In Consultation
Seeing Children through a Polyvagal Lens
By Mona Delahooke
Q: I’m seeing a young child who misbehaves at school and isn’t responding well to the reward system his teacher uses. Is there another approach I can recommend?
A: Offering external incentives like stickers, toys, or even social approval won’t help many children change their behaviors because, contrary to popular beliefs, human behaviors aren’t solely predicated on a drive to maximize gains and avoid losses. Rather, on a basic biological level, they reflect subconscious perceptions of safety and threat that are constantly in play through the actions of our autonomic nervous system (ANS).
With his Polyvagal Theory, neuroscientist Stephen Porges offers a road map for understanding the ANS based on the fact that humans come hardwired to avoid threat and seek physiological safety by connecting with others. From the moment we’re born, our nervous systems are constantly searching for signs that it’s safe to connect. When we can’t connect to reduce our neuroception of threat, we experience stress responses, often in the form of behavioral challenges.
Unfortunately, many well-meaning educators are unaware of the powerful force that the ANS exerts on childhood behaviors, and so they continue to rely on the binary notion that children’s behaviors are either compliant or noncompliant. This popular paradigm views all behaviors as incentivized and motivated, rather than instinctual and safety-seeking.
Beyond the Dots
When Colwyn first came to my office, he was five years old and suffering from stomachaches that his pediatrician suspected stemmed from anxiety. A few months earlier, he’d started kindergarten. Though he’d been excited to attend “real” school like his two older sisters, he’d had a rough start. Accustomed to the more freewheeling environment of his preschool, he had difficulty adjusting to the demands of his new classroom, where he was expected to sit still and focus for long stretches. Instead, Colwyn would routinely get up to wander around the classroom, pulling out toys or otherwise disrupting the class.
His teacher, organized and energetic, immediately initiated a behavior-management approach using a system of green, yellow, and red dots that she affixed next to each child’s name on a large board that hung on the classroom wall. Each week, the children who managed to accrue mostly green dots next to their name were rewarded with special prizes, such as frosted cupcakes with rainbow sprinkles or jars of colorful playdough she made from scratch in her kitchen.
Colwyn wanted the special prizes as much as his classmates did, but no matter how hard he tried, he regularly began the day with behavior that generated yellow dots. By the day’s end, rather than work his way up to green ones, he’d displayed other disruptive behaviors, which earned him the dreaded red dots. Far from teaching or motivating him, the teacher’s method caused Colwyn additional stress. Within weeks, he’d started crying and screaming before leaving the house in the morning, and eventually he refused to go to school at all.
Needless to say, Colwyn’s teacher wasn’t intentionally trying to cause him stress; she had the best intentions to motivate him toward good behavior. Various methods of rating and consequencing behaviors are standard fare in today’s education system. But even though they’re designed to act as visual reminders that incentivize children to develop self-control and make good choices, I’ve found they often do the opposite for kids like Colwyn. Why?
Many traditional approaches assume that all children’s behaviors are deliberate, leading adults to react to problematic behaviors—whether in the form of language, physical actions, or emotional outbursts—by issuing consequences for this “choice” to misbehave. What we fail to recognize is that emotional and behavioral control is a developmental process, and many vulnerable children and teens require years to develop that ability. Contrary to current practices, the way to build it is by creating zones of relational safety around the child, not by offering rewards, consequences, and punishments.
Introducing a Reframe
Early on
