Why I’m Unfortunately Not Surprised By More Incidences Of School Violence

Why I’m Unfortunately Not Surprised By More Incidences Of School Violence

Yet another incident of violence in a school. Over the last few weeks, there were shootings and stabbings in Kentucky, Texas, and New York high schools. We cannot deny or avoid the problem, even if we desperately try. Our children hear of these incidences, and even though they are relatively rare, we can only imagine the thoughts and feelings our children are sitting with. As parents we are fully aware of our deep concern, fear, and outrage over this epidemic.

From when our children are young, we teach them to avoid strangers. Sadly, it is the individuals they are familiar with that are the most likely to harm them. This includes their partners, family members, friends, and others they know. It’s frightening to accept that reality.

Children and adults are being injured, and in very unfortunate cases, murdered, just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Research has shown that school shootings and other acts of violence are rarely impulsive acts. They are typically well thought out and planned in advance. For many offenders, they observed violent films, violent video games, and participated in repetitive viewing of violent media. The most common goal is for retribution. 61 percent are motivated by a desire for revenge, and 75 percent felt bullied, persecuted, or threatened by others.[i]

We also need to be aware of the “Werther Effect” which is defined as a duplication, copycat, of another suicidal act. Because these events are well-publicized, it can trigger an increase in similar acts for days or weeks after an incident.  

What we can do.

Gun control is typically brought up and debated following an incident. The fundamental issue being neglected is that society and schools don’t necessarily teach constructive ways to cope and deal with depression, anxiety, disappointment, frustration, and other significant emotional states and emotions.

There isn’t guidance in teaching about emotional regulation, frustration tolerance, identifying core values, problem solving skills, etc. These constructs serve as the foundation to allow for regulating difficult emotions, fortifying a moral compass, and inevitably facilitating sound decision making.

Our Schools

Schools make it a point to conduct workshops on kindness, diversity, bullying, inclusivity, drug and alcohol use and abuse and many other topics, but don’t teach the foundational skills. The “do this” and “don’t do that” one shot deal workshop structure conducted at schools is unproductive and ineffective. It’s counterintuitive to how kids learn and integrate information and antithetical to research on learning theory.

Teaching about emotional states and emotions unequivocally matter. According to research, they are known to contribute to:

• attention, memory, and learning,  • decision making,  • the quality of relationships,  • physical and mental health, and, • performance and creativity. There is a plethora of studies that support the need to integrate social emotional learning (SEL) in schools and at home because of the long-standing positive benefits.

Some evidence based school SEL and mindfulness curriculum that can be advocated for include:

RULER” – Yale Child Study Center – (Pre-K-HS),

2.  casel.org – (Preschool-HS),

3.  “Second Step” – (k-8th grade)

4.  “Mind Up” – Goldie Hawn Foundation – (Pre-K-8th grade) – www.mindup.org,

5.  “School Connect” – (High School),

6.  “Choose Love Movement” – (Pre-K-HS), and

7.  mindfulllifeproject.org – (Elementary School-MS).

By integrating SEL’s 5 competencies — self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, responsible decision making, and relationship skills into curriculum content, educators are not only giving students opportunities to practice their social-emotional skills, but also showing them how integral these skills are in their daily lives.

As Parents

The more environments that are supporting our children in learning and strengthening their social and emotional intelligence (EI), the greater the benefit for all of us. It is important that we, as parents, advocate for a greater emphasis on SEL in the curriculum, but in the meantime, there are also measures we can take to strengthen the social and emotional intelligence of our children.

Role modeling for children by facilitating discussion around feelings, and making connections between children’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors is essential. Facilitating an emotional climate is also critical. A parent can’t just infuse skills, they need to maintain a climate that is conducive for emotions to be expressed, accepted, and effectively worked through.

The way for parents to teach EI is to focus on:

• Recognizing emotion;

• Understanding emotion – i.e., knowing the causes and consequences of emotions;

• Expressing emotion – i.e., knowing how and when to express emotions with different people and in multiple contexts and under varied influences such as personality, gender, power, social norms (family/work), and race, ethnicity, and culture, and

• Regulating emotion – i.e., the thoughts and actions we use to prevent, reduce, initiate, maintain or enhance emotions.

