of them towards mental illnesses.
In the classroom setting, whenever a child goes off task, I have observed about half the teachers and teaching assistants will interpret the off-task behaviors as resulting from deliberate student defiance and stubbornness. These educators will then attempt to change the behavior of the child by giving the student a negative consequence or denying him a reward.
Modifying behaviors through drugs OR therapy are not evidenced based options with conclusive evidence for how they work, they are simply our only options thus far. Just because they are our only options does not make them our best options. Similarly, a large majority of children will learn regardless of how we teach them or whether or not we modify their behaviors, subject them to therapy, or give them drugs. Because some children will always learn despite what we do or don’t do to them does not mean existing options are optimal. If any of our existing methods of teaching and raising children were optimal, 1 in 4 of them would not end up mentally ill at some point in their lives or for their whole lives.
We teachers use a whole variety of behavior modification methods mostly by default. There are no theories of the human personality we can apply practically in the classroom that don’t involve behaviorism of some sort. We need a new biologically accurate theory of personality we can easily apply in our classrooms.
What if we focus on the unique manner in which each child senses information, organizes and orients to it, and then forms predictive decisions for what to do next with that information. Helping a child expand his ability to understand the information in his environment according to how we want him to can be a routine and easy task if we focus on the child’s understanding rather than his behavior.
Getting a child to have a specific relationship to any piece of information does not happen due to magic pills or magic behavior management plans. For a child to orient to information in specific ways he needs specific instructions for how to do so that MAKE SENSE TO HIM. Magic pills do not change how a child fundamentally senses, organizes, or orients to information. Just because a child is paying attention to information for longer amounts of time due to pills does not mean he is making sense of the information any better than he was before the pills. Forced behavioral changes do not equal better understanding of information. Forced behavioral changes lead to anger, rage, withdrawal, depression, anxiety, and/or mental illness.
Modifying a child’s ability to UNDERSTAND information in a specific way might require many attempts and many environmental adaptations but can be done. Modifying the child’s behaviors destroys the integrity of his sensory, motor, and nervous systems as they do their jobs of taking in, assessing, concluding, and deciding what to do next. Modifying and inhibiting BEHAVIORS damages the developing brain and I believe it to be the leading contributor to mental illness.
When a child does not behave according to how an adult wants him to, it doesn’t mean he has psychological problems or disorders. It means he senses, thinks, concludes, and decides differently than the adult does. It means the child has a different orientation to and relationship with the information in the classroom environment.
We can easily help Andrew change his relationship with the information without declaring him disordered. If Andrew is bouncing off the walls in school, drugging him will likely calm him down so he will behave more like his peers. What if we can simply create developmentally appropriate lessons for Andrew and consider the developmental level he is at instead of the developmental level we want him to be at? If Andrew does not receive constant negative consequences for how he behaves, this will calm him down more than anything. If he is set up to engage in learning experiences where he is successful, he will learn and thrive. He might need stations that captivate his interests in the classroom where he can move around and spend just a moment or two at each one due to a short attention span and the need to move. He might need more direct assistance. But we can surely come up with hundreds of ways to channel his exuberance, energy, and constantly shifting attention without declaring him disordered and drugging him or subjecting him to psychological therapy. (Occupational and physical therapy rock. They offer real strategies to help kids accomplish real life tasks.)
We need a biologically accurate theory of personality that flows from observations for how behaviors reflect the unique manner in which each human being continuously understands and organizes the interplay of internal and external information in order to continuously orient him or herself in space and time to make predictive decisions for what to do next. When we artificially attempt to change this dynamic in a child by modifying his behaviors so the child can achieve an ideal adults have created for how his or behaviors should or should not be, he is forced to adapt in often extreme ways in order to maintain any sort of equilibrium. Cognitive and behavioral adaptations implemented to maintain one’s equilibrium when one is expected to constantly sense, think, and behave in ways that are dictated by other people are mental illnesses.
If we artificially and forcefully change how a child orients himself in space and time by targeting his behaviors for modification according to the latest acceptable behaviors in vogue, we disorient, confuse and damage the child.
We need to discard current theories of personality that create an ideal for how people should behave and then declare them disordered when they do not measure up properly to that ideal. We need to discard psychological theories that identify specific behaviors as disordered and then take medical or therapeutic steps to change those behaviors.
A new biological personality theory would consider the fact that a human being’s relationship to information is really his primary and most crucial relationship. Survival of the fittest is really survival of the individual who can organize, understand, and respond to information in the most optimal ways in relationship to the interaction between his own sensory, motor, and nervous systems and his ever changing environments. Behavior management destabilizes the integrity and coherence of a child’s unique sensory, motor and nervous systems and sets him up for unmanageable anxiety which leads to mental instability and then potentially mental illness.
The psychological theories we teachers apply in the schools set our children up to have mental health problems that then must be treated by psychologists or psychiatrists. This is a vicious cycle we can easily alter by gently helping children figure out what to do next cognitively throughout the school day instead of micromanaging their behaviors.
It is destabilizing to not know when or how your thoughts and behaviors will be commented upon, drawn attention to, or forcibly altered. Whether this process is done gently or roughly by an adult authority, the process is totally destabilizing and anxiety provoking to a child. Anticipating destabilization causes children to withdraw or become hyper active due to the anxiety. Children often behave erratically and wildly when destabilized or anticipating destabilization, ensuring they will receive ever more behavior modification. The integrity of the child’s relationship to information, how he senses, assesses, and makes predictive decisions for what to do next becomes ever more confused. And that child becomes ever more passive and/or aggressive.
Children deal with mountains of old and new information every single day of their lives. They do not have the stored memories or the experience base of the adult authorities. Adults often assume children should know how to behave appropriately at all times when the children are clueless about the information they must know in order to call up the expected behaviors from their stored memories. Even when a child has seemingly mastered material, he can still become confused by it because he is an inexperienced child.
There are a million ways to become cognitively confused and disoriented by each child in each classroom each day of the year. When we fixate on behaviors during moments of confusion or perceived wrong doing, we miss hundreds of teaching moments and we destabilize and damage our children in the process.
Instead of drugging or requiring psychological therapy, we need to help children preserve the integrity of the totally unique relationship they each have with the information in their environments that they must continuously sense, assess, conclude, and form predictive decisions about in the ways that make the most sense to each of them.
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