LAURA BUCKNER: Sometimes behavior can be a real issue with our kids. It certainly was in my life. You know, biting, hair pulling, head butting, kicking, throwing things, we saw all of that. And I'd love to say that as a special educator, as a licensed professional counselor, my husband as a law enforcement officer, I'd love to say we knew exactly how to manage that.
No. We didn't know how to manage any of it because it was behavior that wasn't typical, and it was exacerbated. It was bigger than a lot of what you see with typically developing kids. And so we learned a lot of the hard way.
And I tell my son's story with his permission because he doesn't want people to make the same mistakes we made. We sometimes created a bigger issue by trying to be the parent and dictate what he should or should not be doing, or how he should or should not be doing it. Here's what I have learned, probably the most important thing that I have learned about managing a difficult situation with your son or daughter. The louder my son gets the softer I get.
The bigger physically he gets, the softer physically I get it. It's counterintuitive. It goes against your grain. It's not what most of us are conditioned to do, because we want to react in a defensive mode, but often that defensiveness triggers what we call a trauma response.
We know that children with disabilities are so much more vulnerable for experiencing trauma, medical trauma, restraints, sometimes, isolation, being different all the time. They experience trauma at a much far greater rate than typically developing kids ever do, and a lot of their responses are a trauma response. When there's a trauma response, the rational thinking part of the child's brain like, leaves the building, and the amygdala, the reptilian part of our brain where there's no rational thought, it's just purely response. Fight, flight, or freeze.
We all have that response, but children who've experienced a lot of trauma are more likely to have it more frequent. And we try to talk to them and tell them, if you do this, this will happen. We're talking to a reptilian brain that doesn't understand behavior and consequence. We have to de-escalate that trauma response before we can ever have a rational thinking conversation, and it took me way longer than I care to admit to learn that.