Here are some diagrams and exercises helping to make the connection for children regarding understanding and identifying their emotions:

  1. Feelings chart to measure feelings on each day, or throughout the day.
  2. Feelings chart with 63 different facial expressions, to discuss or identify different feelings. Part of emotional intelligence is being able to identify and describe feelings and this will help help to expand their literacy around this. 
  3. Another one to help with emotional literacy. An extensive list of words to describe physical and emotional states when your needs are satisfied, and when they aren’t. 
  4. A feeling wheel.
  5. Develop coping cards:
    • When I ________, I feel ______ (also rate intensity of feeling from 1 (low) to 5 (high) because ________.
    • What I need is _________________________.
  6. See here for other activities and ideas on ways to explore emotions. 
  7. For other ways parents can integrate SEL, see my blog on Huffington Post “Parenting With Emotional Intelligence: An Aspect Of Parenting That’s Too Often Overlooked

As parents, we need to strongly consider taking a stand and advocate for fundamental change that would teach our children skills to regulate their emotions and would guide them in making more mindful decisions. Scarlett Lewis, Jesse Lewis’s mother who was a victim of Newtown, and created an SEL program called “Choose Love Movement” stated, “If this program had existed when Adam Lanza was a young child, it would have saved my son’s life and it would have saved Adam Lanza’s life.” About Adam she compassionately wrote, “He did what he was supposed to do, and it was up to us to help him. He was just a kid.” 

Viewing curricula through a social, emotional, and moral lens is like a habit of mind: the more kids do it, the easier and more habitual it becomes. Perhaps the greatest benefit of teaching lessons like these is that kids will start to examine their education, their decisions, their interests, and their relationships through this lens. They will be assisted in cultivating a more thoughtful and discerning approach in their general life. What more can we want for our children and the peers our children interact with.

[i] CIRG/NCAVC. (1999). The School Shooter: A Threat Assessment Perspective.


About the Author: Michelle P. Maidenberg, Ph.D.

Michelle P. Maidenberg, Ph.D., MPH, LCSW-R. is the President/Clinical Director of Westchester Group Works, a Center for Group Therapy in Harrison, NY and maintains a private practice. She is the Co-Founder and Clinical Director of “Thru My Eyes” a nonprofit 501c3 organization that offers free clinically-guided videotaping to chronically medically ill individuals who want to leave video legacies for their children and loved ones.

She is Adjunct Faculty at New York University (NYU) in their graduate program in the Silver School of Social Work. Michelle is a Board of Directors member at The Boys & Girls in Mount Vernon. She is author of the book “Free Your Child From Overeating” 53 Mind-Body Strategies For Lifelong Health” and is also a Huffington Post blogger.

You can visit her website at: www.michellemaidenberg.com and link to her blogs at: http://www.michellemaidenberg.com/blog/. You can also visit her foundation at: www.thrumyeyes.org.

 

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We don’t need to protect kids from the discomfort of anxiety.

We’ll want to, but as long as they’re safe (including in their bodies with sensory and physiological needs met), we don’t need to - any more than we need to protect them from the discomfort of seatbelts, bike helmets, boundaries, brushing their teeth.

Courage isn’t an absence of anxiety. It’s the anxiety that makes something brave. Courage is about handling the discomfort of anxiety.

When we hold them back from anxiety, we hold them back - from growth, from discovery, and from building their bravery muscles.

The distress and discomfort that come with anxiety won’t hurt them. What hurts them is the same thing that hurts all of us - feeling alone in distress. So this is what we will protect them from - not the anxiety, but feeling alone in it.

To do this, speak to the anxiety AND the courage. 

This will also help them feel safer with their anxiety. It puts a story of brave to it rather than a story of deficiency (‘I feel like this because there’s something wrong with me,’) or a story of disaster (‘I feel like this because something bad is about to happen.’).

Normalise, see them, and let them feel you with them. This might sound something like:

‘This feels big doesn’t it. Of course you feel anxious. You’re doing something big/ brave/ important, and that’s how brave feels. It feels scary, stressful, big. It feels like anxiety. It feels like you feel right now. I know you can handle this. We’ll handle it together.’

It doesn’t matter how well they handle it and it doesn’t matter how big the brave thing is. The edges are where the edges are, and anxiety means they are expanding those edges.

We don’t get strong by lifting toothpicks. We get strong by lifting as much as we can, and then a little bit more for a little bit longer. And we do this again and again, until that feels okay. Then we go a little bit further. Brave builds the same way - one brave step after another.

It doesn’t matter how long it takes and it doesn’t matter how big the steps are. If they’ve handled the discomfort of anxiety for a teeny while today, then they’ve been brave today. And tomorrow we’ll go again again.♥️
Feeling seen, safe, and cared for is a biological need. It’s not a choice and it’s not pandering. It’s a biological need.

Children - all of us - will prioritise relational safety over everything. 

When children feel seen, safe, and a sense of belonging they will spend less resources in fight, flight, or withdrawal, and will be free to divert those resources into learning, making thoughtful choices, engaging in ways that can grow them.

They will also be more likely to spend resources seeking out those people (their trusted adults at school) or places (school) that make them feel good about themselves, rather than avoiding the people of spaces that make them feel rubbish or inadequate.

Behaviour support and learning support is about felt safety support first. 

The schools and educators who know this and practice it are making a profound difference, not just for young people but for all of us. They are actively engaging in crime prevention, mental illness prevention, and nurturing strong, beautiful little people into strong, beautiful big ones.♥️
Emotion is e-motion. Energy in motion.

When emotions happen, we have two options: express or depress. That’s it. They’re the options.

When your young person (or you) is being swamped by big feelings, let the feelings come.

Hold the boundary around behaviour - keep them physically safe and let them feel their relationship with you is safe, but you don’t need to fix their feelings.

They aren’t a sign of breakage. They’re a sign your child is catalysing the energy. Our job over the next many years is to help them do this respectfully.

When emotional energy is shut down, it doesn’t disappear. It gets held in the body and will come out sideways in response to seemingly benign things, or it will drive distraction behaviours (such as addiction, numbness).

Sometimes there’ll be a need for them to control that energy so they can do what they need to do - go to school, take the sports field, do the exam - but the more we can make way for expression either in the moment or later, the safer and softer they’ll feel in their minds and bodies.

Expression is the most important part of moving through any feeling. This might look like talking, moving, crying, writing, yelling.

This is why you might see big feelings after school. It’s often a sign that they’ve been controlling themselves all day - through the feelings that come with learning new things, being quiet and still, trying to get along with everyone, not having the power and influence they need (that we all need). When they get into the car at pickup, finally those feelings they’ve been holding on to have a safe place to show up and move through them and out of them.

It can be so messy! It takes time to learn how to lasso feelings and words into something unmessy.

In the meantime, our job is to hold a tender, strong, safe place for that emotional energy to move out of them.

Hold the boundary around behaviour where you can, add warmth where you can, and when they are calm talk about what happened and how they might do things differently next time. And be patient. Just because someone tells us how to swing a racket, doesn’t mean we’ll win Wimbledon tomorrow. Good things take time, and loads of practice.♥️
Thank you Adelaide! Thank you for your stories, your warmth, for laughing with me, spaghetti bodying with me (when you know, you know), for letting me scribble on your books, and most of all, for letting me be a part of your world today.

So proud to share the stage with Steve Biddulph, @matt.runnalls ,
@michellemitchell.author, and @nathandubsywant. To @sharonwittauthor - thank you for creating this beautiful, brave space for families to come together and grow stronger.

And to the parents, carers, grandparents - you are extraordinary and it’s a privilege to share the space with you. 

Parenting is big work. Tender, gritty, beautiful, hard. It asks everything of us - our strength, our softness, our growth. We’re raising beautiful little people into beautiful big people, and at the same time, we’re growing ourselves. 

Sometimes that growth feels impatient and demanding - like we’re being wrenched forward before we’re ready, before our feet have found the ground. 

But that’s the nature of growth isn’t it. It rarely waits for permission. It asks only that we keep moving.

And that’s okay. 

There’s no rush. You have time. We have time.

In the meantime they will keep growing us, these little humans of ours. Quietly, daily, deeply. They will grow us in the most profound ways if we let them. And we must let them - for their sake, for our own, and for the ancestral threads that tie us to the generations that came before us, and those that will come because of us. We will grow for them and because of them.♥️
Their words might be messy, angry, sad. They might sound bigger than the issue, or as though they aren’t about the issue at all. 

The words are the warning lights on the dashboard. They’re the signal that something is wrong, but they won’t always tell us exactly what that ‘something’ is. Responding only to the words is like noticing the light without noticing the problem.

Our job isn’t to respond to their words, but to respond to the feelings and the need behind the words.

First though, we need to understand what the words are signalling. This won’t always be obvious and it certainly won’t always be easy. 

At first the signal might be blurry, or too bright, or too loud, or not obvious.

Unless we really understand the problem behind signal - the why behind words - we might inadvertently respond to what we think the problem is, not what the problem actually is. 

Words can be hard and messy, and when they are fuelled by big feelings that can jet from us with full force. It is this way for all of us. 

Talking helps catalyse the emotion, and (eventually) bring the problem into a clearer view.

But someone needs to listen to the talking. You won’t always be able to do this - you’re human too - but when you can, it will be one of the most powerful ways to love them through their storms.

If the words are disrespectful, try:

‘I want to hear you but I love you too much to let you think it’s okay to speak like that. Do you want to try it a different way?’ 

Expectations, with support. Leadership, with warmth. Then, let them talk.

Our job isn’t to fix them - they aren’t broken. Our job is to understand them so we can help them feel seen, safe, and supported through the big of it all. When we do this, we give them what they need to find their way through.♥️

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